April 2024 Vol. 2

Brought to you by Dairy's Professional Development Organization®

Your Farm - Your Footprint

KNOW YOUR SCORE AND SHAPE YOUR FUTURE. Here at Professional Dairy Producers®, we believe dairy farmers should be in the driver’s seat when it comes to knowing and owning their farm’s environmental footprint score. That’s why Your Farm – Your Footprint™ was developed.

With the aim of offering a comprehensive suite of tools to assess and enhance the environmental footprints of dairies nationwide, participating in the initiative begins with a straightforward four-step process. Each participant’s Comprehensive Sustainability Assessment highlights valuable insights into their farm’s environmental impact with a report that identifies and celebrates current practices. That assessment includes the farm’s sustainability scores and explains how both carbon and methane emissions are calculated.

From there, a customized farm action plan is designed to determine actionable steps to elevate the farm’s sustainability score. Eocene Environmental Group is the independent entity tasked with collecting and analyzing data – all of which will remain confidential and solely owned by the dairy producer. This data will be aggregated for the purpose of facilitating peer group discussions.

Dairy's Foundation, Nestlé Global and Nestlé U.S. are inaugural sponsors and provide cost-share grants. To learn more and join the movement, click here.

Opportunities to Learn

Accelerate™

July, 24, 2024

Madison, Wis.

HELP YOUR SUMMER INTERN STAND OUT FROM THE CROWD and excel in today’s workforce. Michael Hoffman will facilitate the one-day PDP Accelerate program designed for interns in the agriculture sector to build on the skills they’ve learned in their internships and give them a head start as they look for full time employment. The interactive session will combine hands-on learning, peer networking and interactive skill practice to ensure interns build the skills they need. Learn more about PDP Accelerate and register interns here or call 800-947-7379.

MAKE THE MOST OF CLEANING & DISINFECTION ROUTINE with several strategies recommended by Ohio State Extension. Cleaning can be an unfavorable task on the farm, so implement the following to make practices as efficient and effective as possible:

• Plan C&D in a way that minimizes impact of pathogen spread, such as starting with youngest animals and moving to the oldest.
• Rinsing or sweeping away visible contamination from surface to avoid interaction with disinfectants
• Include a washing step after rinsing or sweeping an area
• Let areas dry before disinfection



Read the full article for more strategies.

PLANNING AHEAD TO KEEP COWS COOL when temperatures increase is essential on the dairy. For new team members, or for those who need a refresher, check out this series of fact sheets from the UW-Extension on heat stress and abatement techniques. Materials are available in English and Spanish and include a short video featuring content from Heather Schlesser, agriculture educator, Marathon County, Dr. Jennifer Van Os, assistant professor and animal welfare specialist, and Ted Halbach, dairy management instructor, as well as several pictures showing cows coping with heat stress. An infrared photo of a dairy cow after a low-pressure soaking from an overhead shower gives an informative look into how beneficial this practice can be.

It’s important to remember that a dairy cow’s preferred temperature range is between 41° and 77° Fahrenheit. It’s easy to forget that while during what we may consider to be “comfortable” weather, a cow’s body may be approaching heat-stress mode.

When cows are dealing with heat stress, their natural coping mechanisms include panting, and breathing with their mouth wide open and tongue out. They also breathe more rapidly and hang out around water troughs, sometimes without actually drinking. Having systems already in place will save managers, and their cows, stress when the weather gets too warm.

The resources available here will help you ensure your cows are ready for warmer weather with appropriate ventilation, water-based cooling and more.

FEATURED BY MORNING AG CLIPS: California’s wine industry could play a role in reducing methane emissions from dairy cattle. Researchers at the University of California, Davis, added fresh grape pomace left over from winemaking operations to alfalfa-based feed for dairy cows and found that methane emissions were reduced by 10% to 11%.

Click here to read more.

FAMILY FARMS AND BUSINESSES ARE LEGACIES that are often built over generations. At the 2024 PDP Business Conference, speaker Marissa Nehlsen, money and business strategist, shared strategies for producers to either begin or continue the process to ensure that their farm assets will be protected and available to pass down to future generations. While 70% of producers expect their family ag operations to continue as a family business after they are gone, only 23% have a formal succession plan.

Nehlsen suggests the following starting points:

• Write down financial, land and asset goals and establish a plan to reach them. 
• Bring your team of financial and planning advisors together to talk about your plan
• Have a will or trust in place. A will is the most basic form of a formal estate plan that provides asset distribution instructions, names a personal representative to handle your estate, and names a guardian for minor children. Trusts are legal entities that hold assets in a certain way and manage assets on behalf of an individual or entity.
• Everyone over the age of 18 should have a durable power of attorney and healthcare directive in place.  

HAVE YOUR COLLEAGUES’ PERCEPTIONS OF YOU CHANGED along with your role in the company? For employees who have been at the same organization for an extended time and in multiple roles, there can be a risk that colleagues associate you with previous roles or responsibilities. To demonstrate your current value, ask yourself:

• What am I doing to reinforce who I am as a leader today?
• Where am I spending time not aligned to current leadership abilities?
• Can I delegate or stop doing lower-value work?
• What assumptions are others making about my work?



