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Welcome to Cultivating Curiosity, where we get down and dirty with the experts on all the ways science and agriculture touch our lives from what we eat to how we live. I'm Emily Davenport.
And I'm Jordan Powers. And we're from the University of Georgia's College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences.
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We're here today with Jillian Bohlen, associate professor in the Department of Animal and Dairy Science. Thanks for joining us today, and can you kick off by telling us a bit about your background?
Sure. So actually grew up not far from here in Oconee. County, Georgia, so I didn't have to travel far from education either undergraduate or graduate. I got involved in 4-H programs as a youth and I started off with market lambs, realized that that wasn't maybe my forte, if you will, and ended up with dairy heifers. Long story short, I had a friend that had a dairy farm, I ended up getting off the school bus there every single day, just to play with the cows, started showing dairy heifers in
4-H and set sail from there. So I came here for my undergraduate and master's, PhD at Clemson and taught there and now I'm back at Georgia since 2013.
Love it, came back home.
Yes.
That's awesome.
One of the reasons I did come back home is to give back to the program that I'm a direct product of. So, Commercial Dairy Heifer Project here in the state is where I got my start in the dairy industry, and what grew my passion for dairy cattle. And so when the opportunity came up to come back and work in that program is one I couldn't pass up.
That's incredible. What an awesome thing for some of the young people maybe coming up through the program to hear about that opportunity to then continue to give back.
Yeah, that's really great. And that 4-H kind of kicked all that off. I love that.
Yes, I had an incredible 4-H agent. And I think 4-H agents are so impactful to youth in the state, and his ability to engage me with his lively personality as well as knowledge and all things. He was Mr. Henry Hibbs. And he ignited my passion in agriculture. My family had grown up doing horses, but really hadn't done anything in the food animal sector. So he's the one that really lit that fire.
That's awesome. I grew up with horse 4-H as well.
Yeah?
Not in the South, though.
Yes! I did horses for a couple of years, but that group is highly competitive.
It is.
And not that I was afraid of competition, but I've always been one to do stuff a little bit different. So I went with some areas where there are fewer people, but I thought similar experiences and new opportunities.
Can you tell us about what you're working on now and how it impacts the field of Animal and Dairy Science?
So I guess I'll start with Extension, because that kind of is where I came from, from a developmental standpoint. So I'm involved heavily in the youth programs with the state. So whether that's State Dairy Quiz Bowl judging contest, organizing youth retreats and conferences, as well as facilitating Commercial Dairy Heifer shows, I also do some adult education. One of my big areas right now is really focusing on technology in the dairy industry. How can we use it, who can use it, what's
best used for? And that can be anything from activity monitoring systems to robotic or voluntary milking systems, which, of course has a lot of popularity right now. In my teaching, I do a lot from dairy production and management, which makes sense for me, I'm also a reproductive physiologist. So I teach our repro and applied repro classes. And probably one of my favorite classes is issues
in animal agriculture. So teaching about those issues or discussions we need to have surrounding food animal production, and understanding consumer concerns as well as how we work with those concerns. Technically, I don't have a research appointment. So the research work that I do is very much rooted in my extension programs and what I hear
producer needs are. So right now we're working on a farm with a voluntary milking system or a robotic milker and looking at how some of our reproductive understanding and research might change when the cow's behavior changes, see when they voluntarily get to take themselves to milk versus when we take them to milk two or three times a day. That changes a lot of reproductive parameters. So learning more about that.
Okay, we need to know more, because you said, my brain, like, everything is firing. So you said voluntary milking systems. I think that when a lot of people think dairy farming, they think a farmer getting up before dawn taking their cattle down to milk. Tell us about a voluntary milking system and what that changes for the cow.
