By Caitlin Hayes
Fifteen miles southeast of Cornell’s Ithaca campus, in a sprawling valley surrounded by wooded hills, a Cornell-operated, commercial-scale dairy farm resembles many across New York state. Adjacent to manure and feed storage, two large, red barns house 570 milking cows, all of it encircled by crop fields.
But look closely, and you can see that the Cornell University Ruminant Center (CURC) isn’t a standard dairy farm – that on top of the work of managing the farm, a vast number of questions are being asked and answered. Cameras and sensors are affixed to the barns’ rafters. Cows wear collars adorned with sensors. A long line of feeding bins are labeled with project numbers. There’s evidence that researchers are studying every piece of the dairy farm system, from cows’ diet and reproduction to manure management to growing the crops that feed the cows.
Cornell faculty, staff and industry partners say CURC, in the township of Harford, New York, is a one-of-a-kind testbed for new technologies and strategies that, since its construction in 2013, has been crucial to helping New York state dairy farmers improve processes, profits and environmental stewardship.