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It isn’t every day that a simple concept replaces a management practice that has been carried out for many years in the dairy industry.
California, the country’s largest dairy state, became the first state in the U.S. to ban tail docking of dairy cattle in early 2010 as a way to improve animal welfare.
When the bill was signed into law in January of 2010, California dairy producers were no longer able to “dock” or amputate the tails of dairy cattle, which created a need for other alternatives.
USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service calculates and reports U.S. sales of fluid milk products on a monthly basis, using Federal Order and CDFA data to arrive at a total they believe to represent 92 percent of total U.S. sales.
They estimate the remaining 8 percent of sales by using population data for areas not included in the two data series.
On Sept. 8, the House Agriculture Committee’s Subcommittee on Livestock, Dairy and Poultry held an audit hearing to examine U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) dairy programs. This is the 10th hearing in the series on farm policy that is designed to provide oversight of current spending to ensure programs are delivered effectively.
Current dairy programs include the Dairy Product Price Support Program (DPPSP), Milk Income Loss Contract (MILC) Program, Dairy Export Incentive Program (DEIP), Livestock Gross Margin Insurance for Dairy (LGM-Dairy), and Federal Milk Marketing Orders (FMMOs).
After 36 years of teaching at Texas A&M University, Michael Tomaszewski has seen the number of universities with dairy programs decrease.
Without a dairy close to his own campus in College Station, Texas, Tomaszewski took his university’s Introduction to Dairy Science course to the Internet in 2008.
In today’s society many things get replaced even if they still work. Dairyman Jake Wedeberg of Gays Mills, Wisconsin, wants to know why farmers are looking into hydrogen, compressed natural gas and electric tractors when the diesel engine is still working effectively.
“The original diesel engine that Rudolph Diesel designed was made to run on peanut oil,” Wedeberg says. “His idea was to be self-sufficient on your own farm. Now, 100 years later, we are going back to that same idealism.”
As the on-farm sustainability coordinator for Organic Valley Co-op, Wedeberg is passionate about finding new ways to implement renewable resources on as many farms within the farmer-owned co-op as possible.
A number of factors have come together to provide unique circumstances that may be beneficial to both buyers and sellers of agricultural land: Strong demand for land, interest rates at almost all-time lows and long-term federal capital gains tax rates not seen since 1933 are all involved. Let’s take a look at these factors.
Demand for land Interest in farmland is rising globally. Population growth, rising incomes and migration from rural areas to urban locations is driving demand for food products, oilseed and livestock.
Is it possible that you can be a loyal employee to a great company but yet feel that you don’t want to work there any longer? This happened several years ago to an acquaintance of mine.
I would like to relate what happened to him to see if there are any life lessons we can learn.
Some years ago, my friend applied for a herdsman position on a 500-cow dairy. The farm visit went well, as both parties asked questions back and forth.
When it comes to hiring a new employee, what are the top three traits you’re looking for? Do these traits differ between entry-level positions and middle management? And finally, how did you decide which traits are most important?
The desired characteristics for choosing employees is probably almost endless, so I won’t bother trying to provide a comprehensive list of possible choices. And I also won’t claim that there are any right or wrong answers to the above questions (although I’m a huge fan of trustworthy, productive and disciplined) ... that’s up to you to decide.
The following is the second article in a series about different activity monitoring systems currently being used on dairy operations. Click here to read the first article in the series, "Activity monitoring system researcher: ‘This is the right way’"
In 2008, the Chinese government said it would like to increase the recommended daily intake of dairy protein per Chinese citizen from 100g to 300g. Can you guess how many more dairy cows would be needed in China to meet that need? It would be the equivalent of 65 million additional lactating dairy cows in China.
What would those numbers look like if we were in the U.S., using higher-producing, more efficient cows? Only 12 million more cows would be needed. I hope when you read those numbers, the first word that comes to your mind is “opportunity” for our dairy industry.
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