Oftentimes when feed prices rise, your gut reaction is to start pulling high-priced ingredients from the ration. While cows need nutrients and not particular ingredients, rapid dietary changes negatively...

We posted a photo yesterday on our Hoard's Dairyman Facebook page of a well-dressed young man standing at the end of his dairy barn with rose petals sprinkled down the alley. We thought it was a unique...

An updated rendition of the Foster Mother's of the Human Race painting by Bonnie Mohr graced the cover of the June 2010 issue of Hoard's Dairyman

Hundreds of votes are in from all over the world; in a landslide election, our Guernsey calf beat our Jersey with a final tally of 55.6 percent to 44.4 percent at 8 a.m

In the brief period that the number of licensed U.S. dairies has been tracked (19 years), the trend is as frightening as it is obvious: the total gets smaller every year. That trend is a warning for every...

It can be a struggle to keep calf pens stocked with dry bedding, especially when the weather isn't on our side, but recent work shows that it matters

Do you enjoy money, knowledge or friends? This is not a multiple-choice question, as you can have all three through a prominent dairy charity. National Dairy Shrine is a 17,000-member nonprofit charity...

Serve dairy products at events to promote the industry by Patti Hurtgen, Hoard's Dairyman staff Last weekend, I attended a high school graduation party for a student pursuing higher education in our industry....

The jargon in our industry can overwhelm the ordinary urbanite. The words we choose when talking to our dairy neighbor at the feed mill are different than the vocabulary used to talk to the teacher at...

South Dakota State University student becomes the 24th Hoard's Dairyman Editorial Intern. For the past 24 years, the Hoard's Dairyman editorial team has looked forward to welcoming our editorial intern...

"Many retailers understand the science behind food production practices, but their customers do not," noted Charlie Arnot with the Center for Food Integrity (CFI), at the 2012 North American Strategy Conference...

We can buy happiness. That seems to be a pie-in-the-sky statement, but what if I told you researcher Michael Norton has proven we can?

After over two years of discussion, industry leaders have begun to publicly share draft documents which could one day guide U.S. genetic evaluations. The first document, known as the Cooperative Agreement,...

Did your herd's average somatic cell count drop a little in 2011? Chances are it did, according to USDA and the National Dairy Herd Improvement Association. The annual report by the Animal Improvement...

Within farm nutrient variation, estimates are needed to determine feed sampling and ration re-formulation schedules. by Hoard's Dairyman staff "Good ration formulation is a form of risk management. Diets...

"Despite years of research, we still have sick cows," noted Nina von Keyserlingk, University of British Columbia, at the 2012 Herd Health and Nutrition Conference in Syracuse N.Y. Even with the herd health...

Four teams take First Place honors in Roanoke, Va. For another year, the tension has ended and the 2012 Dairy Challenge Platinum teams have been crowned. Spanning 32 universities from across the U.S. and...

This year's conference "Got Manure?" featured a preconference tour of three New York digester systems. Methane digester interest continues to grow, as a near capacity crowd filled the conference room at...

It was 1948 when Cornelis and Arij van der Lely invented the finger-wheel rake. Since then, Lely has aimed to improve manual tasks in many areas of agriculture and other industries. We sat down with Chad...

At the onset of lactation, metabolic adaption mechanisms for calcium are not rapid enough; cows need a day or two to maximize calcium flows from the intestinal tract and bone to the mammary gland