Guest Blog

Recent news of negative producer price differentials (PPDs) has resulted in massive depooling of milk from Federal Milk Marketing Orders (FMMOs). This depooling, and not the negative PPDs that led to it, is the real threat to dairy farm income.

When I started college as a freshman eight years ago, I never expected to be farming full time after graduation. My junior year of college, I had the opportunity to relief milk in a newly constructed parlor six miles from home.

It was the middle of the summer, and the day dawned bright and sunny. It was a perfect hay-making day. We were thankful since we had a large field of hay cut to chop into the silo that afternoon.

When talking about personal growth, we often focus on our career growth. When we’re asked, “Where do you want to be in five or 10 years?” we often answer as if the question was, “What do you want to be doing in five years?” There may not be anything wrong in answering our question that way, but more often than not we discuss our career or business goals and objectives and how that translates to where we’re at today.

Working with $30 per hundredweight (cwt) milk isn’t any different than working with $15 per cwt milk. It’s not hard to put milk price in its own special category as something you have no control over, and for the most part, that’s a fair assessment. Even farms who receive a premium that often appears double that of conventional milk have their own challenges with milk prices and building up cash reserves for those inevitable lean times.

Dr. Kate Darling thrives on any chance she can get to study the interaction between humans and robots. Her specialty is robot ethics and how they apply in social and professional settings.