Delayed harvest and subsequent advances in maturity decrease quality as does rain leached hay that has been cut. Both situations result in increased hay fiber content relative to available energy and protein. Quality of first cutting grasses tends to be more affected by advanced maturity. Legume or legume mixed forage may tend to have a greater quality reduction from rain leached windrows.

Ovaries were obtained from growing pigs that had been heat-stressed and were evaluated for alterations in a signaling pathway known to play a critical role in ovarian physiology. Our results indicate that hyperthermia alters this pathway in a short space of time (after 7 days). Identifying how and why heat stress alters ovarian physiology are important in developing therapeutic approaches to prevent the reduction in reproductive performance associated with warm summer months.

The College of Veterinary Medicine at Iowa State University has responded to the shortage of veterinarians in food animal practice by hiring new faculty in the Veterinary Diagnostics and Production Animal Medicine Department as well as expanding its curriculum offerings in large animal species that encompass species electives from freshman through senior year. In the past five years there has been the addition of full and part-time faculty members to address the needs to teach beef, dairy, small ruminant, and swine production medicine ,embryo transfer, and animal welfare.

The objective of this study was to determine the effects of small versus large pens throughout the grow-finish period on growth performance of the pig. This experiment consisted of two replications. One wean to finish site within a large Midwestern commercial production system was used for both replications. The site consisted of four rooms. Within each room, one side of the aisle was set-up with the small pen treatment (SP; n = 96 pens [34 pigs/pen; 0.69 m²/pig]), while the other side was set-up with the large pen treatment (LP; n = 12 pens [272 pigs/pen; 0.69 m²/pig]). Pens were mixed sexed and when the first market group of pigs reached the targeted market weight in both treatments the trial was terminated. Starting and ending weights and average daily gain on a pen basis was recorded and calculated for a total of 6,528 crossbred pigs. Performance was analyzed using the PROC MIXED procedure of SAS. Small penned pigs had a higher ADG (P = 0.004) and overall gain (P = 0.05) than large penned pigs. In conclusion, pigs raised in small pens throughout the grow-finish period had a higher average daily gain and overall gain than pigs housed in large pens throughout the grow-finish period.

Mastitis research has shown that 40-50% of intramammary infections (IMI) are contracted during the dry or non-lactating period with the greatest percentages of these occurring during the first and last two weeks of the dry period. The ability to develop and apply external persistent barrier teat dip products (like a liquid bandage) that can persist for these 1 week periods could decrease IMI, thus improving animal health and performance, and product quality and safety. The specific aim of this study was to evaluate teat dip characteristics (teat health and adherence times) of novel prototype dry cow barrier teat dip products compared to a commercial product. Dipping with the new prototype dry cow persistent barrier teat dips compared to a commercial dip resulted in similar excellent teat end and skin health. Initially, many of the prototypes has shortened persistency on teats compared to the commercial product but results from later trials showed some prototype products to have equal persistency to the commercial product.