The National Dairy Foods Research Center program, supported in part by the Dairy Research Institute, marks 25 years of providing dairy, food and beverage companies with research, education, pilot facilities and technical assistance to improve and develop new products and dairy ingredients. America’s dairy farmers established the program in 1987 through the dairy checkoff. Today, there are six-university affiliated centers available to the industry at strategic locations across the U.S.

On-farm monitoring of methane emissions with noninvasive infrared technology could provide a low-cost, reliable method to improve testing of mitigation strategies, guide breeding techniques and provide better inventory estimates for life cycle assessment studies. This is important because enteric methane is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions associated with milk production, according to research commissioned by the Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy.

More than 120 professionals with a vested interest in milk quality attended the National Mastitis Council regional meeting in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, in August. In addition to networking and knowledge-sharing opportunities, attendees had the opportunity to participate in specialized, interactive short courses. Attendees could choose to attend four of 10 different short courses, including one taught in Spanish. “This was the first year that we offered just short courses at our regional meeting,” says David Reid, NMC first vice president and owner of Rocky Ridge Dairy Consulting.

Animal Profiling International (API) has announced the launch of EasyPreg, a milk-based pregnancy testing service intended to make reproductive programs as efficient as possible. The test is designed to provide quick and accurate results, detecting pregnancy in cattle as early as 35 days post-insemination without invasive palpation or ultrasound.

John Geuss of Adisseo discusses with PD Editor Walt Cooley a new app his company has recently released to help dairy producers calculate the economic impacts of amino acid balancing. The free app calculates the price of milk for any Federal Milk Marketing Order that pays on components. See what else the app can do in this video. PD Click here to see more videos from the Progressive Dairyman YouTube channel.

Before blogs and Facebook and build-your-own websites, listservs were one of the best ways to get the word out to a lot of online users at one time. Unlike most 20-year-old computer technology, however, these semi-automated email programs are still useful today. Within the dairy industry, Dairy-L is undoubtedly the most well-known listserv. Started in 1990, the list now has 1,800 subscribers in 47 countries. “It was definitely one of the first of its kind,” says one of the list’s current co-owners, Kiera Finucane, with the University of Maryland.