Crop harvest season is winding down, if not finished. Dairy farmer attention now turns to pre-winter projects. Progressive Dairyman asked our team of editorial advisers to share their near-term plans.

Have you done something stupid lately? I have. I went away for the weekend and not only left the back door unlocked, I left it wide open.

Editor’s note: This is the first of two articles about managing the maternity area and newborn calves using a team approach. Click here to read the second article "Praiseworthy newborn calf specialists check these boxes". Maternity is a classically overlooked and poorly understood area of the farm.

According to recent phone and online polls conducted by Progressive Dairyman, most U.S. dairy farms do not feed a negative dietary cation-anion difference (DCAD) diet during the dry period.

As we move forward as a society, the dairy industry will continue to have to justify the use of antibiotics on their operations.

Recent research from the University of California – Davis offers further indication oral calcium supplementation may support increased milk production in addition to supplying the extra calcium needed to ward off subclinical hypocalcemia.

When close-up cows are fed a negative dietary cation-anion difference (DCAD) diet, it induces a metabolic acidosis, which acidifies the urine.

Cow health, nutrition and reproduction are key when trying to find the best options for the transition period of dairy cows. That said, there is a lot of information about nutritional strategies that can be tough to sort through.

The C.O.W.S. program has been successful in working with dairy producers and their teams to unlock bottlenecks in their operations.

I have been a dairy nutritionist for over 33 years, and I am usually the first to know when one of my dairies is having hoof health problems. While many issues with cow health point back to nutrition, I have found that hoof problems, more often than not, stem from environmental causes rather than nutrition.