Multimedia

This episode’s guest is Dr. Tom Earleywine. He is the milk replacer director of nutritional services at Land O'Lakes. He joins Progressive Dairy Editor Walt Cooley to talk about weaning and how it’s changed over the last several years. 

Vir-Clar Farms near Fond du Lac, Wisconsin has elevated the accuracy of feed storage, mixing and delivery with an innovative feed center featuring an automated kitchen and on-site grain storage that saves them time and money. 

When prepartum cows are fed a negative DCAD diet, inducing a mild compensated metabolic acidosis, calcium status is improved, resulting in healthier, more productive cows. Recently, some nutritionist have been feeding even lower-DCAD diets (more anions) to acidify cows more deeply than the majority of published research. At these higher, more extreme levels of acidification, cows may walk a fine line between being OK and being overwhelmed by uncompensated metabolic acidosis. Progressive Dairy Editor Audrey Schmitz spoke with Tim Brown to hear more about DCAD myths and the optimum level for negative DCAD diets. 

Today’s episode provides summaries of three different articles we’ve published this past year on manure management. Listen in to find out how to improve nitrogen efficiency from farm to field, what can be done to get the most value from manure and which manure system will make a good addition to your farm.

Ray Bohacz of the Idle Chatter podcast and farmmachinerydigest.com joins Editor Walt Cooley to introduce himself to readers and share three tips for preventative maintenance that will help avoid machinery breakdowns. Bohacz has published more than 3,000 technical articles about machinery in his career. His columns recently began appearing regularly in Progressive Dairy magazine.