Yeah, so a lot of people will hear them as robotic milkers. In the industry, we tend to use more of the voluntary milking system because that's what it implies is the cow gets to voluntarily decide when she wants to go milk throughout the day. What's the reasoning behind this? You know, really probably it's labor shortages in the ag industries
as a whole. But specifically in the dairy industry and having someone that wants, as you mentioned, to get up bright and early in the morning, and milk cows for the first four or five hours of their day, those people are becoming harder and harder to find. So these voluntary milking systems have allowed us to kind of meet that labor gap with a new technology. And so it is interesting, the cows' behavior is quite different. They choose when they go to the
milker. They spend a lot of time and what we call the commitment pen, which is a pin that they go to right before they go to the milker. And it's kind of like their social hour. So that is when they get up and they go and they have time with their friends. Because otherwise they're spending their days eating and sleeping. Cows are not as robust, we shall say, in their activity level for the day than most people would think. So that's kind of their social
hour. They milk then they go eat, they go rest, and they choose when they repeat that process.
I love it. Yeah, like the visual of a little cow social hour just makes me irrationally happy.
It's so cute, like a little cow happy hour. But they're making the drinks.
Yeah, so it's a fun technology. But it's certainly one that's newer for the industry as a whole, but also newer for the Southeast. So kind of understanding how we use this technology and how cow behavior changes within their systems and how that ultimately changes everything that we might think about management, whether it be nutrition, reproduction, health, all of those parameters are seeming to change a little bit too.
Okay, so to the untrained eye to someone who is not in the industry, when I drive past a field of cattle, I might be curious of whether they're dairy cattle or whether they're beef cattle. What are some of the differences between dairy and beef cattle? Are they raised differently?
So that's a very good question. We talk a lot about that in some of our classes on what are the fundamental differences in beef and dairy cattle physically. When you look at them, you'll see that dairy cows tend to be more of what I call sleeker, I hate to use the word thin, so I
use sleeker. So the way that they utilize their nutrients is very different than the beef cow, the beef cow genetically has been selected for things that we appreciate in the beef animal, which is muscle and fat, which makes that ultimate product tastes better and the dairy animal instead, we've really genetically selected her to partition all those nutrients to milk production to not put those nutrients in muscle and fat. So she has that sleeker, more athletic appearance, if you
will. And that genetic selection is just selecting for milk production year after year and generation after generation. Now how we house them, you know, I feel like our dairy industry enterprises are much more diverse in how we house and manage because you might see those cows on the side of the road in the pasture. Or they might be in a barn, especially here in the Southeast with the
heat and humidity. You know, I've done some talks on that how if I was a dairy cow in the Southeast, I would like to be in a barn.
[laughter]
Give me the misters and the fans.
Yes, please.
And so you know how we house them is very diverse and different from the beef industry as well.
I did not know that there was any difference at all, just like, that's a cow. You don't think about that as you're driving down the road.
You don't have those thoughts?
No, I don't.
Maybe growing up in the Midwest and moving here I'm like, tell me more about what you do.
And normally, you know, predominantly here in the Southeast are the Holstein cows as well which are black and white. Everybody associates with the Chick fil A cow. So they're easy to ID but that's not true, like, anybody who knows me, they know I have a love for the little brown cow which is a Jersey. And so they are maybe a little bit more confused probably on the road side passage of the pasture if they were to be out with the beef animal just because they're smaller frame size, their color.
And we as kind of a community generally see the black and white cow as the dairy cow.
Well, I would love to know more about a particular cow which is Snap who made his debut on TikTok with us last year and our audience was quite the fans of Snap.
Yes.
So tell us more about him and why he has a hole in his side.
Yes. So Snap is one of my best friends out of the farm. He has his friend Crackle that lives with him. So we actually have two.
Oh no.
