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GA Milk Weekly Enews - October 5,
2018
Your weekly update for the Georgia Dairy Industry
Brought to you by the Georgia Milk Producers, Inc.
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| Ribbon Cutting Ceremony at GA Grown Baby Barn, Perry |
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Expectant mothers arrive to give birth at Georgia National Fair
BY Wayne Crenshaw, The Macon Telegraph
They are six Holstein cows that will give birth in front of an audience at the fair's newest addition, the
Baby Barn. More cows will arrive later with the aim of having one live birth each day of the fair, which runs Thursday through Oct. 14.
Stephen Shimp, executive director of the fairgrounds, said he is hearing a lot of buzz from people about the Baby Barn.
"They can't wait to see it," he said. "We are getting more phone calls I think than we have ever had about a new exhibit at the fairgrounds. This is going to be a huge hit."
He said giving birth in front of an audience will not be stressful for dairy cows. The cows come into a barn three times a day to be hooked up to a milking machine.
"Dairy cows are around humans all the time," he said. "That's why they are the best animals to do this with."
The first cows brought into the Baby Barn on Tuesday looked perfectly calm, despite a fair amount of activity going on around them with setup of the Baby Barn and the adjacent Georgia Grown space in the same building.
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Last Minute U.S., Canada Deal Ends Class 7
By Mike Opperman, MILK Business
The U.S. and Canada reached an agreement late Sunday night that will bring Canada into a revamped North American free trade deal with the U.S. and Mexico. The new deal will be called the United States Mexico Canada Agreement, or USMCA, and will replace the 24-year old North American Free Trade Agreement.
In a joint statement, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland said the agreement "will strengthen the middle class, and create good, well-paying jobs and new opportunities for the nearly half billion people who call North America home." Read more
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Are You Registered to Vote? Deadline is Oct. 9th
Georgia's new Governor will appoint many State Commissioners, including those leading the Department of Labor, Department of Revenue and Department of Natural Resources! Your vote counts!!
Georgia Farm Bureau is urging all Georgia citizens to be participants in their democratic process, to make their voice known on Nov. 6, when the state will elect its next governor, lieutenant governor and secretary of state, along with many other state and national elected officials. It is a serious responsibility.
"Georgia Farm Bureau is nonpartisan and has a long-standing record of working with officials from all parties," said GFB President Gerald Long. "Our organization is not endorsing any candidate, but we are encouraging all Georgians involved with agriculture or who live in rural communities to take your civic right to vote seriously, research where the candidates stand on issues important to rural Georgia and to vote."
The deadline to register to vote is Oct. 9 and early voting begins Oct. 15. GFB has launched a website,
www.ifarmivoteGa.com, to assist Georgia's voters in these areas. The site will provide information about how and where to register to vote, and the locations of local voting precincts.
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From Progressive Dairyman Editor Dave Natzke
Through the first six months of 2018, average Federal Milk Marketing Order (FMMO) "mailbox prices" - approximating the net price received by dairy farmers for milk after adding any premiums and deducting costs associated with hauling and marketing - were about $1.79 per hundredweight (cwt) less than the same period in 2017 (Table 1). For those with a longer memory, average mailbox prices were running $9 per cwt less than the record highs of 2014.
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Application deadline to renew medium and large state land application permits is
approaching
By Melony Wilson, UGA Animal Waste Management Specialist
All confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs) in Georgia with 300 animal units or greater are required by state law to obtain a permit. Most of the CAFOs in the state have either a medium or large state land application system (LAS) permit. Georgia Environmental Protection Division (EPD) review and update these permits every 5 years. The new permits are due to be released in April of 2019. All current permit holders must submit a notice of intent (NOI) form to Georgia Department of Agriculture (GDA) in order to obtain coverage under the new permit. Failure to
submit a NOI will result in loss of permit coverage. According to the new permits, owners/operators must apply for the new permits 180 days before the release of the new permit.
Therefore, the deadline to submit the NOI to GDA is October 2, 2018. All permit holders received a letter from EPD explaining the requirement to submit a NOI. The letter also contained a copy of the NOI form with directions on how to complete the form. If you did not receive the letter or misplaced the form, it can be found on the AWARE website at www.aware.uga.edu.
Don't forget to send in the form by October 2, 2018.
In addition to sending in a NOI for the new permit, a new nutrient management plan (NMP) may also need to be submitted to GDA. If the NMP was approved before March 15, 2011, then a new NMP must be submitted to GDA along with your NOI. However, if the plan was approved after that date then it is still valid. All NMPs must be written by a certified nutrient management specialist. Many county extension agents with CAFOs in their counties are certified to write these plans so simply contact the local extension office. It is important to know that a NMP can be fairly complicated and takes a significant amount of time to complete. So the sooner the process can be started the better. Also, soil tests and manure test are required to complete a NMP so these samples should be submitted and results obtained before the process is started. For questions contact
Melony Wilson at mlwilson@uga.edu.
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You'll Never Guess Where You Can Get a 4:1 Return on Your Money
From Jim Dickrell, MILK Business
Revisions to the Margin Protection Program (MPP), proposed in the yet-to-be approved new farm bill, could offer dairy farmers a 4:1 return.
