The 21st Annual Tri-State Dairy Nutrition Conference was held in Fort Wayne, Indiana, on April 24 and 25, 2012. This annual conference provided its 450 attendees the opportunity to learn about a wide variety of nutrition topics, including talks on nutrition and milk composition, forage management, dairy farm profitability and timely topics such as use of automatic calf feeders.

Editor’s note: This is the second of a three-part series. Click here to read the first article. I wrote in the first part of this series that it is important for the dairyman to first find out what he’s fighting and then work with the herd veterinarian on the treatment. By knowing what is causing the mastitis on their farm, the dairyman and their herd veterinarian are able to use the appropriate antimicrobial drugs. Armed with this knowledge, they may see a decrease in the total treatment duration or a reduction in the use of unnecessary broad-spectrum antimicrobials.

In the field of post-mortem examination, experienced pathologists develop a sixth sense. I encountered that sixth sense while a first-year resident at Cornell University, in the middle of a winter morning. At 11 a.m. our lab received a phone call letting us know about seven dead heifers from a farm in upstate New York.

I have a couple of eighth graders who are starting to take an interest in politics. Sometimes they ask me soul-searching questions that cause me to dig in and search for answers.

“There is a lot you can tell about a person just by looking at their shoes.” If this saying is really true, I believe there is a lot you can tell about mechanics by looking at their shops. Recently, I was buying some used equipment and ended up making a drive to Middleton, Idaho. There, I purchased a used diesel engine for a good price. I was excited about the buy, but even more excited when the seller took me into his shop to show me the engine.

I grew up on a typical dairy farm in northeastern Wisconsin, where we milked 35 to 40 Holstein cows from 1940 through 1969. We were somewhat atypical in that we also raised potatoes for the commercial market and grew Scots Pine Christmas trees. In the ’50s, when I was a teenager, my father purchased a Surge bucket milking system.

Replacement heifer feeding programs must be designed to allow heifers to be bred efficiently, calve out by 24 months old and produce to their maximum potential. To achieve this, heifers must be fed to grow at a high rate while not becoming overconditioned, as well as to remain healthy. The costs of replacement dairy heifer rearing are second only to the feed costs of lactating cows, representing 15 to 20 percent of total farm operational expenses. Of these costs, feed represents the greatest expense in heifer-rearing costs.

I am within three weeks of completing my six-month tour here in South Sudan. So begins the examination of what worked, what did not and where we could improve. The word “we” refers to the U.S. government. I am assigned to the U.S. embassy and fall under the staff of the ambassador.