Digest Highlights: Whole milk sales stronger in January. Foremost Farms and MMPA formalize alliance. Agriculture ELD waiver extended. Find a summary of this and other news here.

The March 12, 2018, issue of Progressive Dairyman featured our annual regional snapshots of “the state of dairy” around the U.S. Expanded reports for individual regions are highlighted in this online series.

Farming has been the center of the Brooks family heritage for more than 160 years and, with a new facility and the next generation at the helm, the tradition is set to continue.

Farmers know a lot about the microscopic elements affecting the health of their dairy herds and crops. As researchers at the Marshfield Clinic Research Institute in Marshfield, Wisconsin, we are taking a fresh look at agricultural microbiomes (the clusters of bacteria, fungi and viruses that live together) in different farm environments.

It all started with an innocent comment on a Facebook post in a local community group. A young woman was looking for a place in town to start an animal rescue. I politely told her city and county laws dictate that one must own at least 10 acres to house livestock.

The squeeze on dairy profitability has been getting tighter, and the length of this downturn is exhausting both the financial and emotional state of many farms. “What can I do?” is a common question. A key I have seen in my 40-plus years in the industry is that basics are the foundation of the farm profit. In spite of the technological advances in computers, GMOs, drones, etc., the basics mattered yesterday and they still do today. Highly digestible alfalfa is not helpful if you have not soil tested all the fields you work and applied amendments as indicated.

U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-New York), a member of the Senate Agriculture Committee, announced a plan to provide payments to farmers when the national price for milk falls below $23.34 per hundredweight (cwt).

At the recent Midwest Dairy Day, held Dec. 1, 2017, in Calmar, Iowa, four dairy operations shared strategies, tips and protocols for meeting reproduction goals. Three herds have a pregnancy rate of 33 to 34 percent, while one herd has achieved an outstanding 46 percent.

In a winter in search of warmer news for dairy farmers, the U.S. Dairy Export Council (USDEC) released January 2018 sales estimates indicating dairy product exports were up 9 percent compared to the same month a year earlier.

Digest Highlights: Canada’s dairy herd is larger. California’s FMMO is back on track. Milk dumping authority extended in Northeast. Find a summary of this and other news here.