On a recent Sunday, I was listening to a Packers game on the radio while driving home from a family wedding. The radio feed was from the local Green Bay broadcast and included local commercials that are not usually broadcast on national coverage. One of the commercials that aired was from the Wisconsin Corn Growers Association and related specifically to ethanol and its impacts on feed prices.

Our federal Constitution, now closing in on 230 years since its drafting, stands as a sterling exemplar of how a carefully drafted framework of guiding principles can serve as a long-term framework for governance, even as the society that it governs continues to develop and evolve.

For decades, farmers across all of agriculture have become accustomed to an exemption from paying workers overtime. Generally, employers are obligated to pay their workers wages in excess of the federal minimum wage and to pay one-and-a-half times that minimum wage for all hours worked over 40 per week.

On January 9, 2013, the USDA published a final rule on animal traceability. This final rule resulted from several years of the USDA’s attempt to craft regulations that would allow for effective disease monitoring and outbreak prevention, while balancing the impact on farmers and ranchers. The final rule took effect on March 11, 2013.

The new Congress has brought with it a rather significant shift in political attitudes toward a comprehensive immigration reform package. Before the November elections, immigration was not on the radar screen. Targeted bills were receiving little attention, and comprehensive solutions were more or less dead on arrival. But in the wake of the President’s re-election, there were open discussions about the margins by which Hispanic voters supported Democrats. Going back to the election of 2000, President Bush received 31 percent of the Hispanic vote.

In November, a California superior court judge refused to find that the California Department of Food and Agriculture (“CDFA”) failed to follow the law in establishing the prices for milk used in the production of cheese. The decision has many producers confused. Let’s try to look at the lawsuit and explain exactly what the court decided.

Heading into the presidential and Congressional elections, dairymen and farmers in general are without a farm bill. The Senate passed its version of the bill in April. And the House Agriculture Committee sent its version of the legislation to the full House for consideration in June. Despite what appears to be sufficient support to get the bill passed out of the House, the bill has not yet made it to the floor for debate or a vote. Rather than discuss the different reasons why House leadership has failed to bring the Farm Bill up for a vote (just file that under “politics”), I want to focus on what the failure to pass a farm bill means for dairy and why an extension of the current bill is probably the last thing dairy farmers need right now.

In early August, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit revived a class-action lawsuit brought by dairy farmers against DairyAmerica and California Dairies, Inc. If this general issue sounds a little familiar, that is probably because the misreporting of nonfat dry milk prices and the effects on producer income was a well-covered topic several years ago when the issue was first uncovered. I am not one to presume anything about another’s background knowledge, especially about events that occurred over six years ago or about matters involving topics as arcane as milk pricing and federal civil procedure. So here is a short primer on what DairyAmerica and CDI allegedly did wrong, why this matters to dairy farmers and what the Ninth Circuit’s recent opinion means to the lawsuit.