Let me take you back to a time of innocence. A time when I thought everything was legal as long as there was no game warden around. A time when I thought all the best places to hunt ducks had huge sand boxes, manicured fields and flags every couple hundred yards to help find our way back to the truck.

Collecting and analyzing critical data points, from activity to rumination, for every individual cow can be a struggle for many dairy farms. But this type of information is paramount in maintaining the health and well-being of an entire herd.

Almost 10 years ago, brothers Mark and Paul Berning decided to install an automated calf feeder to assist with one of the tasks at Green Waves Farm in St. Michael, Minnesota.

We try to be faithful recyclers around the house. I make regular runs to town with the pickup full of newspapers, bottles, aluminum cans, cardboard boxes and tin.

Milk yields are maximized when calm cows are milked with a consistent routine from one milking to the next and from one milker to the next.

With all the things going on around your dairy, have you ever thought about whether cows actually like being milked? How would you know if they were happy or unhappy with the milking process?

The first dairy cows came to the United States in 1611, according to the International Dairy Foods Association. 

The August 2019 Federal Milk Marketing Order (FMMO) Class I base price is $17.89 per hundredweight (cwt), the highest level since January 2015. It is up 71 cents from July 2019 and $3.74 more than August 2018.

A team is a group of people with different skills who perform different tasks and work together toward a common goal. All dairy workers, regardless of their roles in the farm, are team members. However, just being part of a team is not the same as working as a team player. You must be intentional about adopting the mindset of a team player; these are some of a team player’s characteristics.

“The only constant in life is change” is a quote credited to Greek philosopher Heraclitus that is especially relevant in today’s dairy industry. Not only is the dairy industry changing in general, but you may notice day-to-day life on the farm seems to always be changing as well.