To properly recycle nutrients, and to reduce the potential for nutrient and pathogen losses to the environment, dairy farmers will be planning, constructing, and using more manure storage systems.

With so many challenges in the dairy industry today, farm managers realize they need to be “better than average” to be in business for the long-term. Running a whole-farm nutrient mass balance (NMB) can help achieve this.

Key performance indicators, such as milk urea nitrogen, ration nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) levels, corn stalk nitrate testing, and soil fertility assessments are only useful if we know what to strive for.

Calibration of yield monitors during the harvest season is essential to obtain accurate yield data, but even if calibrated properly, the data obtained from the yield monitors still needs to be cleaned.

Corn silage and grain yields have steadily increased since World War II (Figure 1) with a slightly greater increase per year for corn grain than for corn silage, possibly reflecting an emphasis on corn grain improvement by plant breeders in the past decades.