I enjoy reading Tom Wall’s monthly articles on employee management in Progressive Dairyman. He brings intelligent ideas to the important topic of managing your employees. For understandable reasons, I am seeing more small dairy farms hire outside help to reduce the burnout from a 24-7, 365-day work schedule. So keeping employees happy is on the management plate of most dairy owners across the country today. But are you sure all your employees are happy?

Mastitis causes more than $2 billion in production losses to the U.S. dairy industry each year. Traditional mastitis testing can be prone to error and be slow – barriers that may prevent dairy farmers from testing as often as necessary. Bacterial culturing has been the standard method for mastitis testing for many years. However, this method has several drawbacks which cause it to be an inefficient method in mastitis analysis. Bacterial culturing is slow, inaccurate, prone to errors and, most importantly, it cannot be used with preserved milk samples. Dairy herd improvement samples used for somatic cell counts cannot be utilized in mastitis testing where bacterial culturing is the method of choice.

The objective of this article is to examine the factors a producer will want to consider when choosing the milk cooling and storage system for the dairy farm. The two systems considered are the traditional, on-farm, bulk tank system and the direct tanker loading (DTL) system that uses glycol chilling plates and loads directly onto the trailer. In the last 50 years, milk has been stored on most dairy farms in a refrigerated bulk tank. From there it was then pumped onto a tanker truck by the milk hauler and taken to the processor. In recent years, larger operations have begun to use direct tanker loading (DTL). With DTL, milk is cooled rapidly and loaded immediately onto a tanker trailer.

The dairy industry’s three big issues – milk pricing, food safety and immigration – will be front and center during the Dairy Policy Summit on Wednesday, Nov. 9, in Madison, Wisconsin. The first session addressing milk price reform will include Dr. Mark Stephenson facilitating an industry panel. The panel includes: Jaime Castaneda, senior vice president, National Milk Producers Federation; Robin Berg, National Dairy Producers Association and president of the Dairy Pricing Association; and Alan Kozak, Dairy Policy Action Committee. Panelists will share their insight and legislation being proposed and how each proposal could affect the dairy business.

When the builder finishes a new dairy facility and cows enter the new barn, both the producer and the lender have to live with the consequences. Poor facilities lead to poor results, and that can put the cow in harm’s way and the producer at risk of not servicing his/her loan. The Dairyland Initiative, developed by veterinarians Drs. Nigel Cook and Ken Nordlund at the School of Veterinary Medicine, and coordinated by Dr. Becky Brotzman, combines the most relevant research in dairy cattle health, production and behavior with years of field experience in housing design into a web-based information center and building plan assessment program.

Over the last 30 years, people have searched for alternatives to traditional observation of cows to detect estrus. Injections to synchronize estrus/ovulation have replaced observations and are now a common tool in many dairy farms.

Every day is Food Day to America's farmers and ranchers, says Miss America 2011 Teresa Scanlan. The high-profile agriculture advocate is joining the Animal Agriculture Alliance to announce the launch of www.realfarmersrealfood.com with a call to action for Americans to celebrate the hard work of our nation’s farmers and ranchers.

H.J. Baker & Bro., Inc. released results of a 30-cow University of Georgia trial that showed MetaboLys BY-PASS LYSINE is digestible in the small intestine, but resists degradation by ruminal microorganisms. The result is a 3.13-kilogram (6.9-pound) increase in milk production per day per cow.

Wisconsin is looking for a county or counties to host the Alice in Dairyland finals for 2013. The finals rotate every year to a different county. The event includes a two-day briefing and three-day selection process.