dairy industry

Devin Nunes, a Republican congressman from the San Joaquin valley, "once said all he wanted to do was work on a dairy farm," says a profile by The Associated Press of the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. "He's a long way from raising cattle."

The Agricultural Marketing Service will publish a proposal for a California Federal Milk Marketing Order (FMMO) on Feb. 14, says Agri-Pulse. The order would regulate product prices between the farmer and first buyer. And California, which prod

With 15 Swiss and Normandy milk cows, central Iowa dairy farmer Kevin Dietzel is a small operator with a business plan — "add value to that milk by making cheese" — aimed at the growing demand for upscale local foods, says Harvest Public Media. "We have to do something that's a little bit more original and is also going to be worth that money," says Dietzel, who makes small batches of cheese on the farm.

Critics say the dairy subsidy created by the 2014 farm law, called the Margin Protection Plan and based on the difference between milk prices and feed costs, is inadequate in the face of the steep decline in milk prices since 2014. An alternative approach is being developed, says Dairy Herd Management magazine – a revenue insurance policy.

Dairy companies wrote to governors of 25 states to ask their help in heading off a change in Canadian dairy policy, due to take effect on Wednesday, that they say will further discourage shipments of ultra-filtered milk and other dairy products to Canada. The dairies say the new National Ingredients Policy violates trade agreements.

Market research company Mintel says sales of non-dairy milk grew 9 percent in 2015, while dairy milk sales fell 7 percent, the food industry news site Food Dive says. "The non-dairy segment started out as an alternative category catering to those with food allergies but it has since evolved beyond a trend."

With sales of cow milk flat or falling and those of plant-based "milk" soaring, a bipartisan group of 34 House member sent a letter to the FDA, urging it to "more aggressively police the improper use of dairy terms, which are used on the labels of many products that have no real dairy ingredients," reports Feedstuffs.

California is the U.S. leader in both dairy and almond production, and it illustrates the rise in popularity of almond milk while Americans are cutting back on milk from dairy cows, says Bloomberg. With a bit of a push from the multi-year drought, some dairy farmers are converting their fields to almond groves for a higher return per acre.

When Kansas dairy farmers expanded their herds and couldn't recruit enough local labor, they began recruiting immigrants from Central America as long-term employees with effects that are altering rural society and economics, according to Kansas State University researchers. Associate sociology professor Alisa Garni says immigrant labor and economic development have gone hand in hand.

The Agriculture Department said it sent $11.2 million in a monthly payment to dairy farmers through the insurance-like Margin Protection Program, calculated at the highest payment rate since MPP began in 2014. A week ago, 61 lawmakers urged USDA to respond to low milk prices through larger federal purchases of dairy products and to "offer financial assistance that will directly support U.S. dairy farmers equally."

Researchers have discovered a way to push the shelf life of milk from two or three weeks to nine, says Gizmodo. By putting tiny drops of already-pasteurized milk into a high-pressure chamber and quickly raising the temperature of the milk by 10 degrees, scientists at Purdue University and the University of Tennessee killed 99 percent of the bacteria that normally remain after pasteurization.

Wisconsin is "America's Dairyland" — it says so on the state license plates, although California became the largest milk-producing state years ago. And now, Idaho and New York State are vying for third place, says Ag Day TV.

Dairy farmer Rob Warnock says he'll vote for Britain to leave the EU despite the likely loss of $60,000 a year in EU subsidies, says The Associated Press. While Warnock believes the referendum will be a wake-up call to the national government on the matter of better agricultural policies, his father is skeptical that will happen, so he says he will vote to stay.

The proposal by businessman Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican candidate for president, "to deport undocumented immigrants and wall off the southern U.S. border has created an unexpected bastion of resistance: Dairy farmers," says Bloomberg. "Farmers say they can't get enough relatives or local workers, even with pay starting at $11 an hour or more."

U.S. dairy farmers are breeding cows that are prodigious milk producers, says Harvest Public Media, and the exemplar is Gigi, a Holstein that produced a record 75,000 pounds of milk, or 8,700 gallons, in 2010.

California and Wisconsin still dominate U.S. milk production, accounting for one-third of total output, but the dairy industry went through a substantial restructuring in the past 20 years, said USDA analysts.