The science of monitoring milk yield and deviations from the expected lactation curve dates back more than half a century – when Dairy Herd Improvement testing began.

In August 2018, six new health traits – milk fever, displaced abomasum, ketosis, mastitis, metritis and retained placenta – were introduced to the Net Merit index (NM$), adding to a growing list of low heritability traits available in the last few years.

Whoever the calendar guru was, I wish he would have made New Year’s in the bright morning of spring instead of the midnight of winter. It would have been so much easier to make resolutions and keep them. In spring, you have the birds chirping, new flowers leaping into blossoms and grass spreading velvet green carpet everywhere.

Farmers are problem-solvers; we have to be. Often, when the chips are truly down, there are few if any options in the way of assistance we can call in time to make a difference. Winter weather can bring all kinds of challenges – frozen pipes, protecting livestock from the elements or simply being able to physically traverse to our tasks.

A new guilty pleasure of mine has been watching horror films. I used to scorn them for their predictability, cheap tricks and poor plot development. Now, I can’t get enough of them.

Happy New Year, everybody. It’s the first day of breaking all those resolutions. Don’t feel bad; 75 percent of people break their new resolutions within the first week, and the other 25 percent of people are the reason why.

“It is slightly sweet when you first smell it. When you take a first sip, it has the heat you would expect in the vodka, but that heat quickly settles down and leaves you a sweet, almost caramel aftertaste,” says Omid McDonald, founder of Dairy Distillery.

What if I told you it only takes three months to fulfill a New Year’s resolution? Would you be more apt to set one this year? Would you be more likely to commit to it for longer than it takes to read this article?

Dairy Farmers of Canada (DFC) kicked off 2018 welcoming our new CEO, Jacques Lefebvre. Under Lefebvre’s leadership, DFC engaged a review of its activities and structure, which led to a “right-sizing” followed by a “right-fitting” of the organization.

This is the first of a regular column to bring you information regarding some of the research being done around the world and published in the Journal of Dairy Science (JDS). The objective is to bring to light areas of research that may have an immediate practical application on a dairy farm as well as research that, even though it may not have a practical impact now, could be interesting for its future potential application.