Engineers had the slide rule. Nutritionists used Pearson’s Square to calculate the proper inclusion rates for two ingredients in order to achieve the desired concentration of a single nutrient. A lot has changed since those days. Yet dairymen continue to maximize production efficiency by using the forages and feedstuffs on hand and making wise feed purchases. Diets must supply minerals, vitamins, fatty acids, amino acids, carbohydrates and water.

Imagine taking a cow’s temperature simply by snapping a picture of her head. Want an early warning system to detect hoof disease or mastitis? Just snap a picture of the cow’s foot or udder. These and other scenarios may be possible someday with digital infrared thermography.

It’s never difficult to spot a healthy, content cow. She’s the one chewing her cud after eating comfortably at the feedbunk. For generations, dairy producers, veterinarians and nutritionists have relied on the visual observation of rumination as a monitor of dairy cow health. There’s good reason for this. Rumination is needed for further chewing of hastily eaten food at the feedbunk and for the constant buffering of rumen content. Inadequate rumination will lead to reduced ration digestibility and, consequently, reduced profitability.

Editor’s note: This is the final article of a three-part series. With traditional mastitis detection methods, complex media are used for the growth and isolation of bacterial organisms. On-farm preparation, storage and proper incubation of the medium is a tedious and time-consuming process.

Typical alkaline detergents are effective in water temperatures from 170°F down to 120°F and, in most CIP situations, that’s an acceptable range. However, when called to diagnose CIP system issues, we more often than not find that water temperatures are inadequate at the end of the cleaning cycle to fully clean the system. This situation is common when dairies expand their system while trying to get by with the same water heater. For these dairies, low-temperature detergents can be beneficial until an adequate heating system can be installed.

Group housing in the calf barn has become an efficient way to house and manage dairy calves. Since our Grober Young Animal Development Center opened its doors in 2009, there has been a dedicated effort to demonstrating the benefits of raising these young animals in groups; some of those benefits include improved growth performance during weaning and post-weaning. Those particular benefits were uncovered in calves grouped right from the start. However, could there an advantage to housing calves individually to start out and then moving them into a group setting to maximize performance and also satisfy their innate need to socialize?

Heat abatement strategies during hot weather include water, fans, shade and elevation of hutches.