Sept. 6, 2016
Labor Day is in the rearview mirror. It’s no longer possible to change the hybrid, plant density, pest management, fertilizer strategies, or the summer weather...


Aug. 23, 2016
The death of a Wisconsin dairy farmer this past week is a grim reminder that farms provide for a dangerous work environment. Sometimes one with unsuspecting hazards.The young dairy farmer was ov...


Aug. 16, 2016
Through the years, farmers have devised any number of methods to estimate the moisture of cut forage in an attempt to hit the optimum harvest mark...


May 18, 2016
A truckload of hay is 48,000 pounds, a “small” 250-ton silo bag and a 1,000-ton pile or bunker are 500,000 and 2,000,000 pounds, respectively...


April 19, 2016
With lower milk and beef prices coupled with increasing corn seed prices, there is good reason to contemplate the optimum planting rate for silage corn. Recently, researchers in both Virginia and Wisconsin weighed in on the topic. Gonzalo Ferreira, extension dairy scientist at Virginia Tech, reported on the second year of planting rate study in the Dairy Pipeline newsletter. In 2015, silage corn was planted in four southern Virginia plots at rates of 22,000 to...


March 22, 2016
Adequately processed kernels separated from the stover and leaves using the float test. The title might fool you into thinking we’re discussing NFL stats, but the focus is actually a topic with...


Feb. 22, 2016
Forage is an indispensable part of dairy cow diets. However, due to its bulkiness and the inherently low levels of fiber digestibility, cows are limited in how much forage they can consume...


Feb. 16, 2016
In my many years spent as a county extension agronomist in one of the largest dairy counties in Wisconsin, I heard a lot of reasons to grow brown midrib (BMR) corn and a lot of reasons not to...


Feb. 9, 2016
A number of years ago one of my kids came home with their report card and presented it to me. Embedded alongside the list of class names and numbers were a few B’s and a couple of C’s...


Jan. 26, 2016
Visual characteristics of BMR hybrids include a darker stalk and leaf mid-rib. The brown mid-rib (BMR) corn silage market is still nowhere close to that of conventional silage corn, but hyb...