The Dairy Innovation Hub has four priority areas that span all areas of the dairy industry. The research, teaching, and outreach activities of the Hub must involve dairy. We strive to support innovative research that will provide solutions to the challenges that will improve economic, environmental, and social sustainability.

Enriching human health and nutrition: 

• Elucidate physiologic, metabolic or immunologic impacts of  dairy components on human health to develop new dairy products for individuals across the life cycle
• Partner nutritional research with food science technology to develop value-added  products to serve health needs and dietary trends
• Promote personalized nutrition with new dairy products
• Design food processing, packaging and delivery technologies to improve product quality and shelf-life
• Make and apply discoveries that will improve the safety of dairy foods

Ensuring animal health and welfare: 

• Develop data analytics for animal management (nutrition, genetics, etc.) that translate to on-farm tools 
• Address public perceptions of animal agriculture through scientific communication  
• Reduce the incidence and impact of metabolic disorders and infectious diseases at the individual animal and whole-farm levels 
• Improve stress biology and immune function to support animal health and productivity 
• Improve efficiency use of feeds to improve environmental and economical sustainability  
• Deploy genomic selection and other emerging biotechnologies to improve animal health, welfare, and performance

Stewarding land and water resources: 

• Research innovative and emerging agronomic and engineering solutions to minimize nutrient losses from agricultural fields to lakes and rivers
• Develop improvements to nutrient management planning (or other tools) to enhance soil conservation and health
• Develop technologies and practices to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, improve air quality, or reduce odor
• Develop new methods for manure and other waste stream capture and reuse, as well as development of alternative markets for waste stream capture products
• Investigate novel agronomic cropping strategies or emerging technologies to improve  land use utilization that also meets conservation goals

Growing farm businesses and communities:

• Support entrepreneurship and establishing agricultural technology start-ups
• Provide education on policy, financial management, and farm management
• Improve financial literacy and return on assets
• Explore infrastructure needs for processing 
• Develop new products and new markets as drivers of business 
• Understand and communicate drivers of production costs and supply chain flow 
• Use big data to optimize dairy farms
• Develop skilled and tech-savvy rural workforce
• Understand supply chains, global markets and areas of opportunity