Snap and Crackle. Both of them are Holstein steers. Last time we weighed them they weighed about 2300 pounds just to give you a size for that breed and both of them have what we call rumen fistulas. Or they have the cannulas a lot of people knew those as the holes in their side or the windows to the inside. You hear a lot of different things about it. And the reality is is those two, Snap and Crackle, do have cannulas that allow us to directly access the
rumens. And so in cattle, the rumen is the largest compartment of the stomach. It is the fermentation vat, it is why they could go outside and eat grass and survive, and we cannot. So it's a very important structure for them. And so that cannula allows us from a nutritional standpoint to maybe evaluate specifically how that rumen handles feeds. So we could bypass the mouth, the esophagus, and any preceding structures, and just look at the rumen
environment. The other cool thing for us and they also have some over at the veterinary school is that whenever we have a sick animal, a lot of times the microbial population is put at risk or a portion of them maybe dies off. And one of the most important things we can do is give them back that microbial population. And sometimes that's going to rely on a donor animal like Snap or Crackle, and we'll take rumen fluid from them. They
happily give it to us. We'll take rumen fluid from them and we'll give it to a sick animal to help populate that gut again, for health. So you and I, we would probably go maybe get a yogurt with a live culture, if we've been sick or on antibiotics or something like that. For our cows, we probably couldn't give them that much yogurt. So that's why Snap and Crackle are there to help out.
That's so sweet.
[laughter]
And they're really good boys, too. That's the other thing. To be as massive and it's dominating as they are physically. I mean, 2,300 pounds on a basically a six foot tall frame is a lot.
It's a big animal.
Mm hmm.
But they are pampered and they know where it's good. So they're quite amenable to giving us their rumen fluid. They go on the halter, we've taken them to school events and a variety of different places, just to get them out to teach people about dairy and some of the important research activities we're doing within the industry.
I know that people are using those kinds of cows to look at the impacts on climate as well. Can you talk a little more about that?
Yeah. So when we look at that rumen environment, a lot of times it's the one that's blamed, you know, for environmental consequences, because it's part of this fermentation process that they go through natural byproducts are carbon dioxide and methane. And of course, as we look at greenhouse gases and think about environmental sustainability, those two are big trigger words for us and so we're looking at ways on how we can maybe shift the feet of an animal to change how much methane or carbon
dioxide is produced? Or are there certain genetic lines? Like maybe it's a heritable trait to some degree on how much methane, carbon dioxide. So those are areas of investigation, and certainly, we could capture that pretty easily out of our fistulated steers. But we're also looking at additional systems that when the animal goes to feed, we can naturally capture how much of those gases they're emitting.
Incredible potential for the future.
Yes. Yeah, absolutely. Because we recognize in the animal industries that we've got to be sustainable, and that's producing food at a low price point for consumers, but also making sure that we're respecting the environment at the same time.
So you mentioned the rumen being the largest chamber. I feel like there's so many rumors swirl around how many stomachs a cow has, and why do they have multiple stomachs, etc. Can you debunk a little bit of that for us?
Yeah, absolutely. Because that's one of the biggest things, I had to be really careful when I answered that question, because I used to always call them the four stomachs to animals. It's technically one stomach with four compartments.
Compartments! I called them a chamber. I'm like, it was one of the "C" words.
Chambers is okay, too. But the reality is, it's one complete stomach with four different compartments that have very different responsibilities in that animal's digestive process. So they have a reticulum, a rumen, an omasum, and an abomasum. And the abomasum is very similar to
our own gastric system. We have the omasum, which is maybe more water absorption; the rumen, which is the fundamental driver on why they can eat such fibrous feeds that we would not do well off of; and the reticulum, which is kind of partly attached to that rumen environment.
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We know it might be hard to picture the internal anatomy of a cow, so we've added the link in the show notes with some helpful information from our forage team for you.
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But yeah, four distinct chambers, if you will, or compartments, in that rumen environment.
And is it true that that developed because they're a prey animal and would eat in one place and digest in another? Or is that just another one of those myths we're told as kids?
It would certainly make sense because that's, if we go back to discussing the cows on the side of the road, a lot of times you'll see them out grazing for a short period of time, and then you'll see him in a tree line or somewhere lying down if it's a cool overcast day in the field, ruminating, which means they're throwing their food back up, which isn't a nice visual, but that's what's happening. And
that's part of that activity. So as being a prey animal, it would be natural that they would go out, consume feeds very quickly. And then they would go and rest and ruminate. And that would be their opportunity to throw that feed back up, re-chew it like they should have done the first time, and then swallow it back
down. It is interesting, too, that in that rapid feeding profile, so even though our cows are not prey to anything they're not having to run, they still maintain that feeding profile. So they'll eat pretty rapidly. And Snap and Crackle have given us some insight into things that they will eat like rocks, because they're so quickly eating and not chewing, they're just swallowing, that we will find these within their rumens.
