Observing cows is nothing new in the dairy business – we all do it every day. But taking some time to critically review a few fundamental cow behaviors on your own operation can have great effects on cow health, performance and the overall attitude of employees within your business. Here are some good areas to watch during your next walk among your cows. Flight zones When you or your employees walk into a pen of cows, how do the cows react to your presence? Do they notice you and head to the opposite end of the pen, or can you walk from one end to the other without a cow taking a step?

Over time the knowledge and ability to get cows bred has taken tremendous strides towards greater on-farm success. Reproductive success takes effort from every angle of the dairy and starts with an understanding of pregnancy rate and the factors which impact it most.

Sound reproductive programs are one of the keys to dairy profitability. Perhaps no other area of dairy management has as many influencing factors as reproduction. A herd’s incidence and severity of metabolic and infectious disease, lameness and heat stress, the level of milk production, heat detection accuracy and efficiency, conception rate and a variety of other cow, management and nutritional considerations, all can and do influence reproductive success to varying degrees.

Reproductive efficiency is a major factor for profitability in dairy herds. Artificial insemination (A.I.) is the most common practice used to breed dairy cows in the United States, accounting for approximately 78 percent of all services.

At a special AgSTAR seminar held at World Dairy Expo in Madison, Wisconsin, a number of dairy producers and anaerobic digester operators came together to speak openly about their systems by responding to audience questions.

In recent years dairy farms have grown in size and efficiency. When more livestock are housed in one location, the volume of stored manure and the manure hauling distance to reach the land base needed for application also increase.

As a technology, anaerobic digestion offers many potential environmental and economic benefits for dairy farms. However, anaerobic digestion can pose significant health and safety hazards when not operated properly.

When I was about 11 years old, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music starring Julie Andrews came to the Snowflake Show House.