Canadian farm consultant and mediator Mark Andrew Junkin recently released a new book about how ag families deal with transition and changes in their business. Junkin started consulting with dairy farmers in Ontario, Canada.

Just five years shy of their family dairy’s 100-year anniversary, dairymen brothers Bruce and Brad Scott of San Jacinto, California, faced a most terrible “what if” situation. State water quality regulators informed the Scotts that within five years they could no longer apply any manure – in liquid or solid form – to their adjacent farm ground.

Making the switch from old-crop corn silage to new-crop corn silage each year can oftentimes challenge milk production, particularly if the new-crop corn silage hasn’t had enough time to ferment. Depending upon location, some dairy producers may already be faced with feeding the recently harvested 2013 corn crop.

As 2013 corn silage is beginning to be more widely fed, producers need to be aware of the findings from a recent U.S. harvest analysis and the impact it may have on herd health and performance. We recently conducted a harvest analysis survey for corn silage and various grains to identify which mycotoxins are present and their levels of concentration in this year’s crops. The analysis was utilized to identify which of a possible 38 mycotoxins were present in each sample.

Dairy cattle and other ruminants are biologically designed to convert forages and other fibrous feeds into high-quality products such as milk and meat for human consumption. Forages also provide the foundation upon which nutritionally sound, rumen-healthy and profitable dairy rations are built. The trend in the Northeast has been to increase the proportion of the total ration from forage in the last 10 to 15 years.