Nearly 1,400 people from 26 states and five countries gathered in Madison, Wisconsin, last week for the Professional Dairy Producers of Wisconsin Business Conference. With “Innovation” as the theme, dairy producers and allied industry shared ideas through educational sessions and the Hall of Ideas trade show. All great ideas and innovations come with a little inspiration. To provide that at the 2012 event was Donald Driver of the Green Bay Packers football team.

This article was #19 of the Top 25 most well-read articles on www.progressivedairy.com in 2012. to jump to the article. It was published in the March 21, 2012 issue. Click here for the full list of the Top 25. Progressive Dairyman Editor Walt Cooley interviewed the then-new CEO of California Dairies, Inc., Andrei Mikhalevsky. The former Fonterra executive shared his views on both export and domestic opportunities for the U.S. dairy industry.

The old adage of farming being a “way of life” no longer rings completely true. Farming is very much a business these days, much like any manufacturing or service industry in town. Even the smallest dairy operations can show assets in excess of $1 million, as milk quota, in many cases with this size of unit, is the main contributor to the farm balance sheet.

Grooming has considerable biological importance to cows. The most obvious importance is in reduction of the number of parasites and organisms on the cow’s coat. However, there is more to grooming than just the obvious. Grooming is actually a social activity for cows. It allows cows to bond with their herdmates and reduces the impact of the boss cow/submissive cow hierarchy within the herd.

With a name like World Ag Expo, the event is bound to attract people from all over. While there, Progressive Dairyman met up with Meerten and Anita Zeldenrust from Barrhead, Alberta. They had traveled to Tulare, California, as part of a tour group. Each spring, Meerten and Anita like to travel to a destination outside Canada. When they saw an advertisement in Progressive Dairyman announcing a trip to California for the World Ag Expo organized by Ken Natzke Travel, they decided to give it a try.

The global food system needs to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels to succeed in feeding a growing world population, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) said. “There is justifiable concern that the current dependence of the food sector on fossil fuels may limit the sector’s ability to meet global food demands. The challenge is to decouple food prices from fluctuating and rising fossil fuel prices,” according to an FAO paper published during the UN Conference on Climate Change.

Soon after being named editor of Progressive Dairyman more than five years ago, my first assignment was to travel with a bus tour through the Midwest en route to World Dairy Expo. I remember sitting on the bed in my hotel room the night before the tour started, feeling anxious as to whether I would be able to write something about the tour that would be new and noteworthy. I wanted our coverage to stand out. But what made me nervous was that this assignment wasn’t the most obviously newsworthy event. It wasn’t the first-ever bus tour dairymen had organized nor was it the first-ever dairy exhibition that I was headed to. This was World Dairy Expo; hundreds of stories have been written about it already.

When the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) was passed in 1938, it provided federal restrictions on the employment of children in private employment, including agriculture. The nonagricultural child labor provisions of the FLSA apply to youth under the age of 18. The agricultural provisions of the FLSA only apply to youth under the age of 16. For the past several years, the Department of Labor has been reviewing the federal child labor regulations.

Jeff Nonay is a third-generation dairy farmer in Alberta. His grandfather’s family business grew to include his father, Dave, and his uncle, Dan, and moved to its present location near Legal – 30 kilometres north of Edmonton – in 1976. At that time it was incorporated as Lakeside Dairy Ltd. Jeff joined the corporation in 2001 and moved up to president in 2007, a position he still holds. Jeff’s sister, Stephanie, is expected to join within the next year. According to Jeff, she “has earned her way to participate on the ownership level.”