Jim Dickrell

Jim Dickrell is the editor Dairy Herd Management and is based in Monticello, Minn. He has 27 years of publication experience, and also operated his family’s Wisconsin family dairy farm for three years following graduation from the University of Wisconsin—River Falls. He also holds a Masters Degree from Hamline University, St. Paul, Minn.

Latest Stories
Large dairy operations, those with 50 or more employees, will now be required to provide health insurance for their employees and possibly for their families as well.
Come August, dairy producers and calf raisers will no longer be able to buy milk replacers with Neomycin-Terramycin in the tried-and-true 2:1 ratio formulation.
From June 2005 through November 2009, Osterkamp Dairy achieved a milk quality bonus for 52 out of 53 months—a 98% success rate. Those results, says owner Mark Osterkamp, don’t happen without teamwork. In fact, getting milkers to buy in to the team concept is key to making everything work, he says.
As dairy price support levels become less and less relevant to cost-of-production levels, milk price volatility has brought cash flows from booming highs to crushing lows.
Balancing dairy rations for rumen-protected amino acids is often an exercise in confusion. There are few hard and fast rules.
As more details emerge on the National Milk Producers Federation’s 2012 dairy policy proposal, there’s a lot to like
Evidence is mounting that cows housed in deep-bedded sand freestalls are outperforming cows on mattresses.
The question before the dairy industry and USDA’s Dairy Industry Advisory Committee is where we go from here.
Neil Michael, director of technical services for ABS Global, says many herds consistently achieve pregnancy rates of 20% to 25%, with many commercial dairies already exceeding 35% to 40%. He lists eight influencers of reproductive success that every dairy should monitor.
“Genomics is a big step forward, but we still need daughter information,” says says Kent Weigel, University of Wisconsin dairy geneticist. “We’re not yet at the stage where we can identify the next sires of sons without using conventional genetics tools.”
With balance sheets in tatters and equity levels at record lows, crop insurance has renewed importance this year.
A three-year, $1.6 million project on six Wisconsin dairy operations is shedding light on management practices that control odors and emissions—and those that don’t.
It’s almost accepted as gospel that a high somatic cell count (SCC) cow in a small herd can throw off the entire bulk tank even if the rest of the herd is doing well. When it comes to large herds, the conventional wisdom is that a few high-count cows can get diluted by their herdmates.
A comfortable cow is a happy, productive cow.
GPS-guided auto-steering has not caught on as fast for dairy farmers as it has for their corn and soybean brethren who farm tabletop-flat prairies. But that’s changing, as pioneering dairy producers try to squeeze every advantage out of this constantly evolving technology.