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McDonald’s announcement it would remove chocolate milk and cheeseburgers from its popular Happy Meal menu drew concern and social media traffic from dairy farmers who have helped finance a long-standing partnership between the restaurant chain and Dairy Management Inc. (DMI) through their checkoff dollars. According to DMI Chief Executive Officer Tom Gallagher, the 9-year-old DMI/McDonald’s partnership remains strong, and DMI is working with McDonald’s to get reformulated chocolate milk back as a menu feature.
The reopening of enrollment for 2018 participation in the Margin Protection Program for Dairy (MPP-Dairy) took on additional urgency with the release of milk price and feed cost information for January. Meanwhile, dairy cows culled in January 2018 were the highest monthly total in five years.
The Association of Equipment Manufacturers (AEM) and the Equipment Dealers Association (EDA) announced a new industry commitment to provide a comprehensive set of service information tools for tractors and combines put into service by model year 2021.
A number of independent Corn Silage Hybrid Testing Programs are conducted across the country. Over the past two years the hybrid evaluation trials conducted in New York, Pennsylvania and Vermont have come together to develop a unified testing network.
In a whole farm context the focus on high-quality forage has shifted to the right-quality forage for each group of animals on the farm. This, however, is not an excuse to relax goals on producing high-quality forage. We all know that a number of factors, from weather to equipment breakdowns, can ruin the best of plans.
The dairy and livestock industries have seen continued advances in options available to improve forage management, from crop species and variety selection, to harvest management, to recognizing the class of animals on the farm that will most benefit from different forage types and qualities.
While almost 90 percent of alfalfa acreage in New York is sown with a perennial grass, alfalfa acreage in the rest of the U.S. may average more than 90 percent pure alfalfa. Interest appears to be growing in alfalfa-grass mixtures across the northern tier of states.
Calibration of yield monitors during the harvest season is essential to obtain accurate yield data, but even if calibrated properly, the data obtained from the yield monitors still needs to be cleaned.
The March 12, 2018, issue of Progressive Dairyman features our annual regional snapshots of “the state of dairy” around the U.S. Expanded reports for individual regions are highlighted in this online series.
