UMaine Hosting Tour of State’s Dairy Industry
Contact: David Marcinkowski, 207-581-2740 or instate toll-free 1-800-287-7170; davidmar@maine.edu
The University of Maine department of animal and veterinary science is hosting the New England Dairy Travel Course, a week-long tour of Maine dairy farms and related businesses set to begin Monday, January 3.
The travel course, which will be based in Waterville, includes bus trips to the University of New Hampshire Dairy Farm, as well as farms and facilities in Maine towns such as Cornish, Canton, Farmington, Embden, Clinton, Exeter, Lamoine, Knox, Sidney, Unity and New Gloucester. Other stops include UMaine’s Witter Teaching and Research Center in Old Town, the Maine Department of Agriculture, Food and Rural Resources in Augusta for a meeting with the commissioner of agriculture and the state veterinarian, Blue Seal Feeds, Inc. feed mill in Augusta, and IDEXX Laboratories Inc. in Westbrook.
The tour will make a stop on the UMaine campus at around 11 a.m. on Wednesday, January 5.
About 40 dairy students and five advisors from the universities of Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont are expected to participate. There are eight students from UMaine on the tour. The trip is being sponsored by the six universities and is being funded by a $5,000 grant from Farm Credit, a nationwide network of borrower-owned lending institutions that provide loans and leases to farmers, ranchers, and other agricultural and rural businesses.
“This tour is an excellent opportunity for us to feature the diversity of dairy farms we have in the state of Maine,” said David Marcinkowski, a UMaine department of animal and veterinary science associate professor and Cooperative Extension dairy specialist. “The students will see large, small, organic, conventional, purebred, cow, goat and value-added farms. Most importantly they will see the diversity of career opportunities that are available to them in the dairy industry.”
The is the 15th year of the tour, which is unique nationally in that it is a collaboration of the six land-grant universities in New England.
For more information, contact Marcinkowski at 207-581-2740 or 1-800-287-7170 (instate toll-free), or email davidmar@maine.edu.