Background (paraphrased narrative from the herd owners): "We started milking in 1982 after purchasing cows to start our herd. At the beginning our herd average was 12,000 lb. In 1987 we remodeled the barn by putting in comfort stalls, a pipeline milking system, and faced the cows to the center of the barn. Milk production then was up to 17,000 lb. We had some trouble with the small pipeline tha...

The barn owl naturally responds to an auditory or visual stimulus in its environment with a quick head turn toward the source. We measured these head saccades evoked by auditory, visual, and simultaneous, co-localized audiovisual stimuli to quantify multisensory interactions in the barn owl. Stimulus levels ranged from near to well above saccadic threshold. In accordance with previous human psy...

Executive Summary A three year research project was funded by the Minnesota Pork Producers Association to address the problems of odors, noxious gases and greenhouse gases produced in the popular deep pit curtain sided building. Several technologies were evaluated in pilot scale testing or laboratory testing while others were installed and monitored long term on full scale production facilities...

Inhalation of agricultural occupational dusts from swine confinement facilities can result in lung inflammation. The innate immune response to organic barn dusts results in production of a number of pro-inflammatory factors in the lungs of barn workers such as cytokines, chemokines, and an influx of neutrophils. Many of these inflammatory factors are influenced by the chemokine CXCL8/IL-8 (KC o...

Barn owls are nocturnal predators that rely on both vision and hearing for survival. The optic tectum of barn owls, a midbrain structure involved in selective attention, has been used as a model for studying visual-auditory integration at the neuronal level. However, behavioral data on visual-auditory integration in barn owls are lacking. The goal of this study was to examine if the integration...

The objective of this study was to evaluate temperature/humidity conditions in freestall barns with different types of gravity ventilation and to determine the risk of heat stress in cows based on the temperature-humidity index. The study was carried out during summer months (June/July) in two free-stall barns located in north-eastern Poland. The buildings for the study were selected based on t...