For the organic dairy farmers partnering with the University of Minnesota College of Veterinary Medicine (CVM), a typical day involves standard chores like milking, feeding, and checking fences. But lately, it also includes watching a city-raised PhD student sprint across their barns waving a net, determined to catch flies.

"That's definitely the fun part for our producers to watch," laughs Carmen Burner, who is pursuing her degree in the CVM Veterinary Sciences program.

Chasing flies is just one slice of the sprawling fieldwork Burner manages. As the primary UMN PhD student conducting research for a $3.5 million grant from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture led by the CVM Ruminant Group, Burner sits at the center of a five-state, multi-university collaborative effort aimed at solving a critical economic bottleneck for the U.S. organic dairy industry.

Under updated federal regulations, calves must be born from an organic cow to be considered organic, rendering the operation's own youngstock—calves from birth until their first calving—to be the most viable source of replacement cows for their herd. Keeping these young calves healthy is both a welfare priority and a key to the farm's long-term economic survival.

To help build evidence-based best management practices, Burner hits the road every three months, executing a whirlwind quarterly sampling tour across 10 Minnesota and Wisconsin dairy farms in a three-to-four-week span. A typical day starts at 6 am, splits four hours of intense field work between two different farms, and finishes late in the afternoon with a car full of cooler bags.

On any given farm visit, Burner is a blur of activity.  She might be administering a comprehensive 12-page survey to the farmers, taking nasal swabs and fecal samples, while also performing overall health checks on the calves. She even hooks up an ultrasound machine to scan the calves' lungs for hidden signs of pneumonia, pulling up an app on her phone so the farmers can look at the real-time scans right along with her.

Every swab, scan, and survey response serves as a data point, ultimately helping Burner and the research team connect daily farm management choices directly to long-term herd health outcomes.

Her second objective is the one involving the fly nets. Burner is tracking the transmission pathways of Staphylococcus aureus, a highly contagious bacterial pathogen that causes severe mammary infections (mastitis). The stakes are high: this bacteria can cause chronic infections that force farmers to cull adult cows from the herd. To stop the damage early, Burner is sampling calves—taking oral swabs, testing milk, and catching fly vectors—to see if the disease is quietly incubating in youngstock long before they ever enter the milking parlor.

It is a demanding, dirt-under-the-fingernails brand of science—and it’s a world away from where Burner grew up.

"I'm originally from Orlando, Florida, about 10 or 15 minutes from downtown," Burner says. "My immediate family had zero farming ties."

Her agricultural spark was struck entirely by chance when she joined the Future Farmers of America (FFA) in high school. Her suburban school happened to have a small slice of agriculturally zoned land behind it, allowing a city kid to raise two pigs and a few chickens. By the time she reached her undergraduate studies at the University of Florida, she realized her passion wasn't necessarily in traditional vet medicine, but in applied research that directly touched communities.

Transitioning to Minnesota brought a bit of cultural adjustment. "In Florida and Georgia, it’s niche to have a farm background in animal science. Most students come from the major cities," Burner notes. "Coming here, two of the girls in my office grew up on family farms and still help out on them. It’s been an interesting dynamic shift."

That outsider perspective has only fueled her deep appreciation for the producers she works with. While some sites in the national USDA grant—which spans Colorado, Washington, Vermont, and Texas—deal with massive industrial herds up to 6,000 cows, Burner’s Minnesota cohort features tight-knit, independent operations ranging from 45 to 600 cows.

"We are talking directly to the people who own the land, and they come out into the barn with us," Burner says. "At university research dairies, primarily it's the staff's job to help you. These independent producers aren't required to help us—they want to. It’s been quite nice to see how much they care about the science."

That partnership highlights the profound impact of the $3.5 million USDA grant supporting her work. Amidst a tightening national landscape for federal graduate student funding, large-scale grants often serve as the lifeblood for the next generation of researchers.

"Without this federal funding, I definitely wouldn't have had the opportunity to do this project," Burner says. "Principal investigators write these massive grants, but they don't have the time to physically run the daily fieldwork. Graduate students are vital for that. This funding ensures I can devote 100% of my focus to contributing to science while still being able to live a life." By supporting the work of students like Burner, the funding also helps to develop the pipeline of future researchers and teachers—crucial to continued scientific advancement.

Furthermore, the federal backing creates a collaborative brain trust that smaller budgets couldn't support. "Working with four other universities and their graduate students has been wild. Everyone brings something different to the table. I don't even know how a project of this scale could pull together without federal support."

While the heavy travel logistics and the constant anxiety of forgetting a piece of gear can make the lead-up to sampling weeks stressful, Burner finds her grounding the second she steps onto a farm. For her, the reward is in the relationships—and the occasional perks of rural life.

"Seeing the producers keeps you going. Just recently, a farmer asked if we wanted to see the newest addition to the family and brought out a six-week-old puppy," she smiles.

And then, of course, there are the barn cats. Burner has become so fond of the local farm feline populations that she has joked with her advisor about the role they might play in her PhD. "I told her that when I defend [my dissertation], I'm going to have an entire slide dedicated exclusively to the farm cats. Sometimes I take more pictures of the cats than the calves on the study."

As Burner prepares for the next phase of the multi-year study, she knows the data she is gathering will spark new, hypothesis-driven projects across the country for years to come. For this self-described downtown Orlando girl, the long, hot days in the barns are exactly where she belongs.

"It feels like giving back," Burner says. "Farmers let us onto their property, we have these wonderful conversations, and at the end of the day, they are helping us push veterinary science forward. It’s just fun."

The Rising Researchers series highlights the scientific contributions of the College of Veterinary Medicine Graduate Program's PhD and Master of Science students.