Dairy cows are like high-performance athletes—nursing high-performance athletes. At least that's how Aurora Villarroel sees them. She's an expert in both veterinary medicine and epidemiology at Oregon State University's experimental dairy research center, which uses all the latest tools to keep livestock healthy and pumping out primo milk. The tilt table (above), for example, is used to safely examine and trim hooves. Here are some of the mechanisms researchers use to monitor the cows and meet their every need.
Photo: Chris Mueller