From the Editor

I was stuck. My family was gone. I was 20 hours from home in teeny-tiny Kirksville, Missouri, and day one of college classes started the next day.

It wasn’t the first time I’d been away from home, nor was it the first time I’d moved. Between summer camps and my family moving from California to Connecticut when I was 10, being away from home and moving were not foreign concepts to me.

Our annual “State of the dairy industry” issue is where we take stock of where the industry has been in recent years, what the present picture looks like and what the future holds.

“I believe in the future of agriculture …”

If you donned a blue corduroy jacket during your high school days, those words hit a special place in your heart. They mark the beginning of the FFA Creed, a five-paragraph essay that eloquently explains the mission of one of the nation’s largest and oldest youth organizations, the FFA.

In December, we published our final stand-alone issue of El Lechero magazine. We wish to thank the thousands of dairies who requested this magazine over its lifetime. It’s been exactly a decade since we launched this magazine for dairy managers and owners.

That stupid pony. How dare he buck me off for asking for a flying lead change. Covered in dirt and too mad to notice the searing pain in my left shoulder, I jumped back on that pony, kept jumping and made him do that flying lead change after the jump.

Though I live only a short drive from Lambeau Field, home of the Green Bay Packers, my most recent visit there wasn’t to cheer on Aaron Rodgers. It was for the Alltech Dairy School.