Progressive Dairy Podcast

Editor Walt Cooley and Professional Dairy Producers Executive Director Shelly Mayer remind listeners of the reason for the season and challenge all to be grateful for their individual “super power.”

Illinois dairyman Andy Lenkaitis converted his home farm Red Shirt Holsteins to robotic milking in 2017. He is also an environmental sales engineer and works for GEA. He assists dairy farms that are transitioning from conventional to robotic milking. In this episode, he talks about his own robotic milking transition, what he’s found is helpful to producers going through their own transitions and the biggest challenges he sees in most transitions to robots.

In this episode, Editor Peggy Coffeen talks with the Dr. Gordie Jones about a dairy barn design concept he contrived called the all-seasons hybrid barn.

Editor Walt Cooley interviews magazine contributor Andy Junkin. He calls himself a specialist in the decision culture of farmers. In short, he’s a farm family consultant. He’s written several books based on his experience consulting with farms. His most recent book is called Bulletproof Your Farm. It’s a workbook of sorts on how to get your family meeting regularly. 

In this episode, Editor Walt Cooley talks with the new principal partners of Vault Ag about forward contracting and risk management in the dairy industry. In October 2019, Rice Dairy LLC in Chicago, Illinois, and Commodity Risk Management Group in Platteville, Wisconsin, announced a partnership between the two businesses to create a single brokerage company that will service the agriculture and dairy industries under the banner of Vault Ag Holding Company LLC. I got a chance to sit down with Pete Turk and Mike North to discuss risk management and forward contracting.

Automated milking systems are changing the way today’s farms function. As more and more dairies adopt the technology, the industry is adjusting its tried and true methods and there is always something new to be said on the topic. Today’s episode provides summaries of three different articles we’ve published this past year on incorporating robots. Listen in to find out whether you should retrofit or build new to accommodate automated milking systems in your barn. Find out the best techniques to train fresh cows for robotic milking success. Lastly, learn what the signals cows are giving you in an automated system mean and how to respond.

Minnesota dairyman Michael Johnson has been using eartag activity monitoring from CowManager for four and a half years. In this episode, he talks about his experience installing the technology, his results and advice for other dairymen who may be considering similar technology. Johnson operates Trailside Holsteins in Fountain, Minnesota, and milks 600-cows. 

The pro-livestock, non-profit organization Animal Ag Alliance annually attends the Animal Rights National Conference to discover trends in strategy and tactics among anti-animal agriculture groups. (No, they don’t use undercover tactics to get in.) Kay Johnson Smith, CEO of the Animal Ag Alliance, recaps in this episode what the alliance heard and saw at the 2019 event held in Alexandria, Virginia, and what it means for dairy farmers. 

In this first-ever episode, listen to Progressive Dairy editors Walt Cooley, Karen Lee, Peggy Coffeen and Dave Natzke discuss what you can expect from future podcasts published by the magazine.