When you’re driving through downtown Madison and the UW-Madison campus, you can see silos and there’s a chance you can smell the dairy cows!
Jessica Cederquist is the research program director at the UW Dairy Cattle Center and herd administrator for the Department of Animal and Dairy Sciences. She explains that the dairy is a full working farm in the city run by students, which posed challenges during the pandemic.
The UW Dairy Cattle Center had to close down from March through September last year. There just wasn’t a student labor force on campus due to COVID, Cederquist says. That means, the barn moved its cows to the Arlington Ag Research Station. But this year, the students and the cows are back on campus. Three student managers live in dorm rooms above the barn. And there are 17 total student employees.
The farm has to truck feed in and milk and manure out. Cederquist says trucking everything in and out is not what a commercial farm would do because it’s so costly. She says having cows on campus is cost prohibitive, but the point is to have this caliber of research opportunity happening steps away from classrooms.
World class dairy research takes place on the farm, and it’s seeing support from the Dairy Innovation Hub. Cederquist says she’s looking forward to more faculty and more graduate students that the hub money will bring in. She says new faculty will also bring in money through per diems — that is a charge faculty have to pay for their research to support staff and cow care. The hub will also provide the dairy herd with equipment money each year. She says the hub will do great things for the UW Dairy Cattle Center.
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