Perspectives Fall 2018 Issue Now Available!

Perspectives Fall 2018 Issue Now Available!

The Fall 2018 issue of Perspectives Magazine is now available, brought to you by Phoenix Feeds & Nutrition.

This issue’s featured farm is B. Danyow Farm, a family farm in Ferrisburgh, Vermont that has mastered change, new management styles, and technological innovation throughout the generations. Check out our other great stories, including technical articles from leading experts in the field. Read the digital edition here or sign up to get future updates delivered straight to your inbox.
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Employee Owners of Vermont Food Drive

Employee Owners of Vermont Food Drive

VERMONT FOOD BANK – OCTOBER 2018

Farmers Feed the World and We Help Them Do It
Help us feed our hungry neighbors.

The employee owners of Phoenix Feeds & Nutrition, Inc. Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) are fundraising with other Vermont ESOP businesses to benefit the Vermont Food Bank. We are collecting food donations at our New Haven and Brandon Vermont businesses, or will we can pick up food donations within Addison County, Vermont. You can also make a monetary donation at:

https://fundraise.vtfoodbank.org/fundraiser/1695983

Phoenix Feeds will match every dollar donated by our employees, friends, and customers.

If you have any questions or would like us to pick up food donations, please contact Shannon at shannon@phoenixfeeds.net.

Thanks for helping us feed those in need.

Chr. Hansen Silosolve® Forage Inoculants

Chr. Hansen Silosolve® Forage Inoculants

Phoenix Feeds & Nutrition is pleased to announce an enhanced partnership with one of our prominent suppliers, Chr. Hansen Animal Health and Nutrition. Chr. Hansen is the world’s leader in producing microbial technologies for a variety of applications such as cheese and yogurt cultures, human and animal probiotics, and silage inoculants. While Phoenix Feeds and Chr. Hansen have had a strong relationship for many years, 2018 will be our first year supplying their high-quality silage inoculants to you, our valued customers. Chr. Hansen has developed a broad range of silage inoculants designed to solve specific silage fermentation challenges. Phoenix Feeds will be inventorying three of the Chr. Hansen products in New Haven, Vermont to help our customers with their forages this year.

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Perspectives Summer 2018 Issue Now Available!

Perspectives Summer 2018 Issue Now Available!

The Summer 2018 issue of Perspectives Magazine is now available, brought to you by Phoenix Feeds & Nutrition.

This issue’s featured farm is Hornstra Farms, a family farm with a storied history located in Norwell, Massachusetts. The Hornstra family has embraced diversification and persevered in the business they love. Be sure to check out our other great stories, including technical articles from leading experts in the field. Read the digital edition here or sign up to get future updates delivered straight to your inbox.
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Stress and the Dairy Cow

Stress and the Dairy Cow

INTRODUCTION

A Google Search for the term “stress” will bring up a variety of articles. If these publications are true, a lot of people are feeling stressed, including: couples planning weddings, couples getting divorced, school teachers, retirees, poor people, wealthy people, employed and unemployed people, and many others! When it comes to people, stress is a hot topic and everyone is looking for ways to manage stress they experience. Even though articles on stress are commonplace, most, surprisingly, do not define stress. Scientists who study stress tell us it is “an organism’s response to a perceived threat” and they refer to the threat as a stressor. For example, if you hit your thumb with a hammer, the pain you feel is the stressor. The complex response to that pain (including elevated heart rate, swelling, and later, increased susceptibility to infections) is the stress. So if we want to manage the stress in our lives we need to consider both the stressor (the threat) and the stress (the body’s response to the stressor). The stress response is similar for humans and animals, including dairy cattle. Stressors can be physical (for example: a back injury in a farmer; high temperature-humidity index in dairy cows) or psychological (learning of a new, lower milk price by a farmer; moving to a new pen for a dairy cow).

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Pine Valley Farm

Pine Valley Farm

Family farms in Vermont come in all varieties and sizes, but there aren’t many that can boast the pedigree of the Pine Valley Farm in Shrewsbury.

Standing in the kitchen of her 1800s farmhouse, Julanne Smith Sharrow is proudly displaying a genealogical chart she’s ingeniously clipped to a coat hanger. The poster-sized paper is crowded with the neatly written record of several centuries of family history, including John (the Miller) Smith, who is recorded in 1640 as one of the earliest settlers of Rhode Island.

“It holds fifteen generations and it’s still not enough,” she says of the chart, turning the hanger to indicate where the back of a second page accommodates more ancestors. “This is what I’ve been working on for twenty years. I don’t know if I’ll ever finish it.”

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Perspectives Spring 2018 Issue Now Available!

Perspectives Spring 2018 Issue Now Available!

The Spring 2018 issue of Perspectives Magazine is now available, brought to you by Phoenix Feeds & Nutrition.

Our featured farm this issue is Pine Valley Farm in Shrewsbury, Vermont; a family farm that dates back seven generations. Be sure to check out our other great stories, including technical articles from leading experts in the field. Read the digital edition here or sign up to get future updates delivered straight to your inbox.
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New Conversations About Tile Drainage

New Conversations About Tile Drainage

The weather has always been a fickle, adversarial wild card for farmers, and as climate change makes extreme events more common and less predictable, the development of adaptive strategies has become ever more important. In the Northeast, recent years have seen an increase in flooding and persistent rain that leave fields saturated just as the planting season is getting underway.

Farmers with heavier soils and high clay content are particularly vulnerable to these adverse conditions. Many are turning to tile drainage as a solution for not only draining excess water from existing crop lands, but also for transforming previously unusable land into properly drained fields that are ready for planting.

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Perspectives Winter 2018 Issue Now Available!

Perspectives Winter 2018 Issue Now Available!

The Winter 2018 issue of Perspectives Magazine is now available, brought to you by Phoenix Feeds & Nutrition.

This issue, we visit Dunajski Dairy in Peabody, MA; a family-owned farm that has thrived for over a hundred years. As always, you will also find tips and technical articles from industry experts. Read the digital edition here or sign up to get future updates delivered straight to your inbox.
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