If you were at World Dairy Expo last year, chances are you saw a bright yellow self-propelled mixer wagon on display. After all, the mixer was the first of its kind to touch American soil, coming all the way from Italy.

Until April 2015, European dairy farmers were producing milk under a quota system, with Dutch dairy farmers being no exception.

When Diana Mallett knelt in the straw in a dairy barn in Arizona and lifted her camera to take a shot, little did she know that the moment she was about to capture would soon be seen across the world.

Dairying in the West has its own set of advantages and disadvantages, and Steve Maddox shared those as he spoke to more than 450 dairy industry enthusiasts at the Great Lakes Regional Dairy Conference held in Mount Pleasant, Michigan, earlier this year.

When T.J. McClure joined a start-up dairy heifer operation in the heart of beef cattle country during the devastating dairy down cycle of 2009, people thought he had lost his mind.

When Tullando Farm in Orford, New Hampshire, installed robots in fall 2012, it became the first robotic dairy in New Hampshire.

Wolfe’s Neck Farm in Freeport, Maine, purchased a mobile milking parlor after recognizing its potential to advance U.S. organic dairy production. However, that potential – like the machine itself – is stagnant.

At April Ridge Genetics Center, the view can’t be beat. “I love seeing the best of the breeding program right here,” Ed Peck says, looking out over his livestock from a loft viewing window at his genetics facility near Mount Horeb, Wisconsin.

In Purity and Danger, a classic book on social anthropology published in 1963, Mary Douglas points out how distinctions in many societies between “clean” and “unclean” are really about what is considered out of place. And these boundaries – like borders between countries – can be quite arbitrary.

The day after Christmas, the aptly named winter storm Goliath blew its way through the Southern Plains states. The snow and 80-mph wind ravaged dairy country in Texas and New Mexico. Like winter storm Atlas two years ago, this storm hit the agricultural community hard.