Progressive Dairyman Editor Walt Cooley interviews CWT management staff — Jim Tillison, Chief Operating Officer of Cooperatives Working Together, and Chris Galen, Vice President of Communications of National Milk Producers Federation — about the program's shift toward funding export assistance instead of herd retirements. Q. How and why did CWT first start an export assistance program? A. GALEN: You have to go back to 2003 when CWT was first created to answer this question. There were actually three different elements to CWT in its first year. One of the three, which lasted only a year and was dropped, was paying producers for reducing their milk output, but that didn’t prove to be cost-effective or easy to manage. What we ended up with was a two-sided coin –one being the herd retirement program and the other being the export assistance program. And the reason that we had the export program was, and still is, because it has a more immediate impact than the herd retirement program.

The late Ed Klessig and his wife, Margaret, ran a conventional dairy farm for decades, just as three generations of his family had done before on the same piece of land in eastern Wisconsin. In 1989, at the urging of their two sons and son-in-law, they made the switch to rotational grazing and let their cows out of the barn.

The decision to use pasture as a major source of nutrients for milking cows must be accompanied by a strong commitment to properly managing the pasture. Determining soil fertility status, choosing a fertilization program, selecting appropriate forage species and controlling grazing are important elements of a pasture management program.

Following the dairy financial crisis of 2009, virtually every dairy farmer in America has spent time evaluating strategies to mitigate the impact when rising feed costs and low milk prices drive profit margins into the red. Lowering operating costs is one logical response to the financial squeeze, and it is the reason a growing number of producers have turned their attention toward grazing.

Imagine the air temperature is 115ºF; the pastures have browned from lack of water, the cows are comfortably under roof in freestalls with a grass silage-based TMR, and the sound of magpies pierces the air. This sounds like an ordinary U.S. dairy, doesn’t it?

Pastures have always been, and will continue to be, a source of forages and nutrients for livestock. In the rolling hills and karst topography of the Driftless Area of northeast Iowa and southwest Wisconsin, pastures serve an additional role in soil conservation and water quality protection. Reincorporating pasture into the feeding and management program for the dairy herd is gaining interest. With advances in fencing and watering systems, improvements in forage species, and increasing cost of equipment, one of the best ways to learn about these practices is to witness them first-hand.

There was a time long, long ago, before electric milking machines and refrigeration, before modern technology and the slow disappearance of the farmer, that every dairy cow in the world spent most of its productive life grazing on a pasture.

Utilizing available resources efficiently has become a foundation for successful grazing operations. To effectively produce high-quality milk means more than providing pasture to the milking herd; it also means supplying a balanced ration alongside high-quality forages. Supplementing grazing cattle diets has the ability to achieve both of these goals.