Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Juan Piñwieo, an assistant professor and dairy extension specialist at Texas A&M University, teaches a segment on animal nutrition during a classroom session at the U.S. Dairy Education and Training Consortium at Clovis Community College.
CLOVIS - The dairy industry is pretty much a non-stop operation in eastern New Mexico, with plenty of operation and products to show for it.
For a six-week period every May and June, eastern New Mexico becomes a go-to stop for dairy education as well. The 12th annual U.S. Dairy Education and Training Consortium was held in Clovis, with 48 students.
"Every morning, we start out and we all have a schedule of the events," said Preston DeJong, a second-time participant in the session, recent graduate of Texas A&M and future grad student at Cornell. "We're either starting the day on a dairy or learning in the classroom. Either way, we're learning about something we're going to be doing that day or that week. You're being told these things, then you go to the farm and do those things."
The consortium, first established as the Southern Great Plains Dairy Consortium in 2008, has 15 participating universities. There are a few people attending the consortium who currently work in the dairy industry, but most participants are students putting the six weeks of instruction toward a directed study or internship credit.
"Each week we have a different subject," said Christopher Childress, who is also attending Texas A&M but never knew DeJong until they met at the Clovis consortium. "Last week we learned nutrition, as in how to make meals for the cows and what components they need. The previous week was genetics. Each week, we have different professors coming in."
More than half of the schools are from New Mexico or bordering states, but the program draws from as far north as Idaho, Illinois and Washington, west to Arizona, and east with Florida and Louisiana.
"The dairy industry in New Mexico is vastly different from Louisiana," said Nick Uzee, who attends Louisiana State University. "In Louisiana, our average herd size is 80 cows and almost all dairies are pasture-based. Here, it's entirely different. You have large operations that have thousands of cows and do a great job with all of those cows."
The consortium is largely organized by Robert Hagevoort of New Mexico State and Mike Tomaszewski of Texas A&M. It's grown bigger over the years, with the 2019 version of the USDETC listing nearly four dozen sponsors.
It needs plenty of sponsors, because educating four dozen people for six weeks gets expensive when you don't pass costs on to participants. The program puts the students up in an area hotel, two to a room, and NMSU provides shuttle buses from the hotel to the Clovis Community College classrooms and the various dairies that participate as learning sites.
"We're fortunate," DeJong said. "We don't have to pay anything for this program. It's six weeks of having the best professors and the best dairies in this part of the country. Dr. T and Dr. H work all year on this."
When the consortium concludes, students will have a yearbook of sorts - a digital directory that includes every student with contact information and eventual plans.
