“Hello, this is the Galway Dating Service. Sarah speaking.” “What’s the craic? Looking for a bird for meself,” Tristan, my Irish friend, said into the receiver, swapping his Dublin accent for a gruff, rural enunciation that probably didn’t exist. We saw the phone number in the newspaper that morning.

Can you imagine a world without cows? In 1535, Francisco Coronado brought cows into what is now the U.S. He crossed the border 40 miles south of Benson, Arizona, with horses and cows. They say he went as far as Kansas – looking for a good veterinarian, I guess.

Congressman Tom Latham (R-Iowa) introduced bipartisan legislation in early March in the U.S. Congress that will block Washington’s attack on America’s long-standing family farm tradition. Latham’s bill blocks recent attempts by the Department of Labor, with moral support from the Department of Agriculture, to increase federal regulatory involvement into family farms that risk outlawing farm youth from working on their family owned farms. “The family farm is one of Iowa’s most cherished traditions and a cornerstone of our state and nation’s economy and cultural history,” Congressman Latham said.

A new poll showed more than 70 percent of likely voters supported a national guest worker program for farm laborers, if such a program included various provisions. Western Growers, an association representing farmers in Arizona and California, whose members produce more than half of the nation’s fresh fruits and vegetables, commissioned the new poll. Progressive Dairyman Editor Walt Cooley discussed the survey results with Ken Barbic (top far right), a Washington, D.C.-based lobbyist for Western Growers, and Brian Nienaber (top right), vice president of the Terrance Group, the national polling firm that conducted the poll.

Four months after its inaugural meeting, the Consortium of Western Regional Colleges of Veterinary Medicine announced that it has established a new Teaching Academy to identify, share and leverage expertise across the five colleges in the Consortium. The Teaching Academy will support the development and implementation of best practices and scholarship in veterinary medical education.

The Senate Agriculture Committee met April 26 to markup a draft of the 2012 farm bill. When it concluded, it passed a bill titled the Agriculture Reform, Food and Jobs Act of 2012. The bill contains major elements of the Dairy Security Act, introduced last fall by Reps. Collin Peterson (D-Minnesota) and Mike Simpson (R-Idaho), including a margin insurance program that replaces existing dairy programs, namely the MILC and Dairy Product Price Support programs.

Rusty Harder has been appointed product manager for adjuvants at Wilbur-Ellis, an international marketer and distributor of agriculture products. He will be responsible for all operations related to the adjuvants products.

The initial upset over Tuesday's announcement of the first case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in the U.S. in six years has started to subside.A dairy cow at a rendering facility in California was determined to have the disease based on samples sent to the USDA National Veterinary Services Laboratory in Ames, Iowa.