Every year the UW-Platteville ag program gets funding from the dairy hub for research to better dairy farming. UW-Platteville gets about 24% of the $7.8 million given from the dairy hub. Another 24% of this goes to UW-River Falls, and 52% goes to UW-Madison.
Research
Tera Montgomery, the School of Agriculture director at UW-Platteville, was able to give a look into some of the research that they are doing with their share of the dairy hub fund. One of the projects is being done by Dr. Joe Sanford. He is looking at bio tar. This bio tar is being made from manure and will be spread upon multiple test plots. The hope is to be able to look at the mitigation of run-off and limit the amount of leaching of nitrogen.
Another project being done is by the chemistry department. With this project they are looking at priming alfalfa seed. They hope by priming this seed that they will be able to increase drought tolerance and increase the quality and value of alfalfa as a feed source for livestock.
The final project Montgomery mentioned was being done in the mechanical and industrial engineering department. They are working on developing a system that can detect health issues in calves sooner. With this they hope to be able to detect the issues sooner and be able to limit the amount of antibiotics used to treat these animals. The hope is to overall be able to have better health and productivity in the calves.
Fall Enrollment
Montgomery says that they are looking at around 500 to 525 students being enrolled into the ag program for this fall. She also says that at the start, the animal science program is usually the most popular. Then when students see all the different aspects of agriculture some branch out into other areas.
“In the School of Agriculture here at UW-Platteville, we have 7 majors. These include ag business, ag education, animal science, dairy science, ecological restoration and research management, environmental horticulture, and soil and crop science,” explains Montgomery. “We have the last day of student enrollment for classes coming up, and we also have an uptick in transfer students. It is really encouraging to see this increase of enrollment in the program since the pandemic.”
UW-Platteville knows that there are just a few schools in the state that will give students the best experience in learning about agriculture. In order to help draw students in, they like to make sure that the prospective students take a tour of the campus. During this tour they like to have professors talk to the students and the families so that they know they will get the best agriculture education.