Learn more in the full article from Harvard Business Review. 

KEEP PROCRASTINATION AT BAY with strategies to keep even the most challenging projects on track. An article from Fast Company recommends taking a “Swiss cheese” approach to a project that seems overwhelming by poking holes into it until it breaks down into smaller and smaller tasks. Other tactics include setting time targets for tasks, assigning meeting times for yourself to complete projects and establishing breaks at the mid-points of a project. Learn more about each of these strategies here.

CONNECT WITH EXPERTS, LEARN FROM PEERS. Three days a week, The Dairy Signal® connects you with leading experts across dairy and agricultural industries to researchers at universities and government agencies to bring updates on the trends and topics that will affect your dairy business. The 60-minute sessions air every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, with recorded episodes available at www.pdpw.org. Click here to tune in to archived sessions.

Presenters and topics covered recently include:

April 16

Learn about Maternity Warden from Ever.Ag, a computer-vision monitoring solution for a dairy’s close-up pens. Powered by artificial intelligence, the system monitors the herd and alerts producers to cows in labor with the goal of safer births and fewer stillborns and dystocia events.

• Ryne Braun, Director, Dairy On-Farm Solutions, Ever.Ag

April 17

Making the most of silage crops is the goal of IONfx Seed2Rumen in-plant microbial inoculant from Agrovive Biologicals. Tune in to learn about biological technologies designed to improve germination and seedling vigor for benefits during growing season and after harvest.

• Nathan Hrnicek, Chief Operating Officer, Agrovive Biologicals

April 18

Hear about Nutricow CalBal from Chemlock Nutrition, which is designed to be fed to the close-up cows in a dairy to help improve their calcium status during the fresh period, the product is formulated to improve the health and efficiency of other ruminants, too.

• Rick Brown, Dairy Science Director, Chemlock Nutrition

April 23

As the deadline for the 2024 Dairy Margin Coverage (DMC) program nears, tune in for a conversation about this risk management program and a market news update.

• Leonard Polzin, Dairy Markets and Policy Outreach Specialist, University of Wisconsin Extension

April 24

Join this interactive conversation about the role that animal stress plays in long term health and performance, with a focus on feed-related stressors. Dr. Goeser will also discuss strategies for success in the 2024 forage growing season.

• Dr. John Goeser, PhD, Director of Nutritional Research & Innovation at Rock River Lab, Inc., and Adjunct Assistant Professor, Dairy Science, University of Wisconsin-Madison

April 25

With spring planting underway across the country, hear about the market, export, weather and other factors that will impact dairy farmers and the ag industry throughout the growing season and beyond.

• Ben Buckner, Chief Grains and Dairy Analyst at AgResource 

April 30

Developing new technologies and practices to sustainably decrease enteric methane emissions from dairy cattle is a priority for the industry. Tune in to learn about obstacles and opportunities, including phenotyping, trait definition, developing a reference population, using milk mid-infrared spectra as a non-invasive approach and manipulating the rumen microbiome.

• Dr. Fransico Penagaricano, PhD, assistant professor, quantitative genomics, UW-Madison
• Dr. Guillermo Martinez Boggio, PhD, research assistant, UW- Madison

COUNSELING CAN BENEFIT PERSONAL LIFE, BUSINESS. It’s no secret that farming is a stressful business that can have impacts on the entire family. While reaching out to a physician is routine for a physical ailment or illness, seeking help for mental health or emotional challenges can be viewed as a weakness. However, counseling can be a valuable tool to help control emotions when making decisions, communicate effectively with family and employees, and change negative thought patterns. Free and confidential counseling is available for Wisconsin farmers through the Wisconsin Farm Center. Read more here.

FLAVOR, VALUE, and SUSTAINABLE PACKAGING ALL PLAY ROLES in how consumers view meat in grocery stores and on their tables, according to “The Power of Meat 2024” study released by FMI and Foundation for Meat & Poultry Education & Research. With changing technologies, grocers can communicate messages about products to shoppers through apps and specials before they reach the store. Ninety-two percent of shoppers said that meat/poultry can be a great price, but if it does not taste good, they will not buy it again. In addition, it was identified that consumers value sustainability, eating occasions and the value of the product beyond savings. Learn more here. 

KEY HUMAN GUT MICROBES CAME FROM COWS, and we are at risk of losing them by eating highly processed food, according to a recent article in Science. Microbes that help break down cellulose from plants may have first come from cows or other ruminants, then evolved into human-specific species. This transfer may have happened 10,000 years ago. A study has shown that the specific cellulose-degrading strains have declined over the centuries and even disappeared in many people in industrialized societies, most likely because diets there tend to contain less cellulose, which these microbes need to thrive. Read more here.

“It is really wonderful how much resilience there is in human nature. Let any obstructing cause, no matter what, be removed in any way, even by death, and we fly back to first principles of hope and enjoyment.” - Bram Stoker

Accelerate™

July, 24, 2024

Madison, Wis.