By Jim Massey
Freelance writer
It hasn’t taken long for Jennifer Van Os to make her mark within the UW-Madison Department of Animal and Dairy Science.
Van Os, an assistant professor and extension specialist in animal welfare, has become well-known across the Wisconsin dairy industry for her innovative research and outreach programs. In her first seven years on campus, she has conducted research on heat stress management for dairy animals, and studies on social behavior and feed efficiency. Most recently, she put together a team of industry stakeholders to develop an interactive game called ‘Mooving Cows’ to train dairy farm employees on best-management practices in animal handling.
Photo curtesy of Jennifer Van Os
Her work hasn’t gone unnoticed, as she recently received a university-wide award from the UW-Madison Division of Extension. Van Os was the recipient of the 2024 “Excellence in Research Award,” presented each year to one Wisconsin extension professional across all disciplines.
“I’d be honored to win anything, but this was a nice one,” Van Os says in reference to the extension research award. “We talk about whether our programs are having an impact, and sometimes we don’t hear positive feedback enough when things are going well. To me, this really reflects the integration of research and extension. It really felt like vindication of the Wisconsin Idea.”
Van Os joined the animal and dairy sciences faculty in 2018 to focus on animal welfare science. The animal welfare topic can sometimes feel threatening to the agriculture industry, but Van Os bridged the fear gap by including farmers and industry representatives in her research efforts, demonstrating that her work was aimed at helping farmers succeed.
“Sometimes there are negative connotations about animal welfare because the term is often misused,” she says. “There was a lot of trust building in the beginning that I’m here to help, I’m here to provide information. Once we got on the same page about what I meant by animal welfare, we could talk about farmers’ challenges and what I could do to help. Animal welfare is really just taking into consideration the quality of life of the animal.”
Van Os has received more than $2 million in grant support for her projects since arriving at the UW, generating new knowledge and helping enhance the well-being of dairy cattle in Wisconsin in a short period of time.
Carolina Pinzon, a dairy outreach specialist in the UW-Madison Division of Extension, offered the presentation speech during Van Os’s award ceremony.
“Professionally, Jennifer is an incredible extension specialist whose research and outreach have earned admiration from educators, dairy farmers, industry partners and stakeholders across Wisconsin,” Pinzon said. “Her work has transformed animal welfare practices on dairy farms, setting new standards for animal care and well-being in our industry.
“Through her outreach and research, Jennifer has not only advanced sound animal welfare practices but has also strengthened extension’s relationship with farm owners and producers. Her ability to build trust and leverage research-based knowledge has made a lasting difference for those she serves.”
In nominating Van Os for the Division of Extension award, Nigel Cook, a professor in the UW-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine, and Dominic Ledesma, assistant vice provost for culture, climate and engagement, described Van Os as “an accomplished scholar, a deeply respected and valued colleague, and an outstanding mother to her young daughter.
“We are immensely proud of her work and the ways her role as a faculty specialist reflect positively on our land-grant university’s research and educational outreach mission,” they wrote.
Van Os says her Mooving Cows interactive game, which allows people to practice appropriate cow-handling skills and get immediate feedback on how their actions affect cow behavior, stress and productivity, was developed in direct response to Wisconsin farmers telling her they wanted better cow-handling training methods for their employees.
She says she would like to expand the concept to focus beyond moving cows into milking parlors to further help farmers train their employees.
Van Os grew up in Champaign-Urbana, Ill., and had “seen cows” when driving by the campus dairy farm. Dairy research was not something she envisioned herself being a part of when she began exploring career opportunities.
She attended Harvard University, majoring in psychology, and upon graduation moved to California where she worked in industry unrelated to science or agriculture for six years. She decided to go to graduate school at the University of California-Davis, and was teamed with a mentor who happened to work on dairy cows.
“I fell in love with dairy cattle,” she says. “I’m really lucky that I got on this dream career path and got into the UW-Madison research and extension position. To me it’s ideal to do applied research to try to address real world challenges and work directly with the stakeholders who can benefit from the information.”
Van Os says she has been fortunate to have “really generous mentors” who helped her settle in at the UW and to get to know people within the dairy industry.
“One of my unofficial mentors was Randy Shaver – when he retired, I moved into his office, which reminds me that I have these shoes to fill of this well-regarded extension specialist,” she says. “He was really kind when I started, he took me around to a lot of farms and introduced me and got my foot in the door. He’s a known person and well-regarded, and that allowed me to start building some of those relationships in this area that are really supportive of UW research.”
Some of the farmers she met early on have participated in research studies with their cows, participated in on-campus focus groups, written letters supporting her grant applications, and been external project advisers, Van Os says. All of those relationships are due to the mentors who made those early introductions.
One of Van Os’s early studies continued with the theme of her Ph.D. research on thermal comfort, to better understand the affects of heat stress not only on cow productivity but also cow behavior.
In the future, she hopes to develop a research program to focus on heat stress in growing heifers.
“In collaborative (heat-stress) research we work on calves during their first two months of life and adult cows, but there are almost two years of the animals’ life where there’s barely any research at all,” Van Os says. “That’s a long time, and farmers do care about their animals’ welfare even if they’re not members of the milking herd yet. I’m hoping to get federal funding to look at thermal comfort in growing heifers.”
Van Os also hopes to work in the future to refine ways to measure the effectiveness of her research findings, either quantitatively or qualitatively, to determine if her efforts are making a difference.
“With the Mooving Cows game, for example, I would like to be able to document not only whether the research has changed knowledge, but whether playing the game has changed practice,” she says.