September 5 is the International Day of Charity, and while many of us are struggling to take care of our own, sometimes giving just a little can mean a lot. Think of the bell ringers around the holidays – all that pocket change that goes into those red buckets really adds up. So, if you are so incli...

Many farmers preserve forage as dry hay, but for some, baleage is a good alternative. Depending on storage conditions, losses in baled dry hay stored outdoors is between 10% and 30%, while properly wrapped baleage should have almost no quality loss. Storage for baleage is less costly than a chopped ...

As ecological instability rocks the globe and the cost of living in urban centers skyrockets, the concept of land stewardship has never been more vital – or more appealing. The post-pandemic trend of seeking a slow-paced life – and the current barrage of social media imagery featuring brightly color...

The Pennsylvania No-Till Alliance recently celebrated its 25th anniversary at the Jim Hershey farm in Elizabethtown, PA. One of the featured demonstrations was a soil pit, which was dug directly under recently planted sorghum-sudangrass. Lisa Blazure, soil health coordinator, Stroud Water Research C...

Once hailed as a green guardian of soil health, annual ryegrass has now gone rogue in New York State. A cover crop champion turned chemical-defying challenger, this fast-growing plant has morphed into a resistant renegade, surviving glyphosate sprays and turning heads in the worst way. Research titl...

When Melissa Cantor was raising calves at the University of Kentucky as an undergrad, she realized there was a need to identify animals that were getting sick. Cantor also speculated that machine learning might be a tool to help detect illness prior to animals showing clinical signs. Today, Cantor i...

Three growing seasons ago, during the middle of summer, I took a few soil samples on a southern Herkimer County dairy farm. One of the fields sampled that I found particularly interesting had been planted to a mix of forage soybeans and brown midrib sorghum two weeks earlier. There appeared to be mo...

Beyond cow comfort, it’s important to reduce the effects of heat stress in a dairy herd. Heat stress causes direct financial losses – and not just from reduced milk production. “It affects reproduction substantially,” said Jon Mills, herd manager at Morrisville State College Dairy Complex. “Their in...

“My dream is to have a cell phone-based device that I can take to the farm and tell you exactly which bacteria are making your animal sick, and exactly which antibiotic at which dose is going to make it get healthy fast. But we’re a long way away,” Erika Ganda said during a recent interview on the “...