Sounds like one of my children.
Say, they sound like 2,300 pound vacuum cleaners out there. Well, on this strange topic, I might as well continue down that road and ask you what's the weirdest thing you've ever been asked at an event when you tell people what you do? Or if not weird then a misconception maybe that you want to debunk?
Yeah, so we go through a lot of those. And let's be honest, I'm a reproductive physiologist. So the questions can get weird. If I'm out with the community, there's a lot of odd questions. But what I realized is that a lot of times, it's just the disconnect between consumer and where their food comes from. Probably it's not a weird question, but it's one that kind of shows me the disconnect is when we're somewhere, and I'll have one of my big favorite dairy cows, I've got a couple,
let's be honest. And I'll bring them out somewhere. And so I've got this big, beautiful dairy cow, big udder, which is part of you know, what we see in beauty of the dairy cow, someone will go, is that a girl? And immediately you will go, well shouldn't you know that? And you're like, oh, maybe you shouldn't know that. You know, maybe I understand why you don't know that. Let's talk about why
this is a girl. What are some features, maybe, that would have told us that but also just kind of what is the dairy industry? And what do we do in the dairy industry? And I don't classify it as much as a weird question as one that shows me the disconnect, sometimes, that exists. But of course, I think kids for fun will ask the does that cow make chocolate milk when they see a Jersey, but I think they know the answer at this point. It's just fun to ask. And then we'll ask them fun
questions, too. So we'll put it back to them. Do you know how to make a milk shake from this cow? No? You run her around?
[laughter]
Yeah, so you can you can play it both ways.
I love it. I love it. Well, and I do. I think that's one of our favorite parts of doing this show is that there is that disconnect. And it's natural at where we are in society right now to have that disconnect. But it's really wonderful to be able to dive into that and really talk about where is our food coming from? And what do those processes look like? So that's wonderful to talk about.
Yeah.
And I really think it's an important part of our job here, you know, and that's why I love some of the classes I teach and the activities because we in the industry think well, people should know, that's ridiculous that they don't know where their food comes from, or how this is made. And, you know, I always retort and it's maybe not the best, but I've walked into a building today. It's something that I use every single day, just like people use food, I couldn't tell you how it was
built. I can't even begin to tell you the engineering or the architecture or anything else. So it's important that we have the conversations now, let's be honest, I don't care how the building was built.
[laughter]
I just care that it was. But I think that those are important, that we have to understand why there is a disconnect, and that it's no one's fault. We just really need to bridge the conversation so that maybe there is an increased understanding.
Absolutely. Well, that was the perfect lead in because I was going to say speaking of teaching, the University of Georgia recently recognized you with a Russell Award for Excellence in undergraduate teaching, the university's highest early career teaching honor for outstanding and innovative instruction. We know that this isn't the first teaching award that you have received. So first of all, congratulations on these incredible honors.
Thank you.
But can you tell us a little bit about your teaching methods and what inspires you to teach the next generation?
