Digest Highlights

• Dairy cow slaughter rate starts 2020 high
• USDA dairy trade forecast shows uptick
• China starts ‘Phase One’ protocol implementation
• Michigan, USDA set new bovine TB control requirements
• Wisconsin ag forum seeks to draw presidential candidates
• New York farm labor wage board sets hearings
• Air quality EQIP aid available in California
• Wisconsin dairy animal abuse claim ‘unfounded’

More than one year after comments closed on the FDA’s request for information on fake-milk labeling, with health organizations warning against inappropriate consumption of plant-based beverages, with a rising number of lawmakers asking why nothing’s been done, and with a new FDA commissioner who seems to understand the problem, the FDA still hasn’t resolved the public health issue of mislabeled plant-based products using dairy terms that imply nutritional equivalence to consumers.

You’re busy milking cows, checking to see where the tillage equipment is parked and eagerly counting the days until Super Tuesday (it’s March 3). With that in mind, Progressive Dairy looks at issues in the news impacting you and your dairy business.

Subsistence farming, by dictionary definition, is “a system of farming that produces a minimum and often inadequate return to the farmer.”

This is common practice in developing countries, but could that definition also be used to describe how many dairies in the U.S. have operated for the past several years? It’s as if we are in a first-world country that expects dairy farmers to survive on a third-world business model.

Bettencourt Dairy has been operating in Jerome and Wendell counties of Idaho since 1982. The farm owns 19 barns housing 50,000 milking cattle in the Magic Valley. At 18 gallons of manure per cow per day, the dairy has great responsibility in handling manure from its cattle.

Beta-casein gene influences production of milk protein casein which has A1 & A2 variants.