The Wisconsin Agricultural and Life Sciences Alumni Association will celebrate its 25th Anniversary April 4-5 on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus. A variety of events will give CALS alumni and other friends of the college a chance to return to campus and reconnect with faculty, staff and students.

Four people were honored recently for applying the “Wisconsin Idea” to natural resource policy development and implementation. Anthony Earl, partner in the Quarles & Brady Law Firm in Madison; Alan Haney, dean, College of Natural Resources, University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point; Nicholas Neher, administrator of the Agricultural Resource Management Division at the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection; and Caryl Terrell, legislative liaison for the Sierra Club received the Wisconsin Idea Award in Natural Resource Policy at a banquet on March 4 at Memorial Union on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus.

Common knowledge doesn’t always square with the facts. Case in point: spotted owls and logging jobs in the Pacific Northwest.

Pasture stocking density ranged from three cows per acre in spring to .5 cows per acre in mid-September during a year with normal rainfall in south-central Wisconsin. Scientists at the U.S. Dairy Forage Research Center and UW-Madison’s College of Agricultural and Life Sciences studied mixed-species pastures, dominated by cool-season grasses.

Robert D. Steele, associate dean for research and executive director of the Wisconsin Agricultural Experiment Station at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, has been named Dean of the College of Agricultural Sciences at Penn State University. Steele will begin his duties at Penn State July 1.

The UW-Madison Farm and Industry Short Course dairy cattle judging team took first place in the last judging team competition of the season at the Southwest Exposition and Livestock Show. The team, all short-course students in the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences with a strong interest in dairy science, placed first in Holsteins, second in Jerseys and Guernseys, and third in Brown Swiss and Reasons. There was a large spread of 17 points between UW-Madison and second-place Kansas State.

With Valentine’s Day approaching and winter sluggishness sinking in, nothing may sound better than a big box of chocolates. Researchers at UW-Madison’s College of Agricultural and Life Sciences are discovering new ways of using milkfat to make those chocolates keep better.

Wisconsin dairy farmers may soon have to find a replacement for meat and bone meal in their rations. A proposal by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration would ban most meat and bone meal from ruminant diets. Ruminant-derived meat and bone meal in cattle diets is blamed for the outbreak of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, or “mad cow disease”) in Great Britain. The FDA has not set a date for implementation of the ban.

The use of pastures on Wisconsin dairy farms has increased dramatically in recent years. Based on a series of statewide surveys, UW-Madison researchers estimate that almost half of the dairy farms in Wisconsin now use pastures to some degree, and the number of farms using management-intensive rotational grazing practices (in which cows get most of their forages from pastures during the grazing season) has doubled in recent years.

Kura clover may be a solution for Wisconsin farmers who need a persistent forage legume in pastures, research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has shown.