Lameness of dairy cattle is an economic and welfare issue. It is the third most important health related economic loss facing the dairy industry, following fertility and mastitis. Most economic loss due to lameness results from costs of premature culling, veterinary treatment, increased labor, discarded milk, prolonged calving interval, and reduced milk production (Kossaibati and Esslemont, 199...

The future value of an individual dairy cow depends greatly on its projected milk yield. In developed countries with developed dairy industry infrastructures, facilities exist to record individual cow production and reproduction outcomes consistently and accurately. Accurate prediction of the future value of a dairy cow requires further detailed knowledge of the costs associated with feed, mana...

In dairy production systems, tradeoffs can occur between fertilizer N applications and crop N use, feed N consumption and manure N excretion, and environmental impacts. This paper examines (i) how stocking rates affect N imports and management on dairy farms, N use efficiency (NUE; i.e., the amount of applied N incorporated into product N), and N loss; (ii) how reductions in fertilizer N and fe...

The application of optimal methods for production scheduling in the dairy industry has been limited. Within supply chain terminology, dairy production was generally considered a push process but with advancements in automation, the industry is slowly transforming to a pull process. In this paper, the authors present triplet notation applied to the production scheduling of a single production li...

An important branch of the modern global economy is food production. Our focus is milk production on dairy farms, the period in which cows produce milk (lactation) and the quantity of milk produced. Special attention will be given to the time-dependent function that describes the quantity of the milk produced over a lactation period. The respective graph is known as the lactation curve and is o...

A growing concern of the dairy industry is to increase dairy cattle wellbeing in anticipation of a demand from the general public of welfare-certified dairy products. Lameness is one of the most important welfare issues of high producing dairy cows in North America (Vermunt, 2007). It is a debilitating condition that challenges sustainability of production systems used in North America because ...

in pasture-based milk production systems, using available farm resources in order to reduce feeding costs, the composition and functional properties of dairy cows’ milk are of considerable importance to the dairy farmer, manufacturer and consumer. basically, there are three options for altering the composition and/or functional properties of milk: 1) cow nutrition and grazing management, 2) cow...

Increasing feed costs and the desire to improve environmental stewardship have stimulated renewed interest in improving feed efficiency of livestock, including that of US dairy herds. For instance, USDA cost projections for corn and soybean meal suggest a 20% increase over 2010 pricing for a 16% protein mixed dairy cow ration in 2011, which may lead to a reduction in cow numbers to maintain pro...