Management

Forage sorghum is a drought- and heat-tolerant warm-season grass that can be used for silage on dairy farms. Since it requires a soil temperature of at least 60°F for planting, the recommended planting time for New York is early June, unlike corn, which is usually planted earlier in the spring.

With so many value-added options available to dairy producers, it can be overwhelming to evaluate each possibility and determine how to move forward. At the 2020 Pennsylvania Dairy Summit, Ginger Fenton and Sarah Cornelisse from Penn State Extension led a breakout session about feasibility analysis frameworks.

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.

As a CPA who survived last year’s difficult tax season due to implementing the expansive changes that were enacted by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCGA), I have taken a step back and revisited some of the less-publicized and -known provisions of the new tax law.

Most of the nation’s dairy farmers are paid for their milk production based on multiple component pricing. All federal order multiple component pricing plans pay producers based on pounds of butterfat, protein, other solids and a producer price differential (PPD) per hundredweight (cwt).

A distraught, middle-aged farmwoman recently asked me for advice on buying her daughter a farmhouse just down the road. This is a loaded question. When farm founders are considering how long they want to live on the farm, there can be a lot of conflict and frustration.