A native New Yorker, Ron St. John came to North Central Florida in 1986, and has blazed a trail of innovation and expansion in dairy farming ever since. St. John lives in Trenton, Florida. He owns five dairy farms, including two in Georgia, and has a new one under construction in Florida. As a result of his dairy farming success, St. John has been selected as the 2011 Florida winner of the Swisher Sweets/Sunbelt Expo Southeastern Farmer of the Year award. St. John now joins eight other state winners from the Southeast as finalists for the award. The overall winner will be announced on Tuesday, Oct. 18 at the Sunbelt Ag Expo farm show in Moultrie, Georgia.

Dairy farmer Mac Pate of Maryville, Tennessee, is 85 years young. Though he has slowed down some in recent years, he still has the drive and energy that helped him develop and maintain an outstanding dairy farm. As a result of his long success as a dairy farmer, Pate has been selected as the 2011 Tennessee winner of the Swisher Sweets/Sunbelt Expo Southeastern Farmer of the Year award. Pate now joins eight other state winners from the Southeast as finalists for the award. The overall winner will be announced on Tuesday, Oct. 18, at the Sunbelt Ag Expo farm show in Moultrie, Georgia. Milk production is excellent, now at about 27,000 pounds of milk per cow per year, down a bit from a peak of 29,000 pounds. At the peak, his 200 cows produced 5.8 million pounds per year. “For two months, our cows produced more than 100 pounds of milk per cow per day,” he adds.

David Areias was recently named Ruan Transportation Management Systems’ 2010 Driver of the Year after being selected from a pool of more than 3,700 professional drivers. Areias, who operates out of Ruan’s Turlock, California, terminal, and lives in Los Banos, California, has been with Ruan since 2006 and has logged more than 2 million miles during his 40 years as a professional truck driver. Areias said he was surprised and honored to be nominated for the recognition because Ruan has many exceptional drivers. “You learn something new every day,” Areias said about being a professional truck driver. “Safety is my No. 1 concern. I want to go home to family every night.”

The Cunard Line’s Queen Elizabeth II, like all cruise ships, is an entertainment venue on the high seas. Center stage for the QE II is the Grand Lounge, a two-story room with a stage at one end. Passengers enjoy the evening entertainment or nightly dance 65 feet above the waterline. On September 11, 1995, a different show occurred in the room. As the ship crossed rough Atlantic seas, a wave hit the windows of the Grand Lounge, crushing them. Less than a quarter of an hour later, Captain R.W. Warwick saw what he later described as the “white cliffs of Dover” straight ahead of the ship.

Dairy producers have continued to see favorable profit margins since the end of the first quarter. While feed costs have been climbing, this has been more than offset by higher milk prices so that the overall profit margin has held steady and even managed to improve through the second quarter of 2011 (see chart at right). This certainly is a welcome development as dairymen struggle to build back lost equity over the past few years in what has been a brutal period of negative margins for the industry.