Green County Cheese Days recently celebrated its 100th anniversary, earning the title of the oldest festival in the Midwest. Cheese Days is a three-day festival which takes place only in even-numbered...
It may not seem like it, but times are a changing on the milk price front. After a stellar run in farm-level margins from mid-2013 through 2014, signs are pointing to dramatically reduced margins next...
Agriculture education attracts all types of students for all types of reasons. Both students who plan to enter the workforce after high school and those who advance to a two-year, four-year or postdoctorate...
Highly regarded cartoonist Walt Kelly once penned, "We have met the enemy and he is us." That statement, which appeared in Kelly's long-running cartoon series "Pogo," accurately describes the dysfunction...
This was the question posed to me a week ago by one of my customers as we considered an annual corn by-product feed purchase. He followed with the statement, "I guess I am greedy and want the bottom of...
Editorial: A2 Milk -Myth, Fad or the real deal? Of the questions our staff has fielded from readers over the past year, A2 milk would rank among the most frequent. While nearly no effort has been made...
The dairyman's judge Steve White ranks third all-time, officiating 11 shows at World Dairy Expo. That's the most of any dairy breeder and sits just behind Iowa State's Fred Foreman and Wisconsin's late...
Any way you slice it, Americans enjoy the safest and most abundant food supply in the world. The cherry on top of the ice cream sundae is that American farmers produce that food for our fellow countrymen...
U.S. milk prices are headed lower. At 11:59 p.m. on New Year's Eve, you can say with some certainty that the big ball will drop soon. Likewise, the dairy industry facts are rather clear: U.S. milk prices...
Paris, a 16-year-old Brown Swiss, has set a new record for lifetime pounds of protein and fat produced by a cow in the United States. There is a lot of black and white at Henry Dairy Farms, but a quick...
This volatile business of milking cows has rewarded many of its caretakers with handsome returns. We always must remember this is a business demands a great deal of capital, planning, time and good old-fashioned...
Multiple component pricing has the potential to raise the value of producer milk in the pool. The magnitude of the increase will depend on the solids-nonfat and utilization of milk in manufacturing classes
Beef prices remain at record highs, in part, because the U.S. has the smallest combined beef and dairy herd since 1951. While it's true there were only 87.7 million head of cattle on inventory this past...
The top 25 counties are now home to one-third of the nation's entire dairy herd. That compares to one-fifth of the cows just 20 years ago. With 489,436 cows in the most recent U.S. Census of Agriculture,...
it may not be the leading cause of improved milk production, but behavioral research in Europe has shown that cows that listen to music produce more milk. While it remains a relatively unstudied field,...
The Class III futures market expects $18 prices in early 2015. May's Class III price announcement of $22.67 per hundredweight was just the start of what is likely to be more cuts. Announcement of the $1.74...
We recently heard a presentation from a nutritionist in one of America's largest school districts who was struggling to comply with USDA's school cafeteria requirements. After listening to her discuss...
Despite our growing ability to find a needle in the "foodborne illness" haystack, as a whole, food safety continues to show steady improvement. Foodborne illnesses reported to the Centers for Disease Control...
Will today's record milk prices lead to new price lows? The billion dollar question every dairyman would love to know: how long will these historical milk prices last? In April, USDA announced Class III...