Although its office is in the Animal Science Building on the UW-Madison campus, its funding comes mainly from the USDA.
Its mission is a lofty one: to link the dairy industries of Wisconsin and the U.S. with dairy industries around the world to improve the quality of life and foster market development. And to transform emerging dairy industries and strengthen the U.S. dairy industry through international partnership, training and research.
Its name — the Babcock Institute for International Dairy Research and Development — might suggest dozens (maybe hundreds) of Ph.D.s, floors of research laboratories, huge auditoriums and vast libraries of technical papers and even a communications department, with dozens of computers manned by communication experts.
Wrong! You can count the number of employees on one hand and have a finger or two left over.
As for the Ph.D.s, researchers, libraries, technical experts, auditoriums and computers, they are there but are located all across the UW agriculture campus, at the headquarters of a myriad of Wisconsin companies, in a host of government agencies and even in the laptops carried around by dairy experts across the state.
Read the full article, written by John F. Oncken, that appeared in The Capital Times.