Forty employees or owners of nutrition service suppliers and 145 dairy farm managers were surveyed to identify the type of information requested and transferred to dairy farm managers, and to identify the role nutrition suppliers perform in technical information transfer to farm managers. The results indicate that feed industry personnel, private consultants, and veterinarians have become major distributors of technical service information to dairy farm managers. This implies communication between Cooperative Extension and dairy farm managers will diminish, while information transfer between suppliers and dairy farm mangers will not. Extension program leaders will have to adapt their role in the dissemination of dairy nutrition information to include nutrition service personnel in technical programs.
Roseler et al. (Wed,) studied this question.