Cabrera is a professor of animal and dairy sciences and extension specialist in dairy management at UW–Madison. He has spent his career developing practical, user-friendly, and scholarly decision support tools for dairy management.
This project will develop a high-level, user-friendly, scientifically sound, yet powerful whole-farm decision support tool, EZ Dairy Enviro-Money, to assess economic and environmental tradeoffs of dairy farming for strategic nutrient management decisions. Researchers will work to address the growing need for Wisconsin dairy farmers to remain sustainable. Researchers aim to provide an online tool that can be effectively used with minimal data entry. This can be accomplished by carefully selecting key performance indicators that are not only critical farm drivers, but also readily available without the need for complex data retrieving efforts. The goal is to have a general representation of farming systems to pinpoint the magnitude of expected outcomes. This tool will not provide deep or fully detailed outcomes, but it will emphasize ease of use for “what-if” scenarios, which could be accomplished intuitively by any user. This project aligns to Dairy Task Force 2.0 recommendation #34 and #47 (‘Create an app for dairy producers and associates on major topics’ and ‘Need for regulatory certainty and consistency’).