There’s a farm in the little town of Arlington, 20 miles north of Madison, that looks and smells like any other Wisconsin dairy operation. Its 550 cows are milked twice daily, once before dawn and again in the afternoon, like they are at thousands of dairy farms across the state.
But at this farm — the University of Wisconsin’s Agricultural Research Station — when a cow eats, gets milked and burps, a data point is created. That data collection is helping researchers at UW-Madison adapt Wisconsin’s herd to the challenges of climate change.