Agriculture

Wisconsin's Dairy Task Force recently passed two proposals aimed at shoring up the state's dairy industry, which is losing hundreds of farms each year. We talk to the director of the task force about why loans to farmers and more funding for education and research are considered so important. Nine subcommittees presented their findings at the meeting, and two brought forward proposals to boost farmers and stimulate innovation in the industry. On a vote, both proposals passed. [node:read-more:link]

Dairy farmers across the United States are dealing with financial stress from several consecutive years of low farm milk prices. Farm stress has been exacerbated in traditional dairy-producing regions in the Midwest and Northeast by a relative lack of dairy-processing capacity, which has led to disappearing farm premiums, increased milk hauling and marketing costs, and—in some periods—dumping milk that has no better marketing outlet.Michigan, part of the Mideast order, has been averaging farm milk prices of $1–$1.50/cwt below their historic relationship to U.S. [node:read-more:link]

Dairy farmers are well acquainted with managing volatile input and output prices. In the past 5 years, dairy farms experienced record high milk prices in 2014 followed by devastatingly low milk prices. In Minnesota, farms that contribute financial information to the FINBIN farm financial database reported the lowest average accrual net farm income, $407, in 2009, while the same sample reported an all-time average high of $236,544 just 5 years later in 2014. [node:read-more:link]

Two trends: One is diverging trajectories for different dairy herd scale categories in the three Great Lakes states. Data in Table 2 presage the eventual exit of most operations with smaller herd sizes, stasis among most operations in the middle, and future expansion concentrated among larger operations. Those middle-tier farms may not be safe, however. [node:read-more:link]

Where then will the future take the dairy sector structure? The crux of structural change is that a sector’s prospects are not strongly tied to those of its participants. Hard science is likely remain in the driver’s seat, with economic considerations defining the terrain and policy interventions seeking to level the bumps. Change will continue and it may continue to be wrenching, favoring consumers on the whole and some producers. This Choices theme deals with all of the above, although with emphasis on producers. But other forces, new and old, are coalescing. [node:read-more:link]

Brubaker is far from the only dairy farmer in Virginia who struggled to make the business work amid falling milk prices, oversupply and growing trade pressure. In the first half of this year, dairy farms in the state closed at a rate of more than one a week.The industry has been struggling for years, but the past two years have been particularly bad, with the total number of licensed farms dropping 15 percent since 2016, leaving 552 as of June. [node:read-more:link]

The U.S. Department of Agriculture published the 2017 "Pesticide Data Program (PDP) Annual Summary." The summary shows more than 99% of the samples tested had pesticide residues well below benchmark levels established by the Environmental Protection Agency. [node:read-more:link]

Conservation practices recommended to reduce nutrient loss from fields are generally classified as in-field practices, edge-of-field practices, and land use change practices. Each practice has a different effectiveness for reducing nutrient loss as well as different associated costs and cost efficiencies. Beyond these important differences, there are several additional details about each practice — level of change required, stackability, and trackability — that are important to consider when weighing options to improve water quality. [node:read-more:link]

California dairy farmers got their first glimpse of what the new Federal Milk Marketing Order will do for them this week. In Tulare in California’s Central Valley, it amounts to 36¢/cwt.“A switch to the Federal Milk Marketing Order means producers are seeing 36¢ (in Tulare) to 86¢ (in Los Angeles) more for their November milk,” says Geoff Vanden Heuvel, director of regulatory and economic affairs for the California Milk Producers Council.The announced Statistical Uniform Price for Tulare was $14.94/cwt and for Los Angeles, $15.44. [node:read-more:link]

Farmers in North America generally did well in the new United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA). But there is one nasty surprise buried in the agreement that should unite all Canadian farmers—intellectual property rules that prevent circumvention of digital locks on electronics including sophisticated farm equipment like tractors and combines that will apply to Canadian, but not to American, farmers. [node:read-more:link]