A group of graduate research students with the University of Idaho College of Agricultural and Life Sciences has a passion for one thing: reproductive dairy sciences.
That passion has spread into the group’s work, with the goal of ultimately making a cow’s life easier.
Part-time graduate student Ashalynn Bilton-Smith has a undergraduate bachelor’s degree in pre-veterinary sciences and decided to forego attending veterinary school for a year to work full-time at the UI Dairy Center. Smith and other colleagues have been working on a research project to determine how nutrition and inflammation in cows affects their overall health and reproductive systems.
Department Chair of Animal and Veterinary Sciences Amin Ahmadzadeh said this topic was inspired by research conducted by other universities in places like Missouri, Canada and Japan. When he finalized this idea and talked to Bilton-Smith about it, she said she was ready to get her hands dirty.
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Dairy cows feed on straw at the University of Idaho Dairy Center Tuesday afternoon.
“I thought it was a good idea. It wasn’t some kind of funny-duddy graduate project. It was actually something with some substantial depth and something I could really sink my teeth into,” Bilton-Smith said.
Research has been taking place since October 2016, and researchers plan to finish sometime later this year because of the complicated process.
Bilton-Smith said before any action can take place, a standard protocol needs to be created, detailing what the project is and what researchers plan to do to the animals. The protocol, once completed, needs to then be approved by the Institutional Care Committee.
“You have to justify what you’re taking (from the animal) and you have to stick to that,” Bilton-Smith said.
Once the protocol is approved, the researchers are ready to go to the UI Dairy Center to collect data. The process includes taking blood from the cows that recently calved and taking ultrasounds of the animal’s ovaries to find out when they ovulate.
“At the end we look at the ovaries and the different follicles. We are looking at these moments of ovulation, when it happens, where it happens,” Bilton-Smith said.
Some beautiful things happen in the process as well, and Bilton-Smith said she smiles when she thinks about the best part of the process.
“My favorite part is seeing these beautiful structures, and the cows are getting back on the horse so to speak,” she said.
Bilton-Smith said any type of project results can help farmers decide which cows should be artificially inseminated, saving producers money.
“If they’re too skinny, we just know by biology that when you don’t have enough fat, you’re not going to be reproductively successful,” she said. “Being able to tell based off a simple blood sample whether or not we should breed this cow would actually save producers a lot of money.”
Even though Bilton-Smith is leading the project, it’s still a group effort. Graduate student Jennifer Spencer and Ahmadzadeh go to the UI Dairy Center any time they are available to help Bilton-Smith with research tasks.
They aren’t the only ones helping with the research. Ahmadzadeh and Spencer said full-time employees, scientists and undergraduates have a chance to get involved.
“A lot of the research studies we have, we will sometimes ask undergraduate students to help us. Some students will have work study where they can be paid for that, some faculty have grants that they pay students. A lot of students that I’ve dealt with, they just want to volunteer, because when you get into vet school it looks great on an application to deal with large animals,” Spencer said.
Having this experience on an application is important, but Ahmadzadeh agreed with Spencer and encourages students to get involved in research for the career benefits.
“Essentially, if you want to go into the field and become a part of the industry these days, you have to know how the research takes place or how to do research,” Ahmadzadeh said.
The research project helps farmers save money and gets students involved in the field.
“I just want good research to be out in the world and to be as accurate as we can fathom. Information to help not just farmers, not just producers, but for researchers and other people writing essays in college about inflammation and reproduction,” Smith said.
Lindsay Trombly can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @lindsay_trombly