As any experienced litigator will tell you, how a lawsuit and what it is fought over differs from why you are in court in the first place. When it comes to court challenges to administrative decisions, the difference between what happened in the rulemaking and the litigation can be even more different. So it was in the court challenge to the recent USDA decision to shift a quarter of a billion dollars from the pockets of producers to processors. A group of seven dairy cooperatives, United Dairymen of Arizona, Select Milk Producers, Zia Milk Producers, Lone Star Milk Producers, Arkansas Dairy Cooperative Association, Maryland Virginia Milk Producers and Continental Dairy Products, along with two producers, sued USDA to stop its implementation of higher make allowances. After being first in U.S. District Court and then the Court of Appeals hours later, both courts denied the demand for an injunction.

I can’t help but wonder how it must have felt for the Pilgrims to have stood on Plymouth Rock and gazed out into the vast gray ocean as the windswept waves slapped the shores of a freezing, uninviting wilderness.

Many years ago while I was involved in the dairy business, a most interesting thing took place. Naturally it involved a bit of questionable judgment that compounded itself, and things got worse.

After my stories earlier this year about my dad shooting that stray dog and about him losing 10 heifers to lightning, he’s asked me to stop writing about him (or at least write something good.) Unfortunately, I can’t do either. I do know that he took a few days off to go to World Dairy Expo this year. That usually guarantees he’ll start seeing smoke signals for help about the time he gets to his hotel.

One of the predominant themes of many of my columns has been the relationship between art and science. The discussion is a perennial one. And there are as many answers as there are questions.

This issue I’d like to share with you two of my recent reflections.

This is how it’s played. You choose sides. Each team grabs hold of one end of a sturdy rope that is stretched across the pig mire pond. When the judge says go, you dig your heels in the dirt and pull. The strongest team will pull the weaker team into the pig mire. That’s how it is with tug of war.

In this third installment of my assignment in Russia, I write of a single day of visiting Russian monasteries.

There’s no hiding it. In this issue, we’re showing others our true colors –our dairy colors.

We have created the Proud to Dairy logo as a symbol of respect for forward-thinking dairy producers and their families. This logo represents dairymen and women sharing and exemplifying dairying’s fundamental values of hard work, persistence, ingenuity, honesty and homegrown success.