Starting a risk management plan can be a daunting task for many dairy producers. You spend most of your time focusing on cow management – maximizing milk production, reproduction, cow comfort and cow health. You fix equipment, plan this year’s crop rotation and buy next month’s loads of cottonseed or hay. Suddenly, you’re being asked about your risk tolerance, futures contracts, long puts and short calls. It’s not an easy or natural transition for most.

Rain poured down continuously from leaden skies overhead. Inside the calf nursery, the newest babies were settling down to rest after guzzling down their breakfast bottles. The bawling of older ones, impatient for their shares of morning milk and fresh feed, partially drowned out the staccato hammering of raindrops pounding the barn’s metal roof. Sheltered from the deluge only by a red, plastic rain poncho, I swooped from the nursery like a crimson Batman, swiftly slipping warm bottles of milk into holders on the pens of the outside calf condos. A yard-wide stream flowed past the nursery door, requiring a leap over the runoff to feed a final round of morning hay to the weaned calves in the barn on the opposite side.

Foreign dairy farmers who invest at least $500,000 to establish a U.S. dairy operation can qualify for permanent residence based on their investment. Many Dutch and Canadian dairy farmers have sold their farms and milk quotas during the last two decades to invest significant amounts of capital into the U.S. rural economy in order to build large dairy operations in this country. They typically enter the U.S. as temporary investors after buying underutilized rural property, building new infrastructure and hiring U.S. workers.

to access that content and to see comments already received on this topic. Yes: Eastleigh Farm is one of the last remaining dairies within city limits in Massachusetts. If not for our sales of fresh raw milk to consumers, this beautiful farm would have been lost to the pressures of development, just as has happened to so many other farms all over the country.

Per-capita fluid milk consumption in the U.S. has been in decline for a number of years. Progressive Dairyman Editor Walt Cooley recently asked Dairy Management, Inc. CEO Tom Gallagher why fluid milk consumption is in decline and what can be done to reverse the trend. Q. Why is fluid milk consumption declining? A. GALLAGHER: It’s a fact that for all but one of the last 25-plus years, per-capita milk consumption has declined. There are a lot of people who operate under the myth that the fluid market is a mature market and it’s just not capable of growing. That’s just not true.

Not many organizations, or couples for that matter, get to celebrate a 75th or “diamond” anniversary. But in Thornton, Colorado, this June, appropriately during “Dairy Month,” the Western Dairy Association (WDA) will celebrate 75 years of regional dairy farmer-directed promotion, research and nutrition education.