For years, 50 to 60 days has been branded as the ideal length of time between calving and first service, but a recent study is looking at how giving dairy cows closer to 90 days before breeding could impact reproductive performance, and the results may surprise you.

Consider the scenario of a cow leaving the milking herd. Culling a cow can sometimes be a good situation when she is sold for reasons like poor production, fertility issues, health challenges or overstocked pens, thus allowing your best cows to thrive. But what about when a cow leaves the milking herd because she died?

The use of polled genetics can be a “kill two birds with one stone” solution for dairy producers: It can relieve the onerous management task of dehorning calves and can also ease consumer concerns about a problematic animal welfare issue.

Good luck in business is financial strategy in disguise. The most successful business owners have a financial game plan. Talent and hard work can only take a business so far.

Properly identifying uterine diseases like metritis and developing effective treatment protocols can be a bit of a challenge for dairy farmers and their management teams.

Cow monitoring technologies bring real-time data to the dairy and are used to inspect every aspect of reproductive management, herd health and ration changes.

What is the difference between ‘genetics,’ ‘genomics’ and ‘genome’? Genetics is a branch of biology focused on heredity and variation of organisms. In simpler terms, genetics focuses on the characteristics or traits that are passed from parents to children, from one generation to another.

With the changing of the seasons comes new challenges for dairy producers. As day length, temperature and environmental pests and pathogens change throughout the year, we see swings in intakes, production and animal health.

A few Sundays ago, I spent some time in the nursery at our church with my two granddaughters, Hazel and Darcy. Hazel is 1, and Darcy is 2. Like the other six or seven children in the nursery, their eyes shone with delight as they milled through the toys and played with each other.