Ask Doug Boop for his thoughts on the future of the dairy industry, and you’ll receive a thoughtful smile followed by a single word: challenging.

It’s an agriculture tradition as old as dirt itself – teaching and preparing the next generation of farmers, advocates and industry leaders for the world they will inherit.

This famous, or better yet, infamous Mark Twain quote has been the rallying cry for many an ambitious youth. It goes, “I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” This was the case for eastern Tennessee dairyman Matt Mitchell.

Most parents gift their toddlers with toys and cuddly teddy bears. However, little Kaila Wussow’s parents, Ron and Nicole Wussow, wanted to give her something a bit more lifelike.

“The turnout is incredible. It shows there is a definite interest in this,” said Jayne Sebright, executive director of the Pennsylvania Center for Dairy Excellence, addressing the crowd at the On-Farm Processing Forum held in Harrisburg in late 2016.

Dairy producers are facing fewer options to sell their milk. Cooperatives have been consolidating, and consumption of fluid milk has struggled to grow in recent years. This can be a worrisome time for dairy producers; many have elected to control their own destiny by turning to on-farm processing and producing their own dairy products.

Three years ago I bought Molly, an American Milking Devon cow, from Bundten Farm in Orford, New Hampshire. Bundten was a small raw milk dairy that made cheese, butter and yogurt on-farm. State inspectors visited them twice per year, and samples were collected for testing four out of every six months.

Organic food sales in the U.S. reached new records in 2015, hitting a benchmark of $43.3 billion. With the rising demand for organic milk, more dairy operations are choosing robotic milkers to help increase milk production, answer labor issues and help with herd health.

Ten years ago, when Gregg and Doug Ode of Brandon, South Dakota, chose to relocate their 30-year-old Royalwood Farms dairy operation back to the farm they’d grown up on, something was different.