Got Milk? How students conduct goat research 

^{Many Langston students know that the university has a goat farm, yet many aren’t sure what exactly the goats are used for. Do they help Langston grow and expand our agricultural skills? Are they essential to our daily student lives? Do we cook them and eat them?}  

^{Jateya Jackson is a junior animal science major. She has worked on the goat farm as well as in the agricultural labs. Jackson was able to go into detail about some of the testing she does on goat milk for the program, how it functions and what they test for.}  

^{“It’s called the Dairy Herd Information Lab for Goats at Langston University. I collect samples from different farms around the United States and we test them for any milk infections, inside diseases or chronic diseases,” said Jackson. “Langston got this opportunity when they started their own goat farm here. They didn’t want to send out their samples anymore, so they got lab certified and now we can test here. We actually test for a number of things, like somatic cell count, Free-Fatty Acids (FFA), and Polyunsaturated Fatty Acids (PFA)”.}  

^{Goat milk samples are sent in the mail from farms around the country for Langston to test.}  

^{“They all come through the mail in vials that contain a preservative pill, so they last. A lot of them don’t usually expire, but sometimes they do, to natural causes.”}  

^{Once the milk arrives it must be prepped and tested. The samples are sat in warm water to get them to temperature for the two machines that will be processing it: the Dairy Spec and the Somatic Cell machine. The samples can’t go in cold, as goat milk thickens to cheese if you let it sit. Bringing it up to body temp is the only way to get an accurate reading of the data, almost as if the milk was fresh.}  

^{These tests show the nutritional state of the goat whose milk was sampled and will allow the farmer to know if their milk is good to sell and consume. After placing the samples in the auto sampler tray, which allows both machines to test at the same time, they record the data and send that back to the farm.}  

^{“We get the milk out of the boxes, write down their Dairy Herd Information (DHI) and then we enter all their DHI into the computer. You put the goat’s number and herd code in, and the machine does the rest. We just have to put their results into excel and send that to them. … It looks like a lot when you first start, but it’s really not bad. I think simply knowing how to do this is cool because I can kind of work in any DHI lab anywhere when I graduate,” said Jackson.}  

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