Those who say our agriculture department doesn’t hold a candle to UW-Madison’s obviously have not met our students, faculty and staff. After being here for five years and completing my degree in animal science, I’d like to tell them what exactly their up against.

With the technology of the swine center and the dairy facility, it is hard to say that Pioneer Farm is just a little country school farm. The high rise facility with a composting pit underneath was the first of its kind in the state. The dairy facility offered a new form of milking with the robotic milker where trained cows can be milked by themselves. The beef facility offers an unbiased testing facility where bulls are housed from all over the United States for 100 days and monitored for their performance.

More recently, Annie Kinwa-Muzinga, an agribusiness associate professor, received the Outstanding Woman of Color award for her dedication to her students and her strive to get students to realize the diverse culture in our country. As a former student of Kinwa-Muzinga’s Intro to Agribusiness course, I will attest to her drive to help students in any way she can. It really shows that she takes pride in teaching.

Now the coolest thing is the UW-Platteville student that is working on finding a cure for Johne’s disease. It is a disease that kills thousands of cattle a year and devastates farmers. Not only is it of concern from an economic standpoint, but from a moral standpoint too. Cattle and other ruminates waste away just like Chronic Wasting Disese in deer, even though they eat regularly. Brooke Schmitz, a sophomore animal science major, is working on discovering a cure. She is working on creating Johne’s resistant embryos. Unfertilized eggs from the ovaries of slaughtered cows will be fertilized with semen to form an embryo. The embryo is then given the Johne’s vaccine. Back at her home she will inseminate the embryo into the cow to carry to term. Once the calf is born, it will be exposed to Johne’s in hopes it will not contract the disease.

Schmitz plans to publish her studies in journals and make the embryos available to farmers. The cycle of Johne’s disease will be controlled and the spread of the disease will be stopped. Farmers will easily be able to rid their herd of Johne’s disease.

Even companies know how the success of UW-P’s agriculture program affects students and future employees. Hartung Brothers, an agribusiness company from Arena, is donating $25,000 dollars to fund five $1,000 scholarships to incoming freshman.

As a graduating senior, I expect UW-P to see a lot more growth and many more improvements to the agriculture industry because southwest Wisconsin has one of the highest concentrations of cows, and after all, Wisconsin is America’s Dairyland.