Digest Highlights

• Milk featured on fewer than 50% of top 200 restaurant chains’ kids’ menus
• Cover crop, prevent plant acreage jumps
• Non-real estate farm loans getting bigger, with longer terms
• Wisconsin dairy generates $45.6 billion in economic impact
• Idaho Milk Products expands Jerome facility
• Penn State Extension offers online ’milking practices’ course

Your best employee should be in charge of feeding your herd, including weighing, mixing, delivery and monitoring rations. This individual can make or break the feeding program, rumen health and profitability.

Over his lifetime of farming the fertile soils of southeastern Wisconsin, Mike Walter has noticed a trend: wetter weather. However, he’s found a way to outsmart Mother Nature.

The USDA’s latest milk production forecasts for both 2019 and 2020 were reduced, based on expectations of a smaller dairy herd and slower growth in milk per cow. As a result, price projections were increased slightly for 2019, with further improvement in 2020, based on USDA’s monthly World Ag Supply and Demand Estimates (WASDE) report, released Aug. 12.

It was early in the evening on Thursday, Sept. 20. Members of the Meyer family were catching up on various tasks. They had put in a long day on Wednesday, harvesting, packing and covering their corn silage crop ahead of rain in the forecast.

Last year brought no new entries to Rabobank’s list of the 2019 “Global Dairy Top 20” companies, although there was some reshuffling due to lower commodity prices, adverse weather in some key exporting regions and shifts in currency strength. Mergers and acquisitions were again the avenue for growth, according to the report’s authors, Rabobank dairy analyst Saskia van Battum and global dairy strategist Mary Ledman.

More than a year ago, I received a random direct message (DM) on Instagram. It was from a female farmer out in California who I had never met. She asked if I wanted to join a female farmer group. If I am being honest, it was pretty random. (We laugh about this now.) Why would I want to join a group of women I had never met? But, I thought, “What the heck? I am a millennial. Why not make friends with random strangers on the internet?” So that’s when I decided to say yes to joining the group!

Having the peace of mind that your dairy facility is properly designed and engineered should be a priority to anyone in the industry. After the April 2018 snowstorm the Midwest endured, engineering of dairy housing structures has been a hot topic.

Digest Highlights

• Dairy Margin Coverage payments near $200 million
• Global Dairy Trade index falls
• Dairy margins end July stronger
• Chapter 12 bankruptcy filings up; bill raises debt limit
• Kentucky Dairy Development Council offers DMC premium incentive
• CMAB seeks to accelerate fluid milk innovation
• PMMB releases dairy producer survey results
• New York dairy promotion order board seeks proposals
• Wonder Why Farm cited by University of Vermont Extension
• Next week: Crop production, WASDE updates

With improving milk prices, average prices paid for dairy replacement cows came off the floor, based on the USDA’s quarterly estimates.