Launched in 2002, the idea behind the North American Intercollegiate Dairy Challenge was to allow students to incorporate the knowledge they had gained in all aspects of dairy management into one competition
Holstein Association USA classifier Willis Gunst recently attended a twilight meeting in Wisconsin to share the new classification changes with Holstein breeders and to answer questions they have on the...
J and Allan Schanbacher have never planted oats any time but early spring. But this year they planted 63 acres in mid-August as they scramble to make up for drought-ravaged hay and corn crops
Time is fading quickly if you want to land a contract for Livestock Gross Margin (LGM) insurance for dairy cattle. This Friday, August 31, approximately $2.5 million will be released as part of the final...
Sire summaries are calculated by the United States Department of Agriculture three times each year in April, August and December. Hoard's Dairyman compiled the August data on the seven dairy breeds and...
Youth at the Wisconsin State Fair share messages with fairgoers. Showing livestock at the fair can be a hectic time filled with preparing for shows and interviews, as well as keeping up with chores at...
Last fall the Purebred Dairy Cattle Association (PDCA) updated their showmanship scorecard. The committee felt the scorecard should more accurately reflect how showmanship is evaluated. They removed the...
Put on your Star Wars T-shirt; this is a subject where one's imagination can run wild. Relatively speaking, genetic engineering is still in its infancy
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...
If the milk prices didn't already tell you, you should know that there's a lot of milk being produced in the U.S. today. Year-over-year, January through April have averaged 767,000 pounds more per month...
The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) seems to have its hands in everything lately. When we turn on the news, HSUS is often cited as a credible source
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...
April 24 was vocabulary-building day not only for consumers, but for many dairy producers, too. The word we learned was "atypical." We also learned that its meaning basically boils down to: Every now and...
It took a ground swell of support in rural America to finally convince the Obama Administration's Department of Labor to withdraw its proposed rule further regulating children under the age of 16 who work...
Big changes and much stricter rules are looking very likely. Enormous change appears to be coming in the way dairies and other livestock operations are accustomed to using pharmaceuticals on their animals,...
A number of dairy processors have implemented or reconfirmed delivery constraints. U.S. milk production is heading up, up, and up with milk flow growing 2.5, 3.4, and 4.3 percent nationally in December,...
Genomic adjustments will be included in this April's genetic evaluations. After reviewing correlations between genomic test results and actual animal performance, USDA's Animal Improvement Program Laboratory...
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...
Youth and adults use their dairy judging skills in the popular annual contest It's cow judging season. Last year over 21,000 entries were submitted in the annual Cow Judging Contest. The top individuals...
Award nominations are sought from professionals working with herds with a high level of reproductive success. This group would include veterinarians, nutritionists, genetic and pharmaceutical company...
