I am leaving my house at a painfully early hour tomorrow to go to Tempe, AZ for a workshop titled "Advancing Dairy Cattle Genetics: Genomics and Beyond" (program). The goal of the workshop is to bring together professionals from all segments of the industry to discuss the future of dairy cattle genetics in the US. This is (I believe) the third such workshop, but the first that's I've been able to attend, so it should be interesting. Of particular interest to me are the action items that come out of breakout groups focused on new phenotypes. This is a challenging time for the industry (when is it not?), and workable real-world solutions are going to be difficult to come by.

My regular readers will no-doubt remember my my totally epic hashtag fail at the 5th International Symposium on Animal Functional Genomics. Well, I'm trying again. I even e-mailed the char of the organizing committee and one of the key industry media figures who will be in attendance to promote the idea of a common Twitter hashtag for the meeting. I was inspired by the number of people at PAG who Tweet about the meeting because while this is a smaller meeting the ehole point is to encourage discussion and the exchange of ideas. One way to do that is to make it as easy tp participate as possible, and Twitter is one way to facilitate that. So, I will be using the hashtag #adcg14 unless the organizers pick something else.