We use cookies to provide you with a better experience. By continuing to browse the site you are agreeing to our use of cookies in accordance with our Cookie Policy.
Sue McCloskey and her husband, Mike, run Fair Oaks Farms, a 37,000-cow operation and agritourist park in Indiana. The farm and its cooperative, Select Milk Producers, is working in partnership with Coca-Cola to produce the milk-based product FairLife.
During the year, CWT received 1,285 requests for assistance. CWT provided member cooperatives with assistance on 582 resulting in 102.5 million pounds of Cheddar, Gouda and Monterey Jack cheese, 53.8 million pounds of 82% milkfat content butter and 34.7 million pounds of Whole Milk Powder being sold by CWT member cooperatives.
A comprehensive new resource on feed and animal management is now available for farmers, veterinarians, nutritionists, dairy science educators and other farm experts and advisers.
Considerations & Resources on Feed and Animal Management is the first report to consolidate and synthesize practical information on animal and feed management that improves productivity and profitability while reducing enteric emissions.
Dairy owners and managers from around the country learned about how to improve their hiring practices and build better teams at the most recent PDPW Managers Academy held in Charlotte, North Carolina. More than 80 dairy professionals from 17 states participated in the three-day training.
More than 550 farmers, nutritionists and industry partners recently attended the invitation-only 2015 Leading Producers Conference, Jan. 6-7 in Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin, to address everyday challenges that have a huge impact on today’s diverse dairy farms.
Fluid milk sales continue to be a challenge. Per-capita consumption of fluid milk today is only about two-thirds what it was back in 1970. There has been little good news to report about fluid milk. Fortunately, there is now encouraging news.
Some major dairy companies and cooperatives are stepping out, making a financial investment and seeking new opportunities for fluid milk. These new opportunities include processing, packaging and marketing milk with more protein or extended shelf life.
Thomas Henry Ford created a system wherein he paid five times the standard wage to attract the best of the best. The flip side of this policy was that if you didn’t meet his standards, you got fired.
Under Jack Welch’s leadership in the ’90s, General Electric fired their bottom 10 percent of performers every year. It created a culture of “Whose head is on the platter this week?”
There’s a classic book-turned-movie that has striking parallels between the business of baseball and the business of dairying.
Moneyball tells the story of Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane, who transformed baseball by bucking the traditional approach to the game in favor of numerical analysis that would help his team compete in an “unfair” environment.
Dairy producers are reminded by lenders, consultants and possibly even themselves that it is important to know their cost of production (COP) and what their break-even (BE) is.
Those reminders create a link between the operational and financial management of their operation. This can help them understand where the dairy has been, but more importantly, plan for the overall success of the future of the operation.
What does your marketing plan look like for 2015? As I write this, April 2015 Class III milk futures prices are trading in the neighborhood of $14.40 per hundredweight (cwt), $10 less than the September 2014 Class III peak of $24.60 only seven months earlier.
RSS
