Greetings from the Department of Animal & Dairy Sciences on a nice March morning! Lots of exciting things are happening, and we hope you’ll take a moment to read some of the articles that are previewed below.
This year we welcomed a large and diverse crop of first-year students into the Dairy Science and Animal Sciences majors. The stories of how four California students–Kylie Konyn, Karli Rask, Daniela Hernandez, and Tula Cox – became Badgers are chronicled in “From the West Coast to America’s Dairyland.” These students share some highlights from their first semester, as well as their career aspirations and strategies for adapting to Wisconsin’s weather (perhaps Jim should have checked in on them for an update a couple of weeks ago, when it was -25°😊).
We recently formed a partnership with the School of Medicine and Public Health, described in “Research uses pigs to solve people problems,” that will capitalize on UW-Madison’s unique advantage of a world-class agricultural and life sciences college just down the street from a world-class medical school. Dr. Dhanu Shanmuganayagam leads this effort from our side, and it seeks to use gene-edited pigs as translational models in developing solutions to some of the thorniest problems in human medicine, such as the shortage in human transplantable organs and the high failure rate of new therapies and devices during clinical trials.
Precision livestock farming, which refers to the use of wearable sensors, cameras, and related technologies to collect massive quantities of data on individual animals, has become an extremely hot topic in recent years. In “Edge computing used to monitor animal behavior”, Dr. Joao Dorea describes how he and several undergraduate students use cameras to monitor dairy cow behavior and identify animals that may be showing early signs of illness. Through his work, and that of Dr. Guilherme Rosa and others in the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, UW-Madison is becoming a powerful force in precision agriculture.
Feed is the largest expense on most dairy farms, and our multi-state project on genomic selection for feed efficiency is bearing fruit. Drs. Heather White, Francisco Peñagaricano, Luiz Ferraretto, and I lead a large project, described in “Data allows farmers to breed for feed efficiency,” that contributes daily feed intakes of 325 cows per year to the national reference population at the Council on Dairy Cattle Breeding. This project recently delivered genetic evaluations for Feed Saved to U.S. dairy farmers, enhanced the Net Merit index used by thousands of farmers, and provided higher and more precise estimates of maintenance energy costs in the National Research Council guidelines for feeding dairy cattle.
Lastly, we are excited to welcome Dr. Hilario Mantovani to our faculty next month – Hilario is an internationally recognized rumen microbiologist who spent nearly twenty years on the faculty of the Federal University of Vicosa, in Brazil. Hilario and his family came to Madison a decade ago, during his sabbatical at the USDA-ARS Dairy Forage Research Center, and we are fortunate to bring him back as the first Dairy Innovation Hub faculty hire in our department.
Please mark your calendars for May 17, the date of our Animal & Dairy Sciences Golf Outing – proceeds from this event fund hands-on learning activities for our students, such as the research experiences described in “Undergraduate Scholarships Top Priority Among Development Opportunities.”
Best regards, Kent