At Brooksco Dairy (2,750 cows), Calvin Moody has created a well-managed “mother ship,” where all cows calve and all calves are raised for the three stand-alone dairies, including Jeffco (2,350 cows) and Westbrook (2,250 cows).

Donning red shirts from Progressive Dairyman and showing their passion for dairy, 52 students from 24 universities, 20 states and five countries gathered at Curry County Fairgrounds for the evening meal and to hear from their “genetics week” instructor on how their morning linear appraisal of 10 heifers compared to the genomic testing done previously by Zoetis at Doug and Irene Handley’s Do-Rene Dairy, Clovis, New Mexico.

The heifer facility at Elm Farms Inc. is a little over a year old, and Michelle Hasheider-Burianek loves it. She and her father, Norbert Hasheider, operate the third-generation dairy farm, which is home to 130 registered Holstein cows including seven scored Excellent in their robotic dairy setup.

Leaving behind the winter-gripped Northeast, 40 dairy producers boarded a bus in Tallahassee for three days touring Florida-Georgia line dairies during the Professional Dairy Managers of Pennsylvania (PDMP) 2015 March Dairy Tour. Tour-goers were quite curious how dairy managers in the South coax 82 to 95 pounds per cow per day and 120,000 to 180,000 SCC in the region’s heat and humidity.

“There is a revolution going on in activity systems,” said Kevin Havartine, Ph.D., assistant professor of nutritional physiology at Penn State University’s department of animal science.