Learning in this New Era By Jenny Hanson, Communications Manager, GENEX
Since 1995, you’ve routinely received the Dairy Horizons magazine in your mailbox. The magazine has been a valuable source of cooperative membership news, sire information and herd management strategies for the past two and a half decades.
Times are Changing, and GENEX is too. Cooperatives – and businesses of any type – adapt and change over time. Technology, economics, member and customer needs, new research and more lead to changes and advancements. While change is often difficult, there’s also a lot to be gained. And so, this is the last printed issue of Horizons to grace your mailbox. This change, however, is a sign of progress as there are new and exciting ways for you to learn, improve your herd management skills and stay up to date on your co-op.
Cars and Cows In that very first issue of Horizons was an article by Dr. Robert Bower. His points from 1995 are perhaps more applicable today than they were then. Here’s how the story went: “I bought my first car in the mid-50s. The car, a 1931 Ford Model A coupe, was older than I was, but it ran and was cheap. Driving with the wind, it would go over 50 miles per hour, although you’d be reluctant to go too
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fast as its mechanical brakes had only a small influence in slowing you down. There was no fuel pump; the gas was delivered to the four-cylinder engine by gravity.
result, today’s cows require more sophisticated management to realize their performance potential. We cannot expect to get it done with ‘screwdriver and pliers’ skills.
Maintenance was a poor man’s dream. A screwdriver, pliers and crescent wrench were the only tools needed for common repairs. I remember resolving a carburetor problem by replacing the old one with a rebuilt one bought from Montgomery Ward for $3.75.
There are two ways you can develop your management skills to optimize performance of your high potential cows. They are to 1) never stop learning and 2) rely on specialists.”
Contrast that old Model A with a contemporary automobile, such as the Ford Taurus SHO. The SHO will go twice as fast as you can legally drive anywhere in North America, has electronic fuel injection, antilock brakes, climate control and other engineering marvels not even dreamed about when the Model A was built. While even a child could identify both the Model A and the SHO as ‘cars,’ no one with even modest experience would fail to recognize the functional differences. The dairy cow has undergone similar changes over the decades. We can easily identify cows of past years as cows but also need to recognize the dairy cow of today is quite a different beast. The productive capability of dairy cows today is significantly higher. As a
Never Stop Learning Cars have changed, cows have changed and where you get your information is changing. You’ve increased your knowledge and skills while reading the printed Horizons magazine for decades. In the decades to come, GENEX will provide you with new ways to learn. After all, education, training and information are among the core principles and practices of a cooperative business. One new educational opportunity is through dairylearning.com, the progressive dairy knowledge hub featured on the back cover of this Horizons. Through this hub, you and your employees can enroll in online courses about reproduction, understanding dairy proofs, newborn calves and colostrum, DairyComp and more. Courses are also available in Spanish at spanish.dairylearning.com.
