Corn silage levels have been increasing in forage programs the past few years for a number of reasons. The volatile costs of corn and alfalfa hay, coupled with regional drought conditions and subsequent hay availability, have contributed greatly. Given these high corn silage rations now fed, it is no longer sufficient to rely on traditional testing for crude starch content of feed ingredients for ration formulation, especially when opening new crop corn silage.

Earlier this year, Progressive Dairyman announced GEA Farm Technologies planned to install the first-ever automatic rotary parlor in North America. The 72-stall rotary parlor was to be built at Mlsna East Town Dairy in Cashton, Wisconsin, and would have been the largest robotic milking system in place worldwide.

Producers looking to sell their products online should be prepared to ship, says Tammy Stephens, who works in marketing at Eichtens. Eichtens is a cheese and bison farm that sells cheese and bison products on Amazon and Overstock, which just opened a Farmers Market section.

Recently yogurt was declared New York’s official snack. "This designation is a fitting recognition of the importance of this state's yogurt industry, which has experienced tremendous growth over the past few years,” said Governor Andrew Cuomo, according to a Poughkeepsie Journal article by Jon Campbell.

If the pictures by Valerie Miller, Emma Caldwell, Bonnie Mohr and Lisa Rasmussen were each worth 1,000 words, bovines could at last speak. While their vocalizations still remain untranslatable, the subjects of these artists’ paintings possess a personality all their own.

Over the years that I have worked with farmers on their dairy cow, calf and heifer diets, I have come to realize that I was not feeding the cow as much as I was feeding the microbial population in the animal.