At Michael and Peter McMahon’s E-Z Acres in Homer, New York, herd growth has always occurred alongside an intensive focus on environmental stewardship, cow comfort and community outreach. The brothers, who purchased the farm from their parents in the mid-1980s, have grown their family’s original eight cows and 150 acres into the 2,500-acre farm, milking 800 head of registered Holsteins in a closed herd.

The final piece of the puzzle was finding the right pasteurizer. New Jersey dairy farmer Peter Southway and his family were seeking one that could gently pasteurize their herd’s milk without degrading its integrity and do so with as little time and labor as possible.

Packing, preserving and properly feeding from the bunk silo relies on feeder knowledge of the chemistry behind the crop. That was the basic premise behind the two-day “Feeder Schools” held by Cornell Cooperative Extension last fall and hosted by dairy farms in different regions of New York.

Being the first farmer in New Jersey to begin bottling fluid milk for direct sales, bringing bottling back to the state after a decade-long absence, is quite the accomplishment for young dairy farmer Jared Weeks. Weeks, along with his wife, Treacy, owns Hun-Val Dairy in Hunterdon County. The dairy began bottling their own fluid milk in 2015 and expanded into ice cream, exclusively made with milk from their herd.

Many factors can impact milk yield and milk composition. In today’s milk market, where income generated from units of milkfat and protein account for the bulk of your milk check, optimizing fat and protein yields and percentages is a goal for most dairy farmers.

Scientists at the College of William and Mary are using sound waves to interfere with birds’ ability to communicate about food sources and predators, resulting in flocks leaving the premises.

Getting the most out of grazing your dairy herd means going beyond the basics of pasture management. Putting the right nutrition into the herd from pasture forages requires intensive management of the grass and the cows.

Hidden Pastures Dairy, a dairy goat farm, recently received top honors in the American Farm Bureau Federation’s 2018 Rural Entrepreneurship Challenge.

Stony Brook Farms in Amsterdam, New York, has a closed Holstein herd of 525 mature cows, 470 of which are milked three times per day – 9 a.m., 5 p.m. and 1 a.m. – in a double-10 parallel parlor. Although the parlor could readily be expanded to a double-14, this dairy farm has been operating at maximum capacity for four years and is not interested in milking more cows.

Dairy farmers could lower costs associated with heifer rearing by making improvements in their herd reproductive management, based on research being conducted by Ph.D. candidate Magdalena Masello and Cornell University’s Dairy Cattle Biology and Management Laboratory.