The Moos Room™

[music]
[cow mooing]
Dr. Joe Armstrong: What is up everybody? This is Dr. Joe Armstrong. I'm a veterinarian who practiced in southeast Minnesota, and now works for the University of Minnesota Extension. You are listening to The Moos Room, a weekly podcast hosted by myself, Emily Krekelberg and Dr. Bradley J. Heins tenured professor. Each episode we try to bring you a topic we think can help beef and dairy producers be more successful.
Dr. Bradley J. Heins: I think about it from pasture standpoint, there's very little rain and pastures are going to be slow to regrowth. Well, what can we do to combat that? Summer annuals are a great thing to plant. We're planting them about now, the last week of May. You can plant them well into the second week of June to provide some feed for summertime if we really don't get any rain because that's really what these grass species do is grow on little rain. That's why we call them warm season grasses because they grow well in the summertime.
I like sorghum Sudan grass, that's our go to right now. It's what we really use a lot in our pastures. It grows fast, it outcompetes weeds. For our organic pastures, we need something that will outcompete the weeds and it provides a lot of forage, and high quality forage.
Dr. Armstrong: Emily has a dairy background in is Extension's farm safety and health educator. Brad is the faculty advisor for the West Central Research and Outreach Center in Morris, and is an expert when it comes to grazing, genetics, dairy management, and sustainability. Between the three of us, there aren't a whole lot of topics we can't cover, but when we find a topic that we're not an expert on, we find someone who is and bring them to the show.
Along the way we cover all kinds of topics. Management, preventive medicine, mental health, genetics, nutrition, mastitis, the list goes on. Now, I'm not going to lie to you, sometimes the show does get serious.
Emily Krekelberg: The other thing that I would say, as far as the guilt or feeling like, again, you're not keeping up or comparing yourself to others. This is the mental gymnastics that I get from my therapist, an ongoing theme because it just kept coming up in sessions was the concept of both/and where right now with farming it can both be your dream and it can be a nightmare somedays. These things like thinking everything exists singularly in a vacuum, that's not the way the world works. A lot of it is dichotomies or even more than that, so it's both/and, it's light and dark. Yes, I can both be happy with a certain situation and I can be frustrated by it. That's totally normal.
Dr. Armstrong: Really, most of the time, it's just three friends having fun, hoping that you learn something that you take home and you use in a real world.
Emily: Rummaging through the rumen, venturing across the abomasum, roving through the reticulum. Meandering about the omasum, moving through the mouth, exiting through the esophagus.
Dr. Heins: I give you jackets, I give you t-shirts, lots of stuff. I give you microphones, but I get nothing.
Emily: I am a taker, Bradley. The mood we're going for is where we're just sitting around at the end of the day drinking a beer, solving the world's problems on the back of a napkin.
Dr. Armstrong: Thank you for being here and thank you for listening to The Moos Room. As you'll find out as we go here, you can always send us comments, questions, scathing rebuttals. You can send those to the email address themoosroom@umn.edu. That's T-H-E-M-O-O-S-R-O-O-M@umn.edu. Again, thank you for being here. Thank you for listening. We hope you join us in The Moos Room in all the other episodes.
[music]
[00:04:04] [END OF AUDIO]

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