JERICHO, Vt. (AP) – Teams of college students fan out across Gary and Tammy Davis’ dairy farm armed with notebooks and digital cameras.

They breeze through the barn, inspect the milking parlor, the grain silo and trudge out into the pasture to get a close look at the cows.

They are competing in the Northeast regional Intercollegiate Dairy Challenge to see which team can give the best advice to local farmers.

Bundled up against the cold, the teams scribble notes and snap photos of the holding pens, the plastic tarp roof, the grain dispensers and the manure pile.

Then they corner the farmers with a barrage of questions.

“Do you have problems with foot warts?” “What breed of bulls do you use?” “What type of music do you play in the milking parlor?” “Do you use ear tags? On both ears?”

They scramble to gather as much information as they can in two hours at the farm and get an edge on the other teams.

About 116 students studying dairy science at 13 colleges in the Northeast, Pennsylvania and Delaware are competing in the two-day event hosted by the University of Vermont.

After visiting the farm on Friday, the teams hole up for six hours in separate rooms with a laptop and no telephone to write an analysis of the farm’s strengths, weaknesses and three areas where it can improve.

The presentation go before a panel of judges on Saturday.

The purpose is to train professional dairy managers,” said Don Maynard, a lecturer and coordinator of a farm program at the University of Vermont. “This is without a doubt the best learning experience and paradigm for learning that I’ve been involved with.”

After walking around the farm for about an hour, Cornell University senior Russ Klein is full of ideas.

“They don’t separate their corn silage from their hay silage,” he said. “So we think maybe they lose a little bit of quality with that. We want to suggest that maybe they separate those.”

“We’re concerned with the animals being pastured right there where they compost their manure. They could be contracting some diseases being into that. So we’ll suggest they put a fence around that.”

Teammate John Silloway who works with his father on a dairy farm in Randolph Center and takes classes at Vermont Technical College peers around the milking parlor.

“I notice that it’s a high line parlor. The newer styles are low line because you get better vacuum that way to the cow’s teats. It generally milks them out better,” he said.

Penny Loverme, a sophomore at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, rushed around taking photos.

“In terms of milking procedures, we think they should probably strip test – take a sample of milk before you actually hook them up to machines, to test for mastitis.”

That way the Davises could catch the disease sooner and get rid of infected cows.

Teammate Anna Pape of University of New Hampshire jotted down the type of iodine sitting in big plastic tub used to clean the cows’ teats.

Her team would suggest “breeding their cows for higher udders, to prevent mastitis,” she said.

At the end of the visit, each team had 12 minutes alone with the farmer.

“We’re going to ask them if they consider going organic because it doesn’t look like they use a lot of drugs as it is,” said Adam Young of the State University of New York at Cobleskill as he anxiously looked for Gary Davis. “They’re all about the natural with the grazing. You get a lot higher price for your milk if it’s organic.”

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On the Net:

Northeast regional Intercollegiate Dairy Challenge: www.dairychallenge.org

AP-ES-11-05-04 1525EST