We came up with a new way to clean water tanks. We put an old propane tank on a buggy to hold the water. We attached a used surge vacuum pump that is run by a Honda motor. The pump builds up vacuum in

Karen Bohnert My now second grade son, Jacob, came home last year with homework — for his mom! I was asked to write one short story to describe Jacob. Where do I even begin?

Katie grinstead founded the Fond du Lac County Fair Ag Birthing Center in 2014, which draws an annual crowd of 20,000 attendees.The majority of today’s food conversations are among consumers who...

Many changes we make to dairy cows through genetic selection are easy to see or quantify. Our cows are much taller, thinner, and have far better udders than cows from past eras. We’ve also doubled...

Marilyn HersheyDuane’s father stops by the farm several times a week, just to check up on what we are doing that day and to see if there is anything new happening

In 2000, the first pair of milking robots, known to bureaucrats as Automated Milking Systems (AMS), began milking cows on a commercial dairy farm in the U.S. But don’t tell the Food and Drug A

It all began with a thoughtful phone call by an Ohio dairyman who wanted to learn more about his milk check

When dairyman Hank Choate saw the “unavailable” number pop up on his cell phone screen late one Thursday afternoon in April, he assumed it was not a call he wanted to take

Some days, we have multiple fresh cows. Since we want all the calves to receive colostrum from their own dam, we needed an easy way for the calf feeder to know which milk came from what cow

In the area of our barn where we keep bull calves, the bottles hang on the wall in a milk crate. With this setup, the nipples often fall off or get thrown in the wash basin. My simple, inexpensi

Who would have thought that major news purveyors, like The Economist and The Wall Street Journal, would have even noticed that the open outcry pits for spot trading cheese at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange

The United States, and most of the world for that matter, is recovering from over a half-century of misguided advice about dietary consumption of fat

The August 2017 Hoard's Dairyman Bull List, with all seven dairy breeds, can be opened by clicking the link below

I recently flashed back to Memorial Day weekend, as that is when my social media feed from coast to coast was filled with families camping, swimming, vacationing — all in relax mode

With no family farm to call home, Adam Borchert of Tree-Hayven Holsteins started his future in the dairy industry by renting a farm in Auburndale, Wis., in 1998

In a classic 1997 behavioral economics study on New York City cabdrivers, it was found that the reason you cannot find a cab in New York City on a rainy day is because the taxi driver sets a personal...

We’ve had issues with birds building nests above our door opener in our barn. We filled it with spray foam insulation, and now we don’t have any more bird nest issues. Scott Drooger

Selective dry cow therapy targets only cows that have or had infections to receive antibiotics at dry-off. At the same time, cows that do not receive antibiotics get an internal teat seal

I remember arriving at Jack’s farm shortly before 4 p.m. He had called earlier in the day requesting that one of his “really good” cows be examined, as it was struggling to take off...

Marilyn Hershey Acronyms are a huge part of our lives. We have been using acronyms on our farms for as long as I can remember. It feels like BMPs, SOPs, and NRCS have always been in our language

Calves are fed pasteurized milk and starter in pails at Vir-Clar Farm in Fond du Lac, Wis. The Boyke family keeps their calf pails securely in place by using field drain tile. Each piece of drai