Inside Farming: OAC Students Rise to the Challenge

The Dairy Challenge that is

The dairy industry is not something that many people give much thought to unless it is a main part of their life. However, for students at the Ontario Agriculture College, the dairy industry is huge. Farms are like any business, they need to be efficiently run and financially stable. But what happens when you have room for improvement? How do you find these small changes that can increase efficiency and productivity? One course at the University of Guelph offers the opportunity to find small changes that can be made.
Opportunities and Challenges in Animal Production, or “the dairy challenge course” as it’s known in the OAC, is run in the fall semester every year by Dr. John Walton and is a course designed for students who are going to be future leaders in the dairy industry. Students are split into groups and taken to four farms over the course of the semester. At each farm they have an hour to walk around the facility to find issues that the farms are facing. The students then have 15 minutes to ask the producer questions before heading back to the school. Then the hard part begins. Each group has five hours to put together a detailed presentation on what they found wrong with the farm, the solutions to these problems, and how the solutions are going to increase profits, efficiency, and milk production. Five hours may sound like a lot of time, but when you are putting the presentation together and finding monetary values for each of your problems and solutions, it flies by very quickly. The teams then get together the following morning to present their findings to a panel of judges and answer questions about the changes they are proposing. Costs and benefits are analyzed along with problems such as calf housing and feed spoilage. Each group has different ideas on how to fix the problems.
This course allows students to critically analyze operations, which are skills they can then apply to in future jobs or on their own operations. Although this course teaches students many valuable lessons, it has a bit of a (not so) hidden agenda. The top four students from the course get to represent the University of Guelph at the prestigious North American Intercollegiate Dairy Challenge.
This is the time for students to show off their knowledge and show North America that Guelph knows what it is doing when it comes to the dairy industry. This year on April 3 Alan Nanne, Peter Spruit, Hans Van lith and John Wynands traveled to Fort Wayne, Indiana to participate in the competition. They looked over data, toured the farm and presented their findings to a panel of industry leaders from across the United States. In fact, the boys from Guelph did such an excellent job that they took top honours at the competition and won. This is quiet the accomplishment as there were 32 schools represented at the competition including Perdue, Cornell, California Polytechnic and Iowa State. This also marks the fourth time in nine years that Guelph has won, establishing it as a strong school when it comes to knowledge of the dairy industry.