You’re busy – milking cows, packing bunker silos and watching presidential candidate debates (well, maybe). With that in mind, Progressive Dairy looks at issues in the news impacting you and your dairy business.

In today’s unpredictable dairy economy, farmers have looked for ways to diversify their income streams. This isn’t a new way of thinking, though organizations have realized offering a place for brainstorming and sharing of best practices to occur is a way to help those searching for ideas.

“What is unique about you and your farm that you can build into your brand?” asked Tera Johnson, director of the Food Finance Institute (FFI) and founder of teraswhey, in her keynote presentation at the Resilient Farms Conference, held earlier this year in Wisconsin Dells.

As farmers, we face challenges and feel stress every day. It is when it becomes unrelenting and overwhelming we begin to experience negative side effects. Dairy farmers are some of the smartest, most innovative, problem-solving, optimistic people in the world. It is good to take a moment to be reminded of this fact.

Think of a recent time when someone – employee, colleague, partner, family member, friend – was not listening when you had something important to say. Now think about how you felt, and describe your feelings in one word.

Scalability gives a certain level of flexibility to the way a farm can grow with robots, giving the producer a clear picture of what to expect throughout the path they choose, as well as how they can cash-flow the changes. We’ll demonstrate this using the context of a large herd robotic milking facility design planned for multiple phases of future expansion.

Parlor expectations have changed. The goal of milking cows the best we can remains: to milk them safely, gently, quickly and completely. But the need for efficiency has changed how we milk cows, the number of cows we strive to milk per hour and how we approach milking labor.

In our previous article in the Feb. 7, 2019 issue of Progressive Dairyman, we discussed the history of milk filters and their importance in the milking process (Milk filters: The unsung hero of successful milking outcomes).

On most modern dairy operations across the U.S., you will find an office with a computer. The computer is most likely running 24 hours a day and may be covered with some dust or fly scat. In that computer, you can find records and information about the performance of the dairy herd.

In days past, before we learned the principles of good hoof care, we would see older, mature dairy cows with overgrown corkscrewed outer claws on their rear feet.