Waupun Equipment is hosting a hay drive to benefit farmers and ranchers in the Oklahoma and Texas drought areas. Due to the severe drought conditions in Texas and Oklahoma, ranchers are in a very difficult position when it comes to providing feed for their cattle. Many have been forced to sell off their entire herds due to lack of rain and extreme heat, which is causing wells to run dry and hay ground to turn to dust. We would like your help in reaching out to our Southern neighbors and easing their burden. Waupun Equipment has partnered with Dart Hay Service to send semi loads of hay from our area to ranchers on the Oklahoma/Texas border. We are asking for members of the community to help out by donating large square bales of hay or by sending monetary donations. Donations of any amount of hay or money are accepted and appreciated.

I enjoy reading Tom Wall’s monthly articles on employee management in Progressive Dairyman. He brings intelligent ideas to the important topic of managing your employees. For understandable reasons, I am seeing more small dairy farms hire outside help to reduce the burnout from a 24-7, 365-day work schedule. So keeping employees happy is on the management plate of most dairy owners across the country today. But are you sure all your employees are happy?

Mastitis causes more than $2 billion in production losses to the U.S. dairy industry each year. Traditional mastitis testing can be prone to error and be slow – barriers that may prevent dairy farmers from testing as often as necessary. Bacterial culturing has been the standard method for mastitis testing for many years. However, this method has several drawbacks which cause it to be an inefficient method in mastitis analysis. Bacterial culturing is slow, inaccurate, prone to errors and, most importantly, it cannot be used with preserved milk samples. Dairy herd improvement samples used for somatic cell counts cannot be utilized in mastitis testing where bacterial culturing is the method of choice.

The objective of this article is to examine the factors a producer will want to consider when choosing the milk cooling and storage system for the dairy farm. The two systems considered are the traditional, on-farm, bulk tank system and the direct tanker loading (DTL) system that uses glycol chilling plates and loads directly onto the trailer. In the last 50 years, milk has been stored on most dairy farms in a refrigerated bulk tank. From there it was then pumped onto a tanker truck by the milk hauler and taken to the processor. In recent years, larger operations have begun to use direct tanker loading (DTL). With DTL, milk is cooled rapidly and loaded immediately onto a tanker trailer.

The dairy industry’s three big issues – milk pricing, food safety and immigration – will be front and center during the Dairy Policy Summit on Wednesday, Nov. 9, in Madison, Wisconsin. The first session addressing milk price reform will include Dr. Mark Stephenson facilitating an industry panel. The panel includes: Jaime Castaneda, senior vice president, National Milk Producers Federation; Robin Berg, National Dairy Producers Association and president of the Dairy Pricing Association; and Alan Kozak, Dairy Policy Action Committee. Panelists will share their insight and legislation being proposed and how each proposal could affect the dairy business.