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Today, many dairy producers are integrating genomic testing into their daily breeding and selection decisions or contemplating doing so. It is remarkable to think that a tissue sample collected from the ear, a hair pulled from the tail switch or a drop of blood spotted onto a card from a day-old calf can get you a genetic evaluation equal to progeny tests on many daughters of sires.
Some use it to increase marketability of show cattle, and for others, it’s used to determine production in a commercial herd. Regardless of the specific reason, genomic testing has been part of the dairy industry for more than five years and has proven effective with diverse dairies across the world.
Decreasing reproductive efficiency in dairy cattle has been documented not only in the U.S. but also in Ireland, the United Kingdom and Australia. Ideally, cows should be pregnant by 85 days in milk, the conception rate at first breeding should be more than 50 percent, the numbers of breeding per lactation should be less than 1.7, and the calving interval should be less than 390 days.
While not much has changed today within the black-and-white Holsteins of a century ago, that’s less true for other things: television (black and white to color), gasoline (leaded to unleaded), telephones (wired to wireless and cellular).
You get the picture; change is everywhere and happening faster than ever before, which includes the fuels we use to power diesel engines in the trucks, tractors and machines on the farm.
The National Dairy Promotion and Research Board (NDB) honored Glen Schroeder as the 2014 recipient of the Richard E. Lyng Award for his extensive contributions and distinguished service to dairy promotion. Schroeder is a dairy farmer from Caledonia, Minnesota.
This week I am going to give an academic conference-style presentation on a mutated calf fetus that mercilessly slaughters Irish people on a dairy farm.I have spent a lot of time in the university system: as a student, lecturer, researcher – and now as a student again.
I have been a public servant for 25 years. I began my career at Oregon State University in January 1990. I was 37 years old. I began writing for Progressive Dairyman in 1993.
The results are in, and this year’s North American corn silage crop contains a mixture of molds and mycotoxins, putting beef and dairy cattle at high risk for mycotoxin exposure and performance problems, including a 3.5-pound average loss in milk yield, according to a recent survey by Alltech.
World Ag Expo is introducing a brand new event: Farmers' Lunch, featuring speaker AG Kawamura, California's former secretary of agriculture. The lunch will be hosted in the VIP event tent on the World Ag Expo grounds, during the final day of the show, Thursday, Feb. 12.
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