Is your farm right for value-added dairy? In most cases, the question asked is: “Is value-added dairy right for your farm?” but maybe it is worth considering the reverse of that question when deciding whether to pursue a value-added dairy operation.

The final piece of the puzzle was finding the right pasteurizer. New Jersey dairy farmer Peter Southway and his family were seeking one that could gently pasteurize their herd’s milk without degrading its integrity and do so with as little time and labor as possible.

Have you ever played jazz or listened to it? If so, you know that great jazz musicians play their instruments in all sorts of creative ways, and they are very good at using different techniques to get the same wild musical riff.

When a crop is harvested to be ensiled, it’s a race against time to minimize losses and preserve a majority of dry matter and nutrients in the form of digestible fiber, protein and energy. In order to have a successful preservation, there needs to be an absence of oxygen in the forage mass, along with sufficient production of organic (lactic) acids by lactic acid bacteria population.

Alternative forages, such as sorghum or milo silage, have gained momentum with growers and producers. Sorghum, sudan, sorghum-sudan, milo and millet are all tropical grasses (C4 biology; warm-season grass).

CompaniesNeogen – Pat Frasco, Director of Milling and GrainLallemand Animal Nutrition – Tony Hall, Technical Services – RuminantBiomin America Inc. – Paige Gott, Ruminant Technical ManagerAlltech – Max Hawkins, Alltech Mycotoxin Management Nutritionist

Today’s dairy cows are genetically superior to your father’s cows. Intensive selection for milk yield and stature has produced bigger, more productive cows. When you combine this with improved nutrition and cow management, it’s easy to see why dairy feed efficiency in North America has doubled in the past 100 years.

Your fresh cow program can make or break the economic success and health of each cow’s lactation. It is important to get these transitioning cows off to a solid start.

Thanks to new research, we now have the ability to routinely evaluate the profile of butterfat as an indication of how it’s being made by the cow.

When a cow becomes pregnant, some of the nutrients it consumes will be used by the developing calf. There is no other time in the calf’s life when the development of tissues, organs and systems is occurring as rapidly as early weeks in utero.