What if there is more protein in your canola meal or soybean meal than you think? An average high-cow ration is around 50 percent forage and 50 percent commodity feed. As nutritionists, we tend to focus on regularly measuring and understanding forage feed value (nutrient content and digestibility).

Over the past couple of years, we’ve been able to measure what commercial dairy cattle digest on-farm by analyzing TMR and manure samples that nutritionists send us from high-cow pens. We measure TMR and manure nutrient content, a digestion marker, and then calculate what cows apparently digest (and conversely, what they did not). What we are measuring is in some cases eye-opening.

Tax season is here and many of us are meeting with our accountants to summarize last year’s balance sheet and plan for 2013. We likely consider different ways to minimize tax implications on our business, planning ahead and investing in various areas of our business.

The spring of 2012 started out early in the Midwest U.S., with warm temperatures in March and into April, but then quickly cooled off. Late-season frost events left us questioning whether the alfalfa crop could survive spring. The crop survived and we transitioned into a drought among the most severe the U.S. has seen in decades, stressing most crops and regions – and yielding some very different and interesting forage results.