College of Agricultural and Life Sciences
Above ↑ “Iwant to contribute to the place where I live. I’m in a great position to do that because I’m both doing the research and going out to talk to farmers about it.” - Kent Weigel
Blurring the Lines Between Extension and Research - Kent Weigel
The College’s extension specialists have always done research, and its researchers have always been involved in outreach. In recent years, the seams between the two functions have become nearly invisible.
In the case of Kent Weigel, they have pretty much disappeared. He’s doing sophisticated basic research in dairy cattle genetics (he received the College’s 2005 Pound Research Award) and sharing what he learns to help producers improve their herds.
Weigel grew up on a dairy farm near Platteville, and although he left Wisconsin for some of his graduate studies, he returned to Madison to finish his Ph.D. and work as an industry-oriented visiting scientist. When he became an assistant professor and extension genetics specialist in 2001, he welcomed the chance to interact directly with farmers.
Part of Weigel’s research deals with gene mapping in Jersey/Holstein crossbred cattle. He’s trying to locate the genes that cause important performance differences between the two breeds — such as the Jersey’s high milk fat and protein content and the Holstein’s high milk volume — by studying crossbred animals in the College’s dairy herd and in one of the state’s large commercial herds.
“In addition to mapping genes, we can also measure interesting phenotypes or performance traits,” Weigel says. “So not only are we doing very important basic research, but we have a strong extension application as well.”
Weigel is also developing ways to capture cow health data and other information from on-farm computers for use in estimating the value of breeding sires. This project, in collaboration with a commercial breeding firm, currently covers about 400 farms. Weigel plans to expand the project to more than 4,000 farms by involving several dairy records processing centers and software vendors.
In the long term, Weigel hopes to use “data mining” techniques to spot useful patterns and inferences among the millions of events that occur each year in commercial herds. He plans to share this information with the state’s dairy farmers.
Weigel work receives strong support from farmers and the artificial insemination industry. About 40 percent of the funding for his salary is provided by the National Association of Animal Breeders.
“I want to contribute to the place where I live,” says Weigel. “I’m in a great position to do that because I’m both doing the research and going out to talk to farmers about it.”