Dairy Innovation Hub
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Dairy Innovation Hub
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The UW Dairy Innovation Hub is celebrating six years of bridging the gap between academic research and the milking parlor. With over 260 projects funded across three campuses — River Falls, Platteville, and Madison — the initiative is proving that dairy innovation is about much more than just milk production.
The Hub’s work spans a diverse spectrum, including a “Mooving Cows” video game for worker training and a patent from UW-Platteville that transforms cheese whey into biodegradable 3D-printing filament.
While some projects find immediate use on the farm, others focus on long-term human health, investigating how dairy ingredients might treat chronic diseases like diabetes and dementia.
Despite the pressure for quick results in a challenging economy, Maria Woldt, the Hub’s program manager and a dairy farmer herself, emphasizes that high-impact science requires patience.
“Research is more of a marathon versus a sprint,” Woldt tells Mid-West Farm Report. “And so it definitely takes time to see kind of the fruits of the labor come together.”
Beyond the lab, the Hub is heavily invested in workforce development, having trained 310 students in the last fiscal year alone. For Woldt, this investment is the only way to ensure the industry remains competitive.
“If we aren’t innovating, the industry is gonna be stagnant,” she says. “The work that we’re doing is really a bright spot.”
