At the Horizon Organic Dairy Farm outside Kennedyville, Maryland, 480 lactating cows are grazed in a carefully designed and managed pasture system. Providing this many cows with high-quality pasture requires good herd and pasture management skills.

The leaky bucket theory, as it relates to dairies, would suggest there are always losses in an operation, so production should forever increase to compensate for the losses (to keep the bucket from running dry).

With the school semester just around the corner, many universities across the U.S. put the finishing touches to recent university farm renovations this summer.

Milk processing is a vital value-added link in the dairy production chain from cow to carton. Due to the industry’s high demand for skilled graduates, many universities have recently upgraded their campus creameries to provide the best learning environment about processing milk for their students.

For the approximately 50 students who attend the U.S. Dairy Education and Training Consortium (USDETC) in Clovis, New Mexico, each year, reasons for attending the program often involve a desire to expand their knowledge of the dairy industry, an interest in the management practices of large dairy herds or an aspiration to study dairy science – an opportunity available within only a limited number of land-grant universities today.

Age: 26 Location: Watertown, Wisconsin History of your dairy, in a nutshell: Lloyd and Daphne Holterman started farming with Lloyd’s parents in 1981. Then, after a two-year stint of farming on their own, they returned to the family farm in 1989. They purchased the cattle and equipment that year, then bought farmland in 1995.

It was the way-early 1930s, and the Great Depression was hitting the country very hard. My grandparents, George and Augusta Elbert, were struggling to hang onto the family farm with their three young children. With a double mortgage on the farm, things looked pretty bleak.