The Moos Room™

Welcome to the Moos Room This is Brad here, uh, actually attending the World Conference of Genetics this week in Madison, Wisconsin. So learning all about genetics from dairy, actually beef, there's swine, poultry, all kinds of fun genetics stuff happening from applied to pretty basic stuff. So may share some of that next week.

What some of the hot things were in the genetics world. But I wanted to quick talk about some of the, or at least one of the research projects that we've been working on for a while, and kind of touched on it briefly, but I wanted to go a little more in depth, and we've been looking at feed intake of heifers, especially our Holsteins here at our Morris research herd, and we also have crossbred, so Jersey, Normandy, and Viking Red, and Montbeliard, Viking Red, and Holstein.

So two different crossbred groups along with Holsteins, and our goal was really to look at feed intake. There's not a lot of feed intake information out there on heifers, and so we wanted to see how efficient some of these heifers were and what their kind of methane was compared to feed intake. And we also had sensors on them to see if we could look at sensors and feeding behavior.

So I kinda wanted to at least go through that little study quick, probably a little bit shorter podcast today, but it might give you some information on intake of heifers, which we don't hear about much. We hear a lot of feed intake studies on dairy cows, but not much on heifers. So we really wanted to compare at least the Holsteins and the crossbreds, you know, kind of see what they were doing and what was happening for feed intake.

We had bunk behavior, so we had a lot of behaviors on when they came to the bunk, how often they came to the bunk to eat, and then activity patterns of Hol