Are you causing the heat stress, or is the environment? Heat stress is a killer; from productivity to cow health, the side effects are real. In this webinar, Dr. Matt Brady walks through a recent case study and talks about the dangerous effects of artificial heat stress environments.

Feeding dairy cattle profitably in 2021 has come with challenges! High grain prices in combination with a global freight crisis have left many dairy producers looking for solutions. Sometimes these answers can be found in taking a pragmatic look at your diet and deciding what is really needed rather than chasing perfection. Time and time again, dairy diets contain an additive that no longer serves a purpose, or a lack of one nutrient, but overfeeding another. Daniel’s presentation will focus on simplifying, decluttering, and how to spend feed dollars wisely through the current commodity price circus. The presentation will lay out a concise list of tips to save money, or optimize your current feed budget.

The profitability of beef semen in dairy is principally influenced by: 1) dairy and beef market calves prices, 2) reproductive performance, and 3) semen combination strategies. Due to the complex interaction among these factors and their inherent changing conditions, the quest for an optimal strategy is best served by the application of an integrated model and a decision support tool adaptable to ever-changing farm and market conditions.

Join us as Dr. Frank Mitloehner of the CLEAR Center at UC Davis brings us another exciting webinar. Animal agriculture is often shouldered with a large part of the blame when it comes to climate change, but that’s because we haven’t been looking at all greenhouse gases correctly. While methane is a potent climate pollutant that we can and need to reduce, it warms our atmosphere differently than other gases because of its short lifespan. By rethinking methane, we can see that animal agriculture can be on the path to climate neutrality with scalable solutions and give the global community tools to fight global climate change.

Join Kristy Campbell of DeLaval in our latest webinar, Milk Quality Begins in the Back of the Barn. Successful improvements in milk quality take a systems approach. Historically, we’ve focused in the front of the barn (the parlor) to make improvements. While that area is important, significant efforts should be made in the back of the barn as well. Cow comfort, bedding management, ventilation, heat/cold stress and employee protocols all play a role in milk quality. The impacts of these factors are amplified in robotic facilities. Not approaching milk quality from a systems point of view leads to missed opportunities for improvement.

Calves are the foundation for a successful healthy herd, so it’s crucial to make sure they are living in the best possible environment, and it starts with the air around them. Dr. Michael Wolf is the owner of Country Doctors Veterinary Service and a consulting veterinarian for VES-Artex, he will discuss how important a healthy environment is for the long-term health, wellbeing and productivity of growing heifers. He’ll walk us through design goals and the cost/benefit analysis of your ventilation investment.

As dairy farms continue to increase in size and hire more employees, dairy farmers increasingly have the responsibilities of a human resource manager in addition to caring for their animals. Katelyn Mills, a Postdoctoral fellow with the University of British Columbia’s Animal Welfare Program will discuss standard operating procedures (SOP) and how these documents can be used to improve employee accountability and track procedures on dairy farms.

In this webinar Dr. Mario Mondaca will discuss baffles in negative pressure ventilation systems for adult dairy cows. We will review the overall design philosophy behind baffles and the history of cross-ventilated barns, the type of barns that most commonly use baffles. We will also look at the latest research on baffle design and position on cross-ventilated barns as well as tunnel-ventilated barns. Finally, we will address unintentional baffles that deflect air away from the animal occupied zone like waterers, concrete walls, cross-over walls, feed bunks, etc. We will review examples from measurements on farms as well as computational fluid dynamics models.

Whereas the beneficial effects of cooling cows during lactation are clear, less work has been done to examine the impact of dry cow cooling on subsequent performance and health, and on the developing fetus. This presentation will explore the recent work related to late gestation cooling on milk yield, metabolism, and immune status in the cow, and also reviews the effects of in utero heat stress on the heifer calf. Finally, the economic implications of heat stress in the dry period will be explored.