So I'm gonna answer the second part of your question first, which is why do I think it's important and I think it's important for the sustainability of all of our industries. You know, too often we we talk to farmers and we talk about immediate sustainability of their farm, whether it be economics or how are they gonna farm in five years when I really want to think about what what's the next 25, 50, 100 years going to look
like for our country? And making sure that we have the food supply necessary to have not only secure but sustainable food. And so that's really what drives my interest in making sure young people are engaged, at least in the conversation. As far as what really drives what I do. I used to always say passion, right? You got to be passionate about what you do, or else, you're never going to engage that classroom. But what I've realized is that too many of us walk into a room thinking
passion is enough. And passion is not enough. Passion will get you in the door, but you've got to engage each student in your class on some level, and to engage them is you've got to know them. It's kind of like currency, each student has a different currency. And that currency is, why is this important or relevant to me? And so I have to figure out, why is it important? Why is it relevant? Why do you need to know this? And how do I get that
across? And so for me, it's a lot of times talking to my students, but also doing activities where they have to apply the information, whether it's problem solving, or true real world experiences. And I think the other thing is, you've got a, in a lecture hall, that's not always easy to do the application. So you've got to talk through problems. I do a lot of visual writing, walking through. But I also tell them, you know, this wasn't easy for
me either. Sometimes we get up there and act like we are the be all end all knowers of all things. And we're all still learning too. So I tell them how I tackle complex topics, or this is how when I was learning this for the first time, this is what I did. I walked through it, I drew this. And I drew that I asked myself these questions. And sometimes I think that makes it more tangible. If they get bogged down in the mud of I don't get this, we got to get
them cleaned out of the mud. And to do that, say, Hey, I was there once too. I was there once too and this is how I worked through that. All right. And then the final thing I would say is you got to do fun activities in class, you know, you can't just bring passion, and good information and know their currency. You gotta make it fun. Sometimes we'll do role playing activities. Sometimes we will do what I call gallery walks. So in my repro class, we do gallery walks, which means I'm not
perfect. Sometimes I don't teach things the way that it gravitates to everyone. So teach it to me, right, reteach it in a different way. Reteach in a different way, we're gonna walk around so that there might be other students, they're not as bold to tell me that they didn't understand it the way I taught it. But they're gonna walk around and see yours and go, Oh, I get it. I get it now. And just the process of having to think through that. Reinterpretation of material is so important for
their learning process. I would say this, I'm still learning too, even when it comes to teaching. Every single semester teaches me something different. And so we're all works in progress in the classroom and out of it.
I love that. As somebody who is insatiably curious, I love that it's like, it's okay to never stop learning. And it's also okay to be approachable, which I think is something really important that a lot of incoming students might be unsure of. They see a professor at the front of the class and there's the persona of what that should be. So breaking that down is something really exciting, I'm sure, for a lot of your students.
Yes.
And humor helps that. Analogies help that. Not being afraid to make fun of yourself sometimes helps that. You've got to make yourself human, you know, and too often, I think, I remember being a student, it wasn't that long ago.
[laughter]
You know, and that it is intimidating, or you feel like they're unapproachable or that your questions not going to make sense. And so I feel like making yourself human in front of the classroom, telling them when you make errors, being funny, doing weird analogies that make them go, gosh, she's weird, you know? But it helps! You know, it makes me more human. People are weird, everybody's different, you know? So all of these things help.
What does role playing look like in an animal dairy science class?
[laughter]
Yes, tell us more.
So you can do role playing from a variety of different things. So we recently did this at the American Dairy Science Association, I led a teaching workshop and so we were talking about active engagements and you know, reproduction one of the key aspects is the different hormones, the reproductive system. There's a horrible chapter five chart, nobody likes but you know, one of the things we can do is suddenly you become hormone GnRH, you become LH, you become
FSH, you become estrogen. And now we're going to have y'all interact with one another. How do you influence the other one? Is it a positive relationship or is it a negative relationship? And then when that interaction happens, okay, LH, what do you do? What's your then response? Do you go back to GnRH? And go, don't talk to me like that? Or do you go downstream you just keep passing it to the ovary or
wherever you're going. And so being able to act it out, even if it's a silly moment that sometimes, sometimes we go, ah, that didn't accomplish what we wanted, because it was silly, or they laughed too much. If I laughed at something or had a just a good chuckle. Even if I thought it was ridiculous, it makes it much more memorable.
The number of like really stiff tense rooms, I want to just drop you in the middle of and have you work your magic.
[laughter]
Yeah, and I think that's a tough part because I started teaching college students when I was 23. And one of the biggest things I realized is that I took myself way too seriously. I thought that I had to take myself seriously and be so professional upfront, because that's the only way they were going to respect
me or pay attention to me. And you know, some of that just comes with years and experience that you realize that being relatable and human is far more important than having this serious affect in front of a classroom.
