The following update is provided by Dairy Management Inc. (DMI), which manages the national dairy checkoff program, and is a producer-funded, nonprofit domestic and international planning and management organization responsible for increasing sales of and demand for U.S.-produced dairy products and ingredients. Managing dairy’s reputation on a global scale One of the prime features of the U.S. Dairy Export Council (USDEC), managed by Dairy Management Inc., is USDEC’s network of overseas office representatives. In addition to providing valuable marketing and trade-development support around the world, these reps serve as the eyes and ears for the U.S. industry beyond our borders.

Here is the charge: “The Chicago Mercantile Exchange cash cheese market is responsible for the failure of milk prices over the last several years.” Those making the charge claim the CME is “thin” with less than 1 percent of cheese priced through its market. Other charges include shady prices when there is no trade (unfilled higher bids and uncovered lower offers) and few market players. Those two elements combined result in the opportunity, if not actuality, of cheese price manipulation and, through that, milk. The CME and its supporters respond that the cash cheese market represents a perfectly honest method to handle the spot market needs by being a market of last resort for buyers and sellers of cheese. It reports actual activity and represents a price for spot cheese and nothing more. What others do with the information is their choice.

Over the past 10 years, we’ve seen every TV network focus a lot of its new programming on reality shows. I don’t watch a lot of TV, and I’m not a huge fan of most reality shows. But in the past couple of years, I’ll admit that I’ve come to enjoy some of the reality-based shows on the “Big 3” networks. The ones that have caught my attention recently are Extreme Home Makeover, Undercover Boss, and The Biggest Loser. I don’t have time to watch all of them, but I’ll admit that my DVR is set to record Undercover Boss whenever it’s on! In every one of these shows, the main characters reach out to ordinary people who are struggling to fulfill a dream, get back on their feet or regain control of their lives. Sure, some of these shows have been criticized for the way they “overdo” the assistance they provide. And I’ll admit, I tend to agree sometimes. But generally speaking, these shows set out to give the underdog an opportunity that wouldn’t usually be available to them.

Many dairy producers think through their business decisions using some kind of “what if” scenario. For example, “what if I change the ration, and then hot weather hits?” It’s a type of thinking that helps to remove the emotional bias. This method weighs the pros and cons of a decision by projecting a real dollars-and-cents outcome. Partial budgets are a handy tool that can help you make specific decisions about your dairy. They can be performed on a multitude of decisions, including feed program changes, reproduction programs, cropping operation’s enterprise effects on the dairy and so on. The economic power these that spreadsheets (or handwritten budgets) have on a dairy can be a very useful, and sometimes eye-opening, event.

As dairy producers search for solutions to ongoing reproductive challenges, nutrition remains one of the leading avenues to improve breeding pen success. New research presented at the 2010 ADSA meetings by Drs. Jose Santos, Bill Thatcher and Charlie Staples, reported new results further linking nutrition to production performance, reproductive success and health through essential fatty acid (EFA) supplementation.

Dairy producers many times find themselves in a balancing act when striving to maximize their reproductive and nutrition programs. Nutritional deficiencies and ration imbalances can lead to poor reproduction performance, but there are also many other factors to consider before altering your current nutrition program. Poor reproduction performance can also be the result of poor heat detection, time of insemination, insemination practices, diseases, toxins and other management-related problems.