No statistic may be more telling than the fact that 3.41 percent of the dairies produce 50 percent of the milk in the Central Federal Milk Marketing Order. This proportion has tightened significantly since the order's inception in 2000. At that time, approximately 10 percent of the farms marketed 50 percent of the milk, wrote Federal Milk Marketing Order administrators in their December 2015 Marketing Service Bulletin.

On a surface area basis, the Central Order is among the nation's largest with dairy operations sprinkled throughout America's heartland. Those 178 dairy farms that produced half of the milk shed's production include farms located in the following states:

• Colorado, 56 dairy farms
  
• Iowa, 25
  
• Texas, 22
  
• Kansas, 20
  
• New Mexico, 19
  
• Nebraska, 11
  
• South Dakota, 6
  
• Oklahoma, 4
  
• Minnesota, 4
  
• Wisconsin, 4
  
• Illinois, 3
  
• Missouri, 3
  
• Wyoming, 1

Each of these dairy operations shipped over 1.5 million pounds of milk in October 2015. That equates to a tanker load of milk per day. As a point of information, only major portions of milk sheds in Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, Oklahoma, Illinois and Missouri are located in the Central Order.

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(c) Hoard's Dairyman Intel 2016
February 22, 2016