Phone caller: “You tell us to regularly test our forages, but how often should we do that?” Expert: “Um…” Now, there’s an answer.

Some things were tolerable with $2 corn that are out of the question now that we deal with $7 corn. Undigested grain in the manure is one of them. Seeds Corn kernels were not designed to be eaten; they are seeds, and what surrounds the dormant embryo — the endosperm — is there to support [...]

You cannot manage your money like the federal government. Why? Because you can’t print money!

With skyrocketing feed prices and negative margins to dairy producers, it may seem as if 2009 is repeating itself. But I don’t think that this is the case — there is some sunshine showing up in the currently cloudy dairy skies. The feed situation It was not that long ago the USDA and most experts [...]

Integrated dairy farms producing a large amount of the feeds consumed by their cows have a distinct cash flow advantage. This should be very good to Midwestern dairy producers in the long run.

I had the privilege of traveling overseas to conduct research during part of the summer, so I missed all of the hot and dry weather during July. Using the Internet, I could follow the ongoing drama of the rain that never showed. But one can never appreciate the devastation until one sees it with his [...]

As I write this column in mid-June, the dairy and feed markets are displaying much uncertainty and even some incoherence. The increase in milk futures over the last two weeks has no fundamentals; it just doesn’t make sense.

I don’t like to be the bearer of bad news, but the sky over dairyland looks to be very stormy with good possibilities of tornados. There is a lot of milk being shipped from U.S. dairy farms right now. Unless the demand for dairy products increases markedly, potential disaster may be looming. As I write [...]

I receive many invitations to speak at dairy conferences across the country. I try to participate in these conferences whenever my schedule allows because I learn a lot from listening to other speakers and talking to conference attendees. Recently, I participated in a dairy conference where Dr. Mike Hutjens was also a speaker. Disappearing breed [...]

After eight years of sitting through hours of lectures and experimentation on animal welfare issues I thought that it was time to share some of my thinking in this column.