Dairy Stockmanship: Training Today's Students for Tomorrow's Workforce
Why one university is bringing efficient and humane dairy-cow handling techniques to the next generation of farmers.
Dr. Katharine F. Knowlton, The Colonel Horace E. Alphin Professor of Dairy Science, Virginia Tech
Calm, efficient and humane handling practices are the goal of nearly all dairy farmers, but finding employees that know how to carry this out is difficult and becoming more so. It seems that the demand for quality farm labor has always exceeded the supply and increased expectations for humane handling make this challenge even more difficult.
As a professor in a university dairy science department, one of my highest priorities is to help students identify, prepare for, and achieve their career goals, and most of our graduates want to work directly with cows. Nearly half of our students go on to careers managing dairies, and even the younger students are in strong demand as on-farm interns. Every grad has multiple good job offers.
Similarly, vet schools struggle to find students who can meet the academic standards and also have the experience working with food animals. We take seriously the need to prepare our pre-vet students be admitted to vet school and (more importantly) to be good vets! Even researchers and governmental agencies seeking graduate students are excited to see large animal handling experience on the resume of an academically strong candidate.
Clearly, the opportunities for new graduates with solid hands-on dairy experience are nearly limitless. As is true at most universities, however, an increasing proportion of our Virginia Tech Dairy Science majors are not from farms. The demand for students with significant on-farm experience far exceeds the supply.
As a faculty member, one of my (admittedly self-serving) goals is for my department to remain the go-to source of skilled herd managers, useful veterinarians, and top notch graduate students. To ensure that we’re serving our students and the industry, we update and upgrade our curriculum annually. This past year one change we made was to add 5 day immersion workshops focused on humane and effective dairy handling to our course offerings.
The workshops we offer are adapted from the www.dairystockmanship.com program. This is based on established principles of animal behavior, and teaches efficient and humane handling of dairy cattle, with training focused as much on the cows as on the handlers.
Because of the nature of the information, we decided that an immersive, hands-on approach was needed. We offer students 5 day workshops, beginning each day with classroom discussion, and quickly transitioning to the barns, pens or fields. During the week the students also review published scientific articles and review papers covering key principles of applied animal behavior. Some students go further, using this workshop as a springboard for an undergraduate research or academic capstone project.
We pitched this course to three target audiences: Students with dairy experience who want to adopt and be certified in the latest cutting-edge training, students with modest dairy experience who want to climb to “certified” level, and students with no dairy experience who aspire to an entry-level on-farm internship. Students can choose to take the course the week before classes begin or the week after the semester ends.
The workshop we offered focused on how cattle learn and how to apply this information. We started in the calf pens, analyzing calf behavior and using that information to efficiently halter-train calves. While halter training isn’t seen as a need on most commercial farms, it’s a dramatic example for students of the power of reinforcement training for animal and handler. Taking a calf from the first fighting and flailing response to the halter and having that calf follow you wherever you lead just 60 minutes later – that’s clear evidence that this approach is a game changer for the low-energy, safe and efficient handling of cattle. This is especially true for 4-H and youth programs.
Next we worked with groups of animals, again analyzing their behavior and using that information to sort out individual animals and to efficiently and quietly move the group from pen to pen and in free-stall environments. Later, we advanced to handling older heifers and at all key stages: dry cows, maternity pens, and fresh heifers learning about the milking parlor. Again and again, basic principles of animal learning followed by efficient application.
Student and employer response to this new course has been resoundingly positive: This training is needed and this format is effective. What students particularly like is the opportunity to connect academic concepts with immediate real-world application and practice.
In the larger picture I really believe that integration of humane management practices in all of our courses and learning opportunities is essential. When it comes to handling dairy cattle, consumers and dairy farmers share the same goal – for all human-animal interactions on the farm to be calm and efficient. Our industry needs a workforce trained to handle dairy cattle efficiently and humanely. The workshops we’re offering our students will help create the calm, efficient, and yes, humane system of dairy herd management that producers want and our consumers expect.
Dr. Katharine F. Knowlton is the Colonel Horace E. Alphin Professor of Dairy Science at Virginia Tech University. Contact Knowlton at knowlton@vt.edu or 540-231-5287.
