For Wednesday, June 7, 2023
Hi WN@TL Fans,
As I may have mentioned before, in the ag shop at Dixon High School my ag teacher Al Tieken hung a framed copy of the famous color print from Hoard’s Dairyman of “The Foster Mothers of the Human Race.” In my time in high school, I stared at two pieces of graphic art: this portrait while in Ag classes, and the map of Paris while in French I through IV. The staring paid off: in July 1986 when I first set foot in Paris, I could feel my way around the more famous parts of the town based on the map embedded in my mind. Alas, on the bovine side, I still can’t tell a Jersey from a Guernsey from a Brown Swiss, and I’m pretty sure this is still the only Ayrshire I’ve ever seen.
In the early 1970’s dairying was dwindling rapidly from the landscape in Lee County Illinois. The last dairy farm I can recall was the McKeel’s on US 52 south of town heading to Amboy. Keeping cows took a lot of capital costs in barns, sheds, silos and milking equipment—depreciating assets all. Plus, dairy cows don’t know when it’s Sunday, so there’s no sabbath rest for the dairy farmer.
In the flat Illinois prairie the lay of the financial land was shifting to corn and beans, and to beans and corn. When the cows went, so went the need for alfalfa, and without alfalfa so went the need for winter wheat as a nurse crop, and so went the need for fair-weather pastures for the cows & heifers. Bereft of bovines, we were left with corn and beans.
Happily, the landscape of about 2/3rds of Wisconsin is still shaped and massaged by the needs of dairy cattle. A drive into the Driftless or an expedition along the Niagara Escarpment still yields viewscapes of winter wheat, of fields of alfalfa, of the occasional swath of oats, of soybeans, and of cornfields that could be greenchopped for silage in late summer or combined for grain in October. We still have pastures, and therefore we still cherish the pastoral.
To keep dairy cows and dairy families upon the land as Wisconsin has for the past 150 years, dairy scientists have long helped invent the future by pioneering innovations in agronomy, in animal nutrition, in genetics, and in physiology of reproduction and lactation. This week we get to hear about the synergistic new confluences of lactation biology and data science.
While we don’t know yet where these synergies might lead, it’s astonishing to watch the insights unroll and unfold year by year.
Special Note: To mark June as Dairy Month, I’m happy to announce that the first 50 attendees on June 7 will receive a pop-top dish of vanilla or orange custard chocolate chip from Babcock Dairy Store. I count as an attendee, so we have 49 to go. Come early.
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On June 7 Laura Hernandez, Alysia Vang, and Ariana Negriero of Animal & Dairy Sciences will speak on “How Data Scientists and Lactation Biologists Develop New Ways to Predict Lactation Potential in Mammals.”
Explore More:
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On June 14 Kelley Senecal of Engineering Interdisciplinary Professional Programs will speak on “Beyond the Tailpipe: The Key to Driving Green.”
Description: We are living through a monumental shift in the transportation industry. New regulations and advances in technology are driving us toward an increasingly automated, electrified future. But are we on the right road? Or is there a better way?
Bio: Dr. Kelly Senecal is a co-founder and owner of Convergent Science and one of the original developers of CONVERGE, an industry-leading computational fluid dynamics software. He is a visiting professor at the University of Oxford, an adjunct professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a co-founder and director of the Computational Chemistry Consortium (C3). Dr. Senecal is a Fellow of the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). He is a member of the executive committee of the ASME Internal Combustion Engine Division, a member of the board of advisors for the Central States Section of the Combustion Institute, and the 2019 recipient of the ASME ICE Award.
Dr. Senecal has long been an advocate of creating cleaner propulsion systems, with a particular focus on using CFD and HPC to enable faster design. Starting with his TEDx talk in late 2016, he has promoted a diverse mix of transportation technologies through invited talks, articles, and social media. Dr. Senecal is co-author of the new book Racing Toward Zero: The Untold Story of Driving Green, winner of the 2022 Independent Press Award for Environment.
More to Explore:
https://www.racingtowardzero.com/
On June 21 Grace Stanke, UW-Madison nuclear engineering student and Miss America 2023, will speak at a special Wednesday Nite @ The Lab to be held in conjunction with the Summer Academy of the Positive Youth Development Institute (including Wisconsin 4-H) of UW-Madison’s Division of Extension. She’ll talk about her outlook for nuclear engineering to meet our future energy & environmental needs.
To accommodate the larger crowd, we’ll meet across the street in Room 1125 Biochemistry, 425 Henry Mall.
Accessibility Note: If you come in the front door on Henry Mall, there’s a lot of steps to climb. But if you come in the back door at the southwest corner of the building, that door enters on the ground floor, and you can stroll or roll step-free to the elevator and up to the first floor.