A University of Guelph study has found that reducing cow milking frequency can help treat ketosis, a common metabolic disorder that occurs within two weeks of delivering a calf.
This research was funded by the Ontario Agri-Food Innovation Alliance, a collaboration between the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs and the University of Guelph.
Dr. Todd Duffield, chair of the Department of Population Medicine at U of G, has spent 20 years researching how to manage pain in young dairy calves, thanks in part to long-term funding from the Ontario Agri-Food Innovation Alliance (Alliance), a collaboration between the Ontario government and the University of Guelph. Much of his work has focused on the practice of disbudding, or the removal of horn buds on young calves.
The professor in the Department of Food, Agricultural and Resource Economics within the Ontario Agricultural College brings together economics and human behaviour through projects ranging from farmer incentive programs to agri-food employee retention to vertical farming, Li said her work helps improve decision making by governments, non-governmental organizations and producer groups.
The study began in fall 2020 and was followed by a larger-scale project in 2021, funded in part by the Ontario Agri-Food Innovation Alliance, that collected nearly 30,000 survey responses from residents in Bruce, Dufferin, Durham, Elgin, Grey, Middlesex and Oxford counties.
The goal of this research is to inform post-COVID rural policy.
Research at the Ontario Dairy Research Centre suggests cows with a naturally higher immune response also have a higher tolerance for increased temperatures, meaning that this research may allow dairy producers to breed cattle that better withstand heat stress. The researchers used Mallard’s High Immune Response (HIR™) technology to determine which cows had high, average or low immune responses.
After being tested, cameras that cost about $900 less than those currently used will be installed on each of the 18 lysimeters at the Ontario Crops Research Centre in Elora.
Read the Farmtario article Annual forages can extend the grazing season about the research Dr. Kim Schneider, department of plant agriculture, is undertaking at the Ontario Beef Research Centre in Elora.
In this research funded in part by the Alliance, Dr. Wanhong Yang, Department of Geography, Environment and Geomatics at the University of Guelph, created a GIS modelling tool that addresses the complexity of a typical watershed evaluation for beneficial management practices (BMPs), along with a user-friendly system developed for creating BMP scenarios and evaluating their effects and outcomes.
New University of Guelph research has been shown to improve existing surveillance measures for preventing Salmonella outbreaks.
In 2020, U of G researchers conducted a study to find out if and how the province's Guidelines on Permitted Uses in Ontario’s Prime Agricultural Areas publication was being implemented.