Late last month, the entire Hoard Guernsey herd was appraised as part of June's scheduled rotation in Wisconsin. The youngest cow to receive a score was Dairyman Ben Neater, #1167. She calved on May 31...

Dairy markets are beginning to improve according to the Dairy Market News for the week of July 26-30, 2010. Both class and component prices for July 2010 under the Federal Milk Order pricing system are...

Taking the nation as a whole, milk production was up 2.4 in June compared to a year earlier. In the top 23 states, milk output was up 2.7 percent. Milk production has been on the rise since February, but...

In addition to milk, dairies are also constant producers of beef. This is a huge reason why USDA's latest monthly Cold Storage report should factor into their summer management plans. The June report issued...

Last winter, things were looking up milk price wise, but rising milk production, sluggish demand, and climbing dairy product inventories caught up with us. Now, it looks like 2010 is going to be better...

Despite the rash of wet weather in the corn belt this year, the overall value of the dried distillers grain has softened during the last two months, due to expectations of yet another bumper crop of corn...

Yesterday, the National Milk Producers federation board of directors approved a recently formulated proposal that will request a major overhaul of U.S. dairy policy. The group's goal is to better protect...

Dairy producers are also beef producers, and wearing both hats has never been as strange as it has been in 2010. Suddenly higher demand for beef around the world has been squeezing U.S. supplies this year,...

We at Hoard's decided to do June Dairy Month with a bang this year. Not only are we celebrating the 125th anniversary of our magazine with a special anniversary issue and a new Foster Mothers of the Human...

According to current USDA estimates, 80 cents of every food dollar spent in the United States goes to off farm costs, including marketing, processing, wholesaling, and distribution. This leaves a mere...

Expect gradual improvement in milk prices and margins, according to USDA's recent Livestock, Dairy, & Poultry Outlook. Corn prices are forecast to average $3.50 to $3.70 a bushel through this crop year,...

More herds will be retired this year - Cooperatives Working Together (CWT) has just announced that it will be implementing another round of herd retirements after reviewing a number of economic benchmarks,...

Since Fisher-Place Mandingo first produced 1 million units of semen in 1994, 42 other Holstein bulls have been able to join him in this elite club. At the turn of the century, merely nine others had reached...

Now that the tax filing season is complete, farm accounting reports are beginning to be compiled and distributed to the dairy world. Those reports only quantify what we already know, 2009's losses were...

A growing A.I. trend is literally changing the look of the U.S. dairy industry: Herds are becoming more colorful. Black and white still dominates the landscape, but a gradual shift toward color is clearly...

Stray voltage by its very name and nature is a difficult entity to trace. And when it is suspected of causing harm on a dairy, it can be a testy condition to eliminate. Such was the case at Bollant Farms...

Green Bay, Wis., is the site of the 5th national AgSTAR conference. For those of you unfamiliar with AgSTAR, it is a joint program between the EPA, USDA, and the U.S. Department of Energy aimed at encouraging...

There was a 0.9 percent rise in milk production during March in the top 23 dairy states, according to USDA's Milk Production report released earlier this week. That was the second month in a row that milk...

They're black and white (or brown) on the outside, but these days there's also a golden glow to cull dairy cows. Even as milk prices continue to slip, beef prices have been moving steadily higher most...

Interest in some type of policy to control milk production or manage milk supply growth continues to gather steam. Even some people and some organizations that have been categorically opposed to the concept...