What Grass-fed Means to Milk: Dutch Scientist to Speak at OSU This Monday (10/25)

COLUMBUS, Ohio — How does a cow’s diet affect the milk you drink? Anjo Elgersma, associate professor of grassland science, Wageningen University, the Netherlands, will discuss “The Effects of Pasture Dairying on Milk Quality” at 11 a.m. Monday (10/25) in 244 Kottman Hall at Ohio State University, Columbus. The talk is free and open to the public but seating is limited.

Recent studies by Elgersma and her colleagues have shown that cows that graze outdoors in pastures, compared to ones that are kept and fed indoors, produce better-quality milk that might also be better for people’s health.

Ohio State’s Department of Horticulture and Crop Science and the Ohio Forage and Grasslands Council (OFGC) are the seminar’s sponsors.

For more information, contact Mark Sulc at 614-292-9084 or sulc.2@osu.edu.

The presentation also can be viewed by video downlink in 121 Fisher Auditorium at the university’s Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center (OARDC), 1680 Madison Ave., Wooster. The rest of the center’s main campus remains closed to the public following a tornado strike last month.

The next day (10/26), Elgersma will present “How Farmers and Forage Affect Dairy Product Quality” at Dairy Grazing Day, 11 a.m.-3 p.m. at Pleasantview Farm, 20361 Florence Chapel Pike (County Road 6), near Circleville. Elgersma's talk is at 1:30 p.m. Signing up in advance is required; contact Sulc to do so. Ohio State University Extension and OFGC are the sponsors.

A member of Wageningen’s Plant Sciences Group since 1991, Elgersma is visiting the United States to attend the joint international annual meetings of the American Society of Agronomy, Crop Science Society of America and Soil Science Society of America in Long Beach, Calif., Oct. 31-Nov. 3, where she’ll present “Pasture Dairying: Impacts On Milk Quality.” Details on her talk are at http://a-c-s.confex.com/crops/2010am/webprogram/Paper57523.html.

OARDC, OSU Extension, and the Department of Horticulture and Crop Science are part of Ohio State’s College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences.

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