By Catalina Mejia-Bonilla, DVM, The Dairy Authority
As a veterinarian at The Dairy Authority, I’ve had the privilege of working alongside our dairy clients to ensure that best practices for herd health and animal welfare are followed each and every day. However, I’ve also seen firsthand the growing challenges dairy producers face especially when it comes to the shortage of labor, the need for skilled personnel to properly care for animals, and language barriers.
We all know that having capable, well-trained employees is crucial for the success of any dairy farm. But the reality is, it can be downright difficult to find workers who are a good fit for your dairy, with the skills needed to manage daily operations — everything from how to safely work around cows, maintain herd health, newborn calf care, and many other areas of expertise on farm.
It became clear to us at The Dairy Authority that we needed to find a way to address these challenges more effectively for our clients. We simply can’t be out at every farm every day to oversee operations, and it’s not always practical to provide in-person training to each employee on a continual basis. That’s why we developed a flexible solution that allows us to provide consistent, high-quality training to dairy farm personnel — no matter when or where they work.
The TDA Training Academy
The Academy is a web-based platform that uses short, informative videos in which our veterinarians explain and demonstrate the essential tasks of animal care and husbandry skills. The training is provided in both English and Spanish and includes quizzes to assess participants’ understanding of each skill. Training videos cover fundamentals such as newborn calf care, how to dry off cows, how to collect milk samples for testing, how to conduct a basic physical exam, and many more animal husbandry tasks done on farm each day.
Each module is designed to be proceeded and followed up with a farm visit where vets can provide additional context, supervise hands-on training, and address questions. The Academy allows employees the flexibility to learn essential skills at their own pace, ensuring minimal disruption to daily farm operations. This hybrid approach of online training paired with in-person support ensures that employees not only receive consistent training, but also benefit from the expertise of our veterinarians. The Academy offers an efficient and cost-effective way to ensure your team is trained according to industry practices while also tracking their competencies.
We created the Training Academy to provide the structured, essential training that many farms request. This platform trains farm personnel in key tasks critical to animal well-being, adherence to protocols and standard operating procedures for animal care on farm. In addition, the platform ensures consistent training for all team members, helping to standardize procedures and improve overall farm efficiency. In developing the TDA Academy our veterinarians kept five goals in mind:
- Improve skills and address knowledge gaps. Many farm personnel lack formalized training in essential daily tasks, such as administering an intramuscular injection or how to evaluate the health of an individual cow. This gap can result in inefficiencies, and risks to both animal welfare and human safety.
- Enhance safety and prevent injuries. The safety of farm workers is a priority. The training modules cover animal husbandry and stockmanship, featuring videos and quizzes designed to help workers understand the risks involved in working with cattle and how to safely and efficiently handle animals.
- Ensure compliance with farm protocols and industry standards. The Academy is designed to provide your team with the skills necessary to perform their daily tasks confidently, ensuring that farm protocols and industry regulations are consistently followed. The modules take much of the burden of developing training instruction off of dairy personnel so you can focus on helping employees learn.
- Address workforce shortages and bridge the language barrier. We believe the TDA Academy can help attract and retain individuals by providing them with relevant training and career development opportunities. Additionally, by offering content in Spanish and English, we can help bridge language barriers, making the training accessible to a diverse workforce.
- Improve farm efficiency and productivity. With increasing regulations and restrictions on worker hours across many states, it’s more important than ever for dairy farms to maximize the productivity of their available labor force. This platform helps producers implement efficient practices, maximizing their time and resources, even when labor is limited.
If you would like to learn more about the training academy, contact The Dairy Authority office at (970) 351-8102 or visit: https://www.dairymd.com/get-started-with-tda-academy
