Guest Blog

When life gives you cow’s milk, make cheese curds. Or give tours. Or sell under someone else’s label.

Rest is both a noun and a verb according to Merriam-Webster’s dictionary. A bodily state characterized by minimal function and metabolic activities and peace of mind or spirit are a couple of the definitions you will find for rest as a noun.

Keith Cunningham went from zero to $100 million and lost it in a period of 3.5 years.

Emotions, excessive pride, greed and arrogance slipped into the way Cunningham ran his business, and he lost it all.

More than a year ago, I received a random direct message (DM) on Instagram. It was from a female farmer out in California who I had never met. She asked if I wanted to join a female farmer group. If I am being honest, it was pretty random. (We laugh about this now.) Why would I want to join a group of women I had never met? But, I thought, “What the heck? I am a millennial. Why not make friends with random strangers on the internet?” So that’s when I decided to say yes to joining the group!

There’s no doubt the dairy industry is in challenging times. Low milk prices, changing consumer preferences, devastating weather conditions and an ever-changing political environment has resulted in much uncertainty throughout the industry.

One Saturday night, my husband and I got a text from our milk co-op with milk quality data from the previous day’s load, and panic began to set in. Our somatic cell count (SCC) was far over our comfort threshold of 100,000, and in a small herd like ours, the blame – more often than not – lays squarely on the withers of just one cow.