Time is so valuable; time might be our most valuable possession because it has a finite limit. It can’t be manufactured or remodeled. It is spent and it is gone. While I recuperate from hip replacement surgery, I have some time to reflect on some topics that aren’t as easy to capture on paper regarding farming.

Digest Highlights: Wisconsin snowstorm losses mount. California FMMO timeline summarized. AMPI sets news cheese output record. Several processors plan expansions. Find a summary of this and other news here.

Milk production quota in five eastern Canadian provinces will be rolled back effective May 1 over fears of rising butter stocks.

People are pretty crafty when it comes to scheming up ways to receive a check for doing nothing. For the most part, farm kids are above quitting a job and looking for a handout. But with the pool of qualified available talent shrinking and the number of farms depending on labor outside of the immediate family increasing, it makes sense to put some rules in place for dealing with labor.

Rabobank’s Dairy Quarterly Q1 Report provides a current snapshot of seven major dairy regions of the world, as well as things to watch for in the second and third quarters of 2018.

Some dairy producers could see total 2018 Margin Protection Program for Dairy (MPP-Dairy) premium payments recouped within two months.

U.S. milk production posted a more modest 1.3 percent year-over-year increase in March, but the subplot in the story was the USDA’s reduction in cow numbers and milk production retroactively to the start of the year.

Editor’s note: A version of this article also appeared in Holistic Management International’s In Practice magazine. Aldo Leopold is one of my favorite ecological thinkers. Leopold was an internationally recognized ecologist and conservationist who lived and worked all over the world, but whose work was particularly inspired by the landscape of the farm he owned along the Wisconsin River. Although I grew up in the corn country of central Illinois, I was drawn as a young adult to this landscape and have made Wisconsin my home for going on 40 years.

Being the first farmer in New Jersey to begin bottling fluid milk for direct sales, bringing bottling back to the state after a decade-long absence, is quite the accomplishment for young dairy farmer Jared Weeks. Weeks, along with his wife, Treacy, owns Hun-Val Dairy in Hunterdon County. The dairy began bottling their own fluid milk in 2015 and expanded into ice cream, exclusively made with milk from their herd.

Dairy farmers are digging out from the treacherous late winter storm that dumped nearly 3 feet of snow in parts of the Upper Midwest last weekend.