Year after year, we listen to Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and swoon with wonder at his understanding of the human condition. The three ghosts, Christmas Past, Christmas Present and Christmas Future, come to all of us in some form or another. In the autumn of my life, I am plagued with all three at one time.

As our industry’s main events – such as World Dairy Expo, NAILE, NDB/NMPF/UDIA joint annual meeting, the Dairy Girl Network Forward TogetHER and more fall conferences and events than I can type – come to a close, we gear up for year-end and the holiday season.

In 1939, Patrick Kavanagh left his farm in County Monaghan, Ireland, and moved to Dublin to become a writer. When he was young, he would recite poetry while working in the fields or scribble down ideas for his own poems while attending to other farming chores.

It’s Christmas time. ’Tis the season to be jolly. I want all of you to be as jolly as possible. So, naturally, I have some tips to help ya’ll get through the holiday season unscathed.

As Noah said when he went out on the deck to check the windshield wipers, “I should’a brought a raincoat.” Paul’s day started out with a drum roll. Every morning for months, as he went into the machine shed, he noticed the rusty gate hinge on the door jamb.

As 2018 comes to a close, I’ve been asked to write about “balancing cow comfort and the bottom line.” This has certainly been a year when the focus has needed to be on making sure your operation was in balance, and there have been enough curve balls to test it.

Celebrating 10 years of Top 25: The top 25 of 2018 For a decade, Progressive Dairyman has presented readers with an annual list of the top 25 best-performing articles. In those 10 years, our online readership has increased nearly 2,000 percent.

U.S. dairy product exports were virtually flat on both a volume and value basis in October, undermined by a continued loss of sales to China, according to Al Levitt, vice president of communications and market analysis at the U.S. Dairy Export Council (USDEC).

Farm transitioning can be a very stressful time. Change is never ceasing, but it still comes with more than a little heartburn for those of us who have been in the production side of agriculture on the same piece of the earth for more than a few years.

A final rule giving schools greater flexibility in the varieties of milk offered to students could be in place by mid-March, in time to make milk-purchasing decisions for the 2019-20 school year.