Each day, folks across the country head to the grocery store to purchase food to feed their families. A look in the shopping carts will show Americans love their dairy products, which they should. Study after study has shown these tasty products deliver serious health benefits, yet the industry is at the brink of collapse from a lack of secure, reliable labor.

If you give a kid a halter, he’ll ask for a calf. Because who wants to jump rope with a halter? It’s best used to walk a calf around. If you give a kid a calf, he’ll ask for some feed. After all, calves are like you and me. They need plenty of food and water to grow big and beautiful.

One day in late July, our neighbor’s field started on fire. He was baling wheat straw, and it has been an extremely dry year in Michigan. A tiny spark started almost an entire field on fire, and it almost burned down a house and barn next to the field.

Cooper Miles Moore joined our brood of little farm boys on April 28. Eight days later, I was more than ready to get back in the barn and get back to normal life. Here we are, nearly three months later, and Mr. Cooper still isn’t the farming type. I swear, no matter what we try, that little guy is one step ahead of us.

For this issue, I set out to feature two dairies’ cross-ventilated barns. I went out to visit them with an agenda: to write an article about each one, highlighting their newly constructed barn.

I am more and more disturbed at the amount of people who are campaigning for a professed socialist. Do they even know what it means to be a socialist? I wonder if they know what kind of society we would live in if capitalism was abandoned and socialism was adopted.

There’s a danger that lurks in the Irish countryside. A hazard waiting latent under the gray skies as one passes the seemingly quiet stone houses, covert with peril. Something that has victimized all those who live there. Something few are spared from.

I think we all have that handful of Facebook friends who share everything that has ever been posted about dairy. Health benefits of milk? Share! New research on the positives of GMOs? Share! Cute cow photo? Share! Well I will let you in on a little secret – I am that friend. Yes, that is right. Take a look at my social media pages.

As a kid, I would see pictures of big, new, shiny tractors in the magazines and remember thinking, “One day, I’ll have one of those.” Now, 40-plus years later, I have the willpower to breeze right over those advertisements – because I could never afford one.

The road to the milk pricing transparency provided by Pennsylvania House Bill 1265 has been a lonely one for the state’s dairy farmers. Many of the farm groups and organizations, which supposedly exist to serve and represent the interests of farmers, have chosen to remain silent and not take a position. Some groups, such as PennAg Industries Association, have even taken the official position of opposing this bill.