At Miner Institute’s recent Open House, I gave narrated rides on a hay wagon through our dairy facility. As we approached a pen of cows we are currently conducting a dairy nutrition trial on, nearly every one of the 86 cows in the pen were bunched in 1/3 of the pen closest to the center of the barn. I was hopeful the “general public” wouldn’t perceive that we were forcing the cows to live in such close proximity to each other…it was a hot day.

Dairy calves or dairy-beef calves, not destined for replacement animals, routinely contribute to the beef industry. Some estimates are that over 4.7 million calves go to dairy-beef in the United States annually and are typically raised to be harvested around 16-18 months of age. Many of these animals are transported to a dairy-beef farm early in life, often at less than one week of age. This transport can include multiple trips from the farm of origin and can include auction

The ration is formulated. You loaded the ingredients. You mixed the TMR. But did you actually feed the ration you intended to? Most farms routinely monitor feed ingredients, dry matters, and ration costs, but the scale responsible for weighing those ingredients may not be receiving similar attention. Mixer wagon scale accuracy is especially important for low-inclusion rate ingredients like premixes and feed additives. Even small deviations can become economically meaningful

Alfalfa is a perennial legume, but because it’s typically managed for high forage quality it’s often not a long-lived one. Most dairy farmers in this region are satisfied to get 4 or 5 productive years from a stand of alfalfa or alfalfa grass — and they should be, for several reasons.

Weaning is a major physiological time for a young calf, especially when the calf is fed an elevated milk replacer feeding program (Khan et al., 2011; Steele et al., 2017; Wolfe et al., 2023; Drackley, 2025). There are several benefits to adopting an elevated milk feeding program; in a review, Ghaffari and Hammon (2026) outline several. These include an increase in energy and protein supply, insulin and IGF-1 signaling, mTORC1 activation, muscle and protein synthesis, average

I recently had the opportunity to discuss milk component production and the growing role that fat and protein play in farm profitability with a group of young dairy farmers. This topic comes up often and for good reason. Fat and protein production are making up a larger share of the value of the milk we ship every day. Many farms have already made tremendous progress over the last 5+ years.

I’ve always enjoyed farm tours, especially when other farmers are on them. It’s not the big picture of the farm itself that’s all that interesting…wood, metal and concrete. It’s often not the farm manager that is that interesting either, although we’ve met some memorable ones. When on other’s farms, most farmers I’ve traveled with are looking at the little things …clever fixits that save a few minutes each day… that they hadn’t thought of…and could adapt to their farm. A diff

For many years, fat supplementation in dairy diets was viewed primarily as a way to increase the energy density of the ration. This concept remains true, particularly for high-producing cows with substantial energy demands, but recent research has shown that the response to fat supplementation depends not only on the amount of fat supplied but also on the specific fatty acids being fed. In other words, nutritionists are shifting their attention from "feeding more fat" to "fee

Last month I wrote about the critical weed-free period in corn. This month I’ll continue the theme by discussing why you may still be seeing weeds growing in your fields weeks after the corn was sprayed. While herbicides are very effective at controlling weeds when everything goes well, the reality is that many dairy operations end up with more weed material in their corn bunk than they would like to admit.

In last month’s Farm Report I introduced and discussed the hydrology of an edge-of-field monitoring project that was designed to assess the impacts of no-till corn silage production on field hydrology and nutrient losses. In this article we’ll discuss the impacts the no-till treatment had on nitrogen (N) transport from the field.