One source of income for Pennsylvania dairy farmers has hit its lowest point in three years, according to a dairy market expert in Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences. James Dunn, professor of agricultural economics, said that in May, milk margin per hundredweight -- the income portion left to pay dairy producers' bills for inputs other than feed, such as electricity, equipment and labor -- hit its lowest point in Pennsylvania since September 2009. "This is starting to really eat up the farmers," Dunn said. "The milk price is not historically low, but the feed price is so high that the amount that's left is not good."

Radiation spewing from Japan's severely damaged nuclear facilities following the recent earthquake and tsunami is not endangering the United States' food supply, according to a food-safety expert in Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences.

A dairy nutritionist in Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences is conducting genetic research with mice to determine if cows can be influenced by diet to produce milk with a higher fat content. You read that right. "On the surface, it may seem like a strange concept, experimenting with mice to learn things about cows," said Kevin Harvatine, assistant professor of nutritional physiology. "But the lactating dairy cow is not amenable to transgenic approaches. The mouse offers the greatest opportunity for genomic manipulation, and we have successfully developed a lactating mouse model to investigate milk-fat depression in dairy cows."