The Moos Room™

In this short solo episode of The Moos Room, Emily takes the mic to talk about managing holiday stress through setting healthy boundaries. With the holidays approaching, Emily shares practical guidance on navigating family dynamics, uncomfortable conversations, and competing demands on time and energy.

She outlines three simple steps for setting boundaries—being clear and direct, stating what you need, and accepting any dis...

In this episode of The Moos Room, Brad dives into a landmark new study examining the effects of short- and long-distance transport on the health, survival, and growth of pre-weaned dairy and dairy–beef crossbred calves. Drawing on data from nearly 392,000 calves across multiple farms and transport durations (ranging from 30 minutes to 24 hours), the study challenges common assumptions about calf transport. Surprisingly, mo...

In this episode, Brad and Emily welcome a special guest: Dr. Angie Varnum, the University of Minnesota Extension’s new livestock veterinarian. After some banter about Minnesota winters—and a classic round of The Moos Room’s “super-secret” cattle breed questions—the crew dives into Angie’s unique path to Extension.

Angie shares how she went from growing up in suburban Maple Grove to studying Spanish education, teaching in sc...

In this solo episode of The Moos Room, Brad dives into a deep, honest look at production challenges in the University of Minnesota dairy herd and the nutrition and management factors that may be holding cows back. After noticing low udder fill during classification and reviewing herd data, Brad confirms a troubling trend: cows across all lactations are producing 20–30% less milk than predicted. Early-lactation health issue...

Brad and Emily reunite on the podcast to dive into an essential—and timely—topic: farmer mental health. With fall wrapping up and winter on the horizon, stressors on the farm shift and often intensify. Emily shares updates on her recent travels and outreach work in farm safety, health, and wellness, highlighting the seasonal rise in mental health–related concerns across rural communities.

Together, Brad and Emily walk throu...

Brad recaps a fall road trip with the Minnesota dairy extension team to South Dakota’s rapidly growing I-29 dairy corridor, highlighting what innovative farms are doing to boost efficiency, cow health, and profitability. Along the way, they tour the Bel Brands plant in Brookings, where milk from about 10,000 cows a day is turned into those familiar Babybel snack cheeses, and hear how the plant’s demand for high-protein mil...

Brad recaps his trip to dairy farms in the Netherlands and Germany, where robotics, crossbreeding, and creative manure and energy management are everywhere — even on small farms. He visited farms using Lely robots, grass/rye silage-based diets, and small-scale digesters that capture manure methane. Crossbreeding (Holstein × Montbéliarde × Viking Red) is common, driven by goals of longevity, health, and reducing inbreeding.

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In this episode, Brad is back from Europe—jetlagged but full of insights from farms and conferences in Germany and the Netherlands. He dives into one of the biggest topics he heard about abroad and at home: Inbreeding in dairy cattle.

Brad explains how inbreeding occurs, what it costs farmers economically, and how inbreeding levels have climbed across all major dairy breeds—especially Holsteins and Jerseys. Drawing on recen...

Brad kicks off a solo episode (recorded before a trip to Germany) and turns the mic to rangeland scientist Anna Clare for a deep dive into “the solar savanna”—treating solar arrays on grasslands as functioning grazing ecosystems. She shares early results from Silicon Ranch’s Cattle Tracker research on integrating cattle (not just sheep) with PV systems. Brad follows with University of Minnesota’s on-farm demos: panel heigh...

Emily is back from medical leave (hooray!) and she and Brad dig into an essential topic for every operation: emergency planning. You can’t predict every detail, but you can make the first decisions easier when seconds count.

What we cover:

• What an emergency plan is (and isn’t): a concise, written set of steps and key info you can default to under pressure.
• Start with a farm map: access routes, gates/fences, livestock loca...

In this episode, Brad shares his fall updates from western Minnesota before diving into a detailed discussion on genomic testing in dairy herds. Drawing on his experiences from recent farm visits in South Dakota and ongoing University of Minnesota research projects, he explores how producers are using genomics and whether the investment pays off.

Brad explains that while some herds use genomic testing solely to decide which...

Host Brad Heins welcomes Becca Weir, a Minnesota native and newly appointed assistant professor of agricultural economics at Penn State. Growing up on a dairy farm near Sauk Centre, Rebecca developed a passion for applying economics to dairy management decisions.

In this episode, she shares findings from her University of Minnesota research with Jolene Hadrich, which connected genetic selection (sire Net Merit) with farm-le...

In this episode, Brad shares his firsthand experience with virtual fencing on the University of Minnesota’s Morris dairy herd. After a long grazing season, he dives into the reasons he began experimenting with NoFence collars, the training process for heifers, and what he learned about costs, labor savings, and animal behavior.

Brad walks listeners through the setup, the challenges of training, and the variation he saw amon...

Today, Brad brings on University of Minnesota Extension colleague Jim Salfer to talk through the state of dairy automation. Robots are still going in across the Upper Midwest, but they’re also coming out—and the “why” depends on farm goals, labor, barn design, and cash flow.

Highlights

• Adoption reality: Robots are spreading, yet many farms are re-evaluating fit. Large herds often lean toward automated rotaries (pre- and ...

This week on The Moos Room, Brad shares updates from the University of Minnesota’s dairy research center, where staff have been on strike and he’s been back in the barn doing chores, milking, feeding, and even pulling calves late at night. With calving season underway, Brad shifts the focus to a new review article on weaning practices in young ruminants, authored by Heather Nave at Purdue University.

The discussion explores...

In this episode, Brad dives into the growing interest in milk fatty acid profiles and what they can tell us about cow health, nutrition, and management.

Brad explains the three main groups of milk fatty acids—de novo, mixed, and preformed—and how they are shaped by diet, stage of lactation, seasonality, and even genetics. He highlights how monitoring these fatty acid trends through routine milk testing can help farmers fine...

In this Labor Day episode, Brad highlights the history of the holiday in the U.S. and Canada before diving into a brand-new genetic evaluation for Holstein dairy cattle: milking speed. Released in August 2025, this trait provides an objective way to measure how quickly cows milk—expressed in pounds of milk per minute—with the Holstein breed average set at 7 lbs/min.

Brad explains how this evaluation was developed using parl...

In this episode of The Moos Room, Brad shares updates from a busy summer and fall kickoff at the Minnesota State Fair, where his kids showed cows and he helped with 4-H dairy programming. After reflecting on the fair, he dives into the latest research and extension projects happening at the University of Minnesota’s West Central Research and Outreach Center in Morris.

Brad covers a wide range of studies, including:

• Virtu...

In this episode of The Moos Room, Brad shares updates on the University of Minnesota’s ongoing work with bovine leukosis virus (BLV), a retrovirus that weakens the immune system, reduces production, and costs dairy farmers hundreds of dollars per cow each year.

Brad walks through the latest herd testing results, where prevalence has held steady at around 30%, but with new infections continuing to appear—especially in older ...