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This past summer, Eastern Washington representative Alan Yost joined an extremely elite group of industry professionals by selling his one millionth unit of semen. Alan becomes only the 23rd semen sales representative in the history of the A.I. industry to reach this level of sales and may very well be one of the youngest to accomplish this feat.
Alan began his career with All West in June of 1986 while attending Washington State University. He began by working as a relief technician in the Sunnyside area of Eastern Washington until his graduation in December 1989. For the next two years Alan was the ‘go to’ guy breeding cows and filling in on sales routes in Eastern Washington. He began as a full-time technician in 1992 and bred cows for the next four years in the Yakima/Sunnyside region. It was January 1996 that Alan was promoted to full-time sales representative, and has been doing so for the past 14 years.
As we enter the fall months of the year, it appears that we finally have milk pricing that would put us in the black once again, but how long will it last? We are already seeing the Class III market on the CME fall below the cost of production for the first six months of 2011.
Beginning in 2009, we have endured unprecedented losses. For approximately 10 months, we experienced losses averaging $5 per hundredweight (cwt), which was followed by another eight months of less than breakeven prices. We have seen our cow loans stretched to the maximum, our feed loans out of compliance, our property values falling below desirable levels and our cow values falling as well.
At the 61st annual meeting of the National Dairy Shrine, Mary Shank Creek, an Ayrshire breeder and dairy producer from Hagerstown, Maryland, was elected president of the organization. Meanwhile, Erick Metzger, the manager of National All Jersey from Reynoldsburg, Ohio was chosen president-elect. Elected to the executive committee along with Creek and Metzger were: Dale Olver, University Park, Pennsylvania; Ken Crandall, Provo, Utah; Maggy Murphy, Summerfield, Florida; and immediate past president Corey Geiger, Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin. The National Dairy Shrine board of directors consists of 21 members. This year, two new directors were elected to the board. They included Nancy Feeney, Davenport, Iowa and Fred Hendricks, Bucyrus, Ohio.
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