Winter member meeting schedule
Minnesota DHIA member meetings are scheduled for 75 minutes and start with a 15-minute business meeting to include nominations for south-central, southeast, and metro directors and state delegate nominations, and brief announcements. This will be followed by the featured speaker. Attend one or all!
February 15, 2024 – 12:30 PM
"What's new" mini-series
Three speakers are welcomed in to give a high-level overview of their projects related to collection and use of milk recording data followed by a group roundtable Q&A. Topics include (a) Initiatives of National DHIA, (b) Research and development of genetic evaluations, and (c) HerdHQ: Intro to a new web-based platform for on-farm management.
February 20, 2024 – 12:30 PM
Milk fatty acids: results and application
Brad Heins, Professor, University of Minnesota WCROC, Morris
Brad specializes in applied research in many areas of dairy cattle management, especially organic and grazing systems, housing, genetics, and energy use for dairies. He is currently leading a project on Fatty Acid yields and ratios and how milk fatty acids can provide insight in the on-farm management of feedstuffs, grazing, breed composition, methane production, and more.
February 21, 2024 – 12:30 PM
Mental health on the farm
Ted Matthews, Director of MN Rural Mental Health, MN Dept of Agriculture
Ted is a mental health practitioner with over 30 years of experience in counseling in rural areas. He has extensive counseling experience in the areas of PTSD, crisis intervention, family issues, suicidology and domestic abuse. Ted’s focus has been farmer mental health support in recent years. He fully understands the extreme pressure that farmers are facing today. Ted is the local expert who farmers across the state call with a question about mental health or suicide. He further offers his expertise to help the general population to better understand farming culture.
February 28, 2024 – 12:30 PM
Developing a national genetic evaluation for dairy cow mobility and hoof health
Gerard Cramer, Associate professor, Dept of Vet Population Med, Univ. of Minnesota
Gerard’s research focus is to develop and evaluate safe and effective prevention and intervention strategies for common foot diseases. He is the research lead on a grant with CDCB to aggregate observations from mobility camera and hoof health records provided by farms to create a pipeline for genetic evaluation of hoof health and on-farm hoof health management tools.
February 29, 2024 – 12:30 PM
Dry-off and selective dry cow therapy best practices
Luciano Caixeta, Associate professor, Dept of Vet Population Med, Univ. of Minnesota
Luciano’s research interests include metabolic and infectious diseases, Immune response and immunotherapeutics, and dairy systems biology. Here, he presents important considerations for the dry period, including blanket vs selective dry cow therapy, teat sealant, considerations for high-producing cows prior to dry-off, and grouping strategy.
DART user’s webinar
A DART webinar (separate from the Member meetings series) is being organized. A few basic topics will be covered such as event entry, setting up protocols, changing cow information, & building reports. A substantial amount of time will be devoted to addressing your specific questions. Date and time will be forthcoming.
REGISTER TODAY for one or several webinars by emailing Nancy Zander at [email protected] and she will email you the Zoom link prior to the meeting.