During the Dark Ages, when I was in seventh grade at Heber School, I was required to memorize the Gettysburg Address. I puzzled over the meanings and archaic mentions of time.

Dear Editor & Fellow Dairymen, We will soon be facing the most important decision our industry has had to make in the last 50 years. I ask that you give the following thoughts some very careful consideration. All over our country our dairy leaders are suggesting milk quotas and coming up with complicated plans to cut back our production so as to improve milk prices. They are promoting their plans as a quest for price stability (a worthy goal), but price enhancement is really their main goal, just as it was in their CWT effort.

At the end of April, we began a one-of-a-kind Progressive Dairyman straw poll, asking dairy producers to evaluate and choose the dairy reform plan they support most for needed industry reform.

(Click here to listen to the podcast of this column.) A few weeks ago, I was privileged to act as a merit badge councilor for a group of Boy Scouts. I have been a merit badge councilor for Citizenship in the Nation (a merit badge) for over twenty years. I went to the dentist the other day to get a root canal, and the young dentist said, “Do you remember when you taught us about the Constitution in Boy Scouts?”

In 18 years of writing this column, I have written of journeys all over the world, some as short as a month and then a recent one as long as 16 months in Iraq. They tell the story of an agricultural scientist at work. I have answered the call to service and gone into the world to seek and effect change. You have read of stories in Europe, Asia, Latin America, the Caucuses and the Middle East.

When New Zealand holds its annual agricultural exhibition, one of similar size and exposure to our World Ag Expo show, the minister of agriculture makes an appearance. And sometimes more than just a one-day, couple of hours’ appearance. This past year he was on the Fieldays show grounds twice during the four-day event.

A few years ago country music duo Brooks & Dunn released a song called Only in America. The premise is that only in America can a regular kid grow up to be whatever he or she dreams possible. They sing that it’s only here “where we dream as big as we want to, we all get a chance, everybody gets to dance.” I always love hearing what kids want to be when they grow up. The answers range from pro athlete, U.S. president, fire fighter, doctor, movie star and everything in between. It’s great to see that the notion of “limited potential” has never occurred to them.

The following are responses by producers and industry experts who participated as panelists or provided testimony at the Department of Justice/USDA antitrust hearing in Madison, Wisconsin, June 25. What good may come from the USDA/DOJ workshop? I believe that it was very significant to the future of our dairy industry that Secretary Vilsack and Attorney General Holder recognized the importance of conducting workshops, such as the one held in Madison, Wisconsin. This event provided representatives of our industry an opportunity to focus the attention of our public officials, in addition to everyone in our industry, on their views about the critical issues we need to solve in order to restore economic stability to our industry.

(Click here to listen to the podcast of this column.) Last November, my niece, Annette, lost her son in an unforeseen accident. He went to bed one night and choked on a piece of candy. A shock like that is hard to get over. One day, he is alive full of mischief and teenage emotion, and the next day he is gone.

I departed Iraq nearly two weeks ago. After three days in Washington, D.C., at our USDA national headquarters, I went home to Alma, Michigan.