So how do we sign up for your classes, speaking of?
[laughter]
Emily and Jordan go back to school!
Yes, here we come!
From a master's in marine science to animal dairy science. You know, from the sea to the land.
It's fine.
[laughter]
Oh, my goodness. Can you tell us a little bit more about your work with youth through the Commercial Heifer Project, dairy cattle judging, and the Dairy Quiz Bowl?
Yes. So on the youth level throughout the state, I help facilitate the Commercial Heifer Project, which is that project that I'm a direct product of. So it allows kids that maybe don't come from a farm background to get their hands on an animal. And if it's anything like me, once you get your hands on the animal, you learn something, you at least respect the animal in her industry. And these people are always going to be consumers, whether they actually enter that industry is going to differ for
each one of them. But at least they know a little bit, something about it. And so with the quiz bowl, and the dairy judging on top of that, you know, you're talking about a team event, an individual event. I'm big on diversity. So if we want to get people engaged in agriculture, we can't say, hey, here's this one event. It's going to be a team event, no animals, we're going to do it 20 times in the year, so you have
lots of opportunities. But that's not going to engage every different kind of youth that's out there. So we have projects that have animal components or not, if that's too time consuming for you, that allow you to work independently or within a team that are state level, regional or national. So again, just trying to give every opportunity to say, come learn something about agriculture, just using dairy as the medium
to learn about agriculture. On the collegiate level, I'm highly involved in ADSA, which is the American Dairy Science Association and their undergraduate student division, as well as Dairy Challenge, which is a management based competition. And in both of those, they allow our students to get some real world experience because a lot of our students in the Animal and Dairy Science Department don't come from an agricultural background.
They are urban young people that maybe have aspirations to go to veterinary school. And integrating into an industry like the dairy industry can be very intimidating. These farmers are very smart. They're very progressive, very technologically savvy. And if I didn't grow up in that, it can be an intimidating pathway to follow. So we try to break down some of those walls by taking them to these events where they can learn and integrate more
into the industry. So they feel more confident, then hopefully becoming a part of or at least servicing it in the future.
That's inspiring. As someone who grew up in suburban Chicago, that, it did, it seemed like a huge hurdle. And I'm an animal lover, I actually had aspirations for a while to be a veterinarian. But it was just kind of seeing that roadblock after roadblock and how do you get into this industry? I wish there were some folks like you around in my circles as a youth to bridge those gaps.
Yep, absolutely. And I think it's an important part of our responsibility here, the farmers' responsibility to try and navigate some of these pathways to make sure that we do have that sustainable future in that workforce pipeline. You know, having people that know enough about us that want to know more about us, that feel comfortable with us. And that's what I always tell my students is, all these people are great people and wonderful farmers.
It's just learning how to integrate with them, have conversations with them, open the dialog, and we have to be the avenues by which that happens. Because I found that if we leave it to organically happening a lot of times, it doesn't. So we have to be that conduit, if you will, between our students and these industries.
Well, we have covered a lot of topics in a short period of time. But is there anything that we've missed that you want to share about the work you're doing?
You know, I think really, the biggest thing that I look in doing in my job every single day, is fostering and helping my dairy farmers. And I feel like I'm doing that largely by working to develop that next generation that's going to work within or for
their industry. And so, in order to do that, in my teaching, I try to make sure that I have classes that teach the educational basics, but also build upon them and allow for some experiential learning opportunities and get them integrated into these industries sooner than later. And also allowing my classes to have the conversations about difficult and hard topics that surround
animal agriculture. And so that's just my big passion is making sure that we have a sustainable group of young people into the future to maintain these industries.
Well, Jillian, we have learned so much in this last hour or so. I don't think we've laughed harder in a long time. This has been an inspiring conversation. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Yeah, absolutely. I enjoyed talking more about what I do and where I came from, and I thank you all for the opportunity.
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Thanks for listening to Cultivating curiosity, a podcast produced by the UGA College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. A special thanks to Mason McClintock for our music and sound effects. Find more episodes wherever you get your podcasts.