Anyone who lives in or around farm country has at one time or another wrinkled their nose and said, “What’s that smell?”

The other day I was mopping my floor with my fancy mop, one that piddles on the floor and I mop it up, cleaning the floor like magic! I smiled as I remembered my childhood and teenage years, when I was floor cleaning Cinderella-style on my knees with a pan of water and a scrub brush.

It is not uncommon to open the hood of a new diesel pickup and see a slew of wires and hoses and underneath it all something which resembles an engine. What happened to the good old days when we used to actually be able to see the engine and be able to work on it when we popped the hood? How did we get to this point with the light-duty diesel industry? Let’s take a step back in time when Ford and GM and Chrysler introduced their light-duty diesel engines. The year was 1983 and the engine was the 6.2-liter diesel.

Herd health morning ... cows are lined up and the vet is putting on a palpation sleeve. In your hand, a clipboard with the list of bred cows to check ... and off you go down the alley. “1520, 41 days ... ”

Traditionally, corn has been the major energy source for dairy rations because of the high starch content. The starch provides energy needed for high milk production; however, when too much starch is added at the expense of forage, rumen pH decreases. When rumen pH falls, intake decreases, as does fiber digestion and milk fat concentration.

Most of us remember the medical emergency system commercials from the 1990s with the elderly lady calling out “Help, I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.” Would you ever receive these types of calls from within your freestall barns if your cows had some type of medical emergency system from which they could call you? Unfortunately, in many older freestall barns, these calls would probably be fairly frequent. Generally, cows prefer to lunge forward when rising from a resting position. Think about how a cow gets up when she is on pasture. Their behavior in freestalls should be similar to this.

Recommended concentrations of dietary phosphorus (P) for lactating dairy cows have been reduced in recent years in order to reduce the excretion of P in manure. This reduction in manure P has resulted in less P spread on dairy farmland, thus reducing the amount of P moving with water to adjacent land and streams.

It’s New Year’s Day. Here is a story of entering the field, which all field scientists do. What we see is but a fraction of what is there. So here is a photo-essay of what I see and what I imagine. I am here at the National Agricultural Research Center. I have visited many such centers all over the world. But here, in a flood of blue and red colors, on inscribed rolls of paper, are the words of a mandate.