Recruiting and hiring are the first steps to adding the right employees to a dairy farm, but training and retraining are essential to keeping them. However, Penn State Extension veterinarian Dr. Adrian Barragan said a significant percentage of dairy farms still don’t offer a solid training program. ...

The Brassica genus boasts in its membership many of our most well-known vegetables: cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, rutabaga, turnips, kohlrabi, Brussels sprouts, collards, kale, mustard and more. My first contact with this genus as a source of soil fumigants occurred about 20 years ago. At the time...

More farmers than ever are interested in and practicing regenerative agriculture these days. They are focused on putting more back into their land and their animals so that more (and better) may be produced. But what about the concept of regenerative agritourism? On the surface, tourism seems like a...

There’s evidence that pair or group feeding for calves is better, but will farmers buy into it? Dr. Marina von Keyserlingk, professor and dairy welfare researcher at the University of British Columbia, has conducted extensive research on pair and group feeding of dairy calves. “There are lot of thin...

Part 1: How Medicare works Some business practices in farming, including legally minimizing reported income, may benefit the business for a while. However, in some cases, cleverly managed tax returns and waiting too long to enroll in government financial and health security programs can backfire. Pa...

Just as summer 2026 was getting started, I stumbled into three situations where cattlemen reported incidence of foot rot in their livestock. Two of the individuals I work with in an advisory capacity – one a dairyman, the other a beef (mostly Angus) farmer. A discussion of foot rot should logically ...

Farmers have a love/hate relationship with phosphorus (P). It’s a dietary requirement for livestock but significant P is excreted in manure and urine. Depending on on-farm conservation practices, P accumulates in runoff and soil erosion and is carried to important watersheds, resulting in eutrophica...

Using winter rye in his crop rotation has freed farmer Sandy Syburg from a chore he never much enjoyed: spreading poultry litter. His biologically active soil now generates enough nitrogen that he no longer needs to import additional fertility onto his farm. Syburg, whose farm has been certified org...

Small ruminants come up with a variety of reasons to have diarrhea. A change in feed, weather, stress or disease can result in a miserable animal with a messy hind end. One cause of diarrhea in young lambs and kids is coccidiosis, but by the time diarrhea is evident, the animal is likely already exp...