Can you guess where it is? Leave your response in the comments section below the photo. The picture is from a producer feature that will be in an upcoming issue of Progressive Forage Grower.

The following excerpt is from the Texas Farm Bureau’s blog, Texas Agriculture Talks. Author of this post, Gene Hall, is the bureau’s public relations director. Publications Director Mike Barnett also contributes posts. Learn more at: www.texasfarmbureau.org/TxAgTalks We’ve all heard it. We’re only a few short years from climate change devastating agriculture. We used to call this global warming until the earth actually cooled a bit over the last decade. Now we call it climate change, but I won’t get into that disagreement. I’ll just concede for now that Mother Earth has warmed a bit over the last few decades.

Rosser Farm Holsteins, named for the nearest village, is a leader in Manitoba’s dairy industry. Brothers Henry and Tony Holtmann are third-generation dairy farmers in the operation established by their grandfather in 1929. Grandfather was a cream producer, shipping cans to Winnipeg by train. He had pride in his purebred Holstein herd and showed his cows, even traveling on occasion to Toronto for the Royal Agricultural Winter Fair. In 1961, Dad took over, and the brothers in 1995.

How to effectively cool cows is an ongoing conversation. One option gaining interest is evaporative cooling with the use of cooling cells. We know cows are most comfortable at temperatures in the range of -5°C to 15°C. However, in summer, it is impossible to get temperatures to this optimum range. What could we gain if we could get it much closer? “I believe the biggest benefit is any time you can drop the temperature in the barn during the warmer months, let’s say when temps reach above 20°C outside, the cows’ dry matter intake will not drop as much,” says Terry Lebold, Lebold Farms LTD.