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Sometimes there’s just so many good articles in one issue you need a bit more space to promote them all. This is one of those issues. Read about a few I suggest you review in this issue.
Fair Oaks Farms Fair Oaks, Indiana
The Detroit Free Press spotlighted the collection of properties known as Fair Oaks Farms, which includes 10 dairy farms with 37,000 cows. The newspaper pointed out that many large-scale farms are “off-limits” to the average consumer, whereas Fair Oaks Farms welcomes tourists and draws as many as 180,000 visitors per year.
Jam-packed with seven northern Indiana farm visits ranging from 200 to 3,000 cows, the March 2014 Spring Dairy Tour by the Professional Dairy Managers of Pennsylvania (PDMP) gave Northeast producers a look at Midwest dairy farming through the eyes of the owners and managers who touch 40,000 of the Hoosier state’s 178,000 cows.
As the first shovels of dirt were turned at the groundbreaking ceremony for the New Holland Pavilions at the Alliant Energy Center in Madison, Wisconsin, the countdown also began.
From that moment on April 11, there are 158 days for construction crews to complete the new 290,000-square-foot pavilions by mid-September, just in time for World Dairy Expo, Sept. 30 through Oct. 4.
With the high level of volatility in milk prices in recent years and even recent months, many people look to other economic indicators and indexes to see if a pattern exists.
In order to get an idea of any correlations, I tracked milk prices with the consumer confidence index, crude oil price, gross domestic product and disposable personal income.
Have you ever hired new employees only to have them leave within a few weeks or months? Unfortunately, this is all too common on our dairies these days.
Employee turnover costs time in having to train multiple new employees, but it also costs your dairy money due to the reduced productivity of both employees and trainers during the training period.
Two dairies that will test-drive a new handheld feedstuff moisture monitor as part of Progressive Dairyman’s first-ever peer technology user group say they want to use and evaluate the device to determine its effectiveness on their farms.
Jim Winn of Cottonwood Dairy in South Wayne, Wisconsin, and Jack Pirtle of P7 Dairy in Roswell, New Mexico, both recently received a new Moisture Tracker from Wisconsin-based Digi-Star.
In a court decision issued late last year, a federal judge determined that soy milk and almond milk are not deceptively labeled. In the judge’s opinion, “even the least-discerning consumers” could readily determine that the products do not contain dairy ingredients. In my opinion, that might be a bit of a stretch. I will claim to have known some not-so-discerning customers.
