Dairy farmers are digging out from the treacherous late winter storm that dumped nearly 3 feet of snow in parts of the Upper Midwest last weekend.

Editor’s note: On April 18, the House Agriculture Committee approved the Agriculture and Nutrition Act of 2018 (aka the House version of the 2018 Farm Bill) on a straight party line vote. Twenty-six Republican ag committee members voted for the bill, with 20 Democrats voting against the proposal.

It’s anything but a done deal, but the House version of the 2018 Farm Bill outlines congressional efforts to address federal programs affecting the dairy industry.

U.S. milk quality – measured in terms of somatic cell counts (SCC) – improved in 2017, according to the annual summary of Dairy Herd Improvement (DHI) test-day results.

Being the first farmer in New Jersey to begin bottling fluid milk for direct sales, bringing jugging back to the state after a decade-long absence, is quite the accomplishment for young dairy farmer Jared Weeks. Weeks, along with his wife, Treacy, owns Hun-Val Dairy in Hunterdon County. The dairy began bottling their own fluid milk in 2015 and expanded into ice cream, exclusively made with milk from their herd.

Matt Utt has been leading research projects at Select Sires for the past several years. He was recently promoted to a newly created position to analyze data and find new, beneficial uses for it.

Fat and fatty acid (FA) digestion and metabolism in dairy cattle is of considerable interest to the dairy industry. The subject has received renewed interest for a number of reasons. First, the addition of supplemental FA sources to diets is a common practice in dairy nutrition to increase dietary energy density and to support milk production.