USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service calculates and reports U.S. sales of fluid milk products on a monthly basis, using Federal Order and CDFA data to arrive at a total they believe to represent 92 percent of total U.S. sales. They estimate the remaining 8 percent of sales by using population data for areas not included in the two data series.

After 36 years of teaching at Texas A&M University, Michael Tomaszewski has seen the number of universities with dairy programs decrease. Without a dairy close to his own campus in College Station, Texas, Tomaszewski took his university’s Introduction to Dairy Science course to the Internet in 2008.

In today’s society many things get replaced even if they still work. Dairyman Jake Wedeberg of Gays Mills, Wisconsin, wants to know why farmers are looking into hydrogen, compressed natural gas and electric tractors when the diesel engine is still working effectively. “The original diesel engine that Rudolph Diesel designed was made to run on peanut oil,” Wedeberg says. “His idea was to be self-sufficient on your own farm. Now, 100 years later, we are going back to that same idealism.” As the on-farm sustainability coordinator for Organic Valley Co-op, Wedeberg is passionate about finding new ways to implement renewable resources on as many farms within the farmer-owned co-op as possible.

In 2008, the Chinese government said it would like to increase the recommended daily intake of dairy protein per Chinese citizen from 100g to 300g. Can you guess how many more dairy cows would be needed in China to meet that need? It would be the equivalent of 65 million additional lactating dairy cows in China. What would those numbers look like if we were in the U.S., using higher-producing, more efficient cows? Only 12 million more cows would be needed. I hope when you read those numbers, the first word that comes to your mind is “opportunity” for our dairy industry.

A giant statue of a warrior on horseback stands in the place de Jaude, the central square in Clermont-Ferrand, France. This is no figure sitting on a stationary horse, but of a man with sword drawn, the horse in full gallop. The image is so vivid it is easy to imagine it rapidly moving on. Sculpted by Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, known to Americans as the man who designed the Statute of Liberty, the great rider is Versingetorix, (vers-n-ge-to-rex) “Great Warrior King,” a man that united the Gallic tribes (in what is now more or less France, Switzerland, Austria and Germany) against a foreign invader.