Jersey Breeders to Visit UConn Dairy During AJCA-NAJ Annual Meetings

The University of Connecticut, Storrs, Conn., will be a tour stop during the annual meetings of the national Jersey organizations on Thursday, June 20, 2024.

Men’s basketball may be what comes to mind when you think of the University of Connecticut (UConn). After all, the UConn Huskies just earned a back-to-back national championship in the NCAA tournament and won four other national titles in the past 25 years. But the land-grant university in Storrs is also home to a herd of Registered Jerseys and Holsteins and a creamery that creates award-winning cheese and ice cream from its milk.

Strolling campus alongside the star athletes are more than 2,200 undergraduate students enrolled in the College of Agriculture Health and Natural Resources and 500-plus graduate students pursuing advanced degrees. All teaching and animal facilities are within walking distance of campus.

The university was established in 1881 as The Storrs Agricultural School with a donation of 170 acres, several barns, 800 books and $6,000 from brothers Charles and Agustus Storrs.

The dairy herd was initially housed in a quintessential hip-roof barn with twin brick red silos built in 1911. The structure known as the “yellow dairy barn” is now used for storage. Its replacement, the Kellogg Dairy Center, was built in 1991 atop Horsebarn Hill, funded by a bequest from Frances Osborne Kellogg, a woman industrialist, dairy farmer and conservationist from Derby, Conn.

The Kellogg Dairy Center is a freestall facility that accommodates 30 Jersey and 60 Holstein cows. A robotic milking and feeding system was installed in 2018, with cows milked by a pair of DeLaval VMS (Voluntary Milking Systems) Classics. Stalls are fitted with mattresses and groomed three times a day. The facility includes a classroom, laboratory, surgical unit and recovery room and an observation area where the public can watch cows being milked. An area equipped with tie-stalls and box stalls is available to handle cattle as well.

Young calves are housed in hutches until they are weaned. They are then moved down the road to the Cattle Resources Unit, a greenhouse-type building constructed in 1999, where they are first raised on a bedded pack and then transitioned to pens with freestalls.

The Jersey herd is enrolled on REAP and has a 2023 lactation average of 20,243 lbs. milk, 1,017 lbs. fat and 788 lbs. protein. With the last appraisal in February, the herd includes six Excellent and 22 Very Good cows and has an average final score of 83.5%. The Holstein herd has received the Progressive Breeder Award from Holstein Association USA for the past 18 years.

The farm grows 155 acres of brown midrib corn for silage and sets aside another 300 acres for grass and pasture. The milking cow’s total mixed ration is corn silage, haylage, second-cutting dry grass hay, corn meal and a lactating grain mix. Heifers are fed a ration of 75% haylage and 25% corn silage supplemented with a high protein (22%) calf starter pellet. Calves are fed three times a day with milk replacer and calf starter made by the Bovine Innovations Group.

The university began bottling milk at the Creamery in the George White Building, home of the animal science department, in the early 1900s. The UConn Dairy Bar, located about 700 yards from the Creamery, was opened in 1953 to sell dairy products to the public. Today about 25% of the milk produced by the resident dairy herd “up the hill” is used to make cheese and ice cream and the balance is sold to Agri-Mark. The Dairy Bar has been listed among the best New England ice cream shops by Yankee Magazine, the 10 best ice cream places in Connecticut by the Hartford Courant and earned rave reviews from the Boston Globe, Connecticut Insider and the Connecticut Post. A popular attraction, it has served the likes of President Joe Biden, who paid a visit in 2021.

In addition to the dairy herd, UConn manages a flock of 550 white leghorn chickens, 50 registered Angus and Hereford cows, 100 Dorset, Southdown and Shropshire brood ewes and 70 horses, including several prize-winning Morgans that are direct descendants of U.S. Cavalry horses.

The livestock at UConn are cared for by a dozen full-time staff members and about 60 animal science students. Mary Margaret Smith, executive program director, manages dairy, poultry, livestock and crops. Mary Kegler, educational program administrator, manages the university’s compost facility and provides supervision and guidance on Smith’s days off. The rest of the cross-trained staff team includes Tyler Bentley, Paul Bleimeyer, James Cititello, James Dunn, Michael Emerson, Aubrey Grabber, Bedford Lawrence, Lisa Nowak, Michael Watson and John Paul Williamson. Bill Sciturro manages the creamery.

The dairy herd and creamery are used for teaching, research, extension and public outreach. Among others, research projects aim to predict animal performance for complex traits like heat stress, behavior and disease resistance using genomic information; manage beef x dairy crossbred calves for improved growth; enhance the productivity, efficiency and environmental sustainability of ruminant production systems; and identify and optimize natural and novel means of controlling foodborne pathogens and spoilage microbes in milk and cheese.

The Kellogg Dairy Center has received milk quality awards from Agri-Mark 10 of the past 12 years, was named a Gold Winner in the National Dairy Quality Awards program in 2013 and was honored with the New England Green Pastures award in 2023.

The UConn Dairy Club was established in 1948. The club’s major event is the annual spring dairy show and banquet in April. Any UConn student is eligible to exhibit a heifer in the show. Each year, members also bring cattle to the Big E in Springfield, Mass., as consumer outreach and travel to Toronto for the Royal Agricultural Winter Fair. They sponsor dairy-related clinics regularly and design a new UConn Dairy Club collectible milk bottle each year. In 2021, a team from UConn also competed in dairy judging contests at World Dairy Expo and the Pennsylvania All-American Dairy Show for the first time in nearly three decades.

Background feature photo © Michelle Lewis/UConn Animal Science.