The estimate is based on what returns would be if feed and milk margins are similar over the next five years to what they were between 2014 and 2018. The better returns are based on lower premium costs and raising the top margin to $9 for the first 4 million pounds of a dairy farm's production history, says Mark Stephenson, director of Dairy Policy Analysis at the University of Wisconsin. He spoke today at World Dairy Expo.
Under proposals passed by the U.S. House and Senate, MPP premiums would be just 17¢/cwt for $9 coverage for Tier 1 production under the House bill and 18¢/cwt under the Senate bill. If margins are similar to what they had been over the past five years, the MPP payments would average 73¢/cwt under the new farm bill, says Stephenson.
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Calmer financial waters await U.S. dairy producers
By Sarina Sharp, Hoard's Dairyman
For years, dairy producers have been battered and tossed about like a dinghy on a stormy sea. Milk prices have been barely adequate to keep them afloat. Some have even sunk. But those who have weathered the gale are on course to calmer waters.
It won't always be smooth sailing, though. Headwinds persist. Low to reasonable feed costs typically correlate with low milk prices. Milk powder inventories in the United States, Europe, and India remain burdensome. U.S. cheese stocks are record large. The dollar is also strong, making U.S. dairy products more expensive when priced in foreign currencies.
TWO DIFFERENT DIRECTIONS
And while Europe, New Zealand, and other dairy exporters are aggressively pursuing trade pacts to improve access to customers around the globe, the United States, for the most part, is moving in the opposite direction, eschewing the Trans-Pacific Partnership and levying tit-for-tat tariffs against China. After China raised border taxes on U.S. dairy products in July, the value of U.S. dairy product exports to China plunged to a nearly two-year low, down 27 percent from July 2017 and off 42 percent from April's record-breaking shipments. The U.S. trade relationship with Mexico seems to be thawing, but the country's retaliatory tariffs on U.S. cheese remain.
Despite these challenges, the current is pulling the U.S. industry toward a more favorable climate. The domestic appetite for dairy, particularly cheese, is strengthening. The economy is booming, wages are climbing, and consumers are spending with confidence. And after years of surplus, global dairy demand is helping to bring supplies into balance.
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How Much Will Dairy Revenue Protection Cost?
By John Newton, Ph.D., AFBF Chief Economist
Dairy Revenue Protection is an area-based quarterly revenue insurance product designed to protect against quarterly declines in revenue from milk sales. Recognizing that every farmer in the U.S. is paid a different price for their milk, Dairy-RP is unique in its ability to closely match farm-level milk price risk by providing milk pricing options based on either classified milk prices or the value of the components in the milk, i.e., butterfat and protein.
Several articles have been written reviewing how Dairy-RP was developed and how it is designed to operate:
What is Dairy Revenue Protection? and
Dairy Revenue Protection is Here. One of the few remaining unanswered questions about the product is how much will Dairy-RP plans cost? Today's article provides example Dairy-RP premium rates for a variety of coverage options based on CME futures and options as of Oct. 4. Premiums will be slightly different when Dairy-RP launches Oct. 9.
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The future of food is farming cells, not cattle
We've become incredibly efficient at producing animal products for humans. Through innovations in animal husbandry, animals can be reared for meat and produce more milk and eggs faster than ever before.
Dairy cows, for example, produce
four times more milk than they did 75 years ago.
But we're reaching the upper limit of how much longer we can do this for. According to a report published by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, livestock grazing takes up
26% of Earth's ice-free land, and an additional 33% of arable land is used to grow the food that feeds them. This set-up is also susceptible to unpredictable events, such as epidemic viruses, antibiotic resistance, and weather incidents like rogue snow storms and heat waves.
We've created a precarious agricultural system. The safest way to move forward is to diversify our animal agriculture portfolio like we diversify energy. In the same way we've introduced alternative forms of energy to
lessen our dependence on coal, we need to introduce new ways of producing animal products to lessen our dependence on industrial animal farming.
One of the most important ways to do that is through
cellular agriculture. This is the process of producing animal products from cells rather than from whole animals. Instead of raising a cow from calf to slaughter-and requiring all of the feed, water, and land that goes with it-we can create animal proteins without the farm.
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A tale of resource limitations, technological progress and cows. Millions of cows.
For the past few decades, the heart of America's dairy industry has been in the dusty flatlands of California's San Joaquin Valley. Milk and milk products are California's most valuable agricultural commodity, ahead of the grapes, almonds and lettuce for which the state is better known. California passed Wisconsin in 1993 to become the No. 1 milk-producing state, 1 and Tulare County, between Fresno and Bakersfield, passed Southern California's San Bernardino County to become the nation's No. 1 dairy county a couple of years before that.
You may notice a dip in California milk production since 2014, though. It's not a fluke! Earlier this week came the news, for example, that the family of Tulare County's most famous dairy farmer, U.S. Representative Devin Nunes, had quietly moved its operations to northwestern Iowa a decade ago. Ryan Lizza
has the details in Esquire
, and I'll leave it up to you to decide whether the story is of political significance or not. But while traveling through Iowa and South Dakota last month, I heard enough about the recruiting and arrival of California dairy farmers beset by drought and other hassles to know that it is of agricultural and economic significance.
Read here
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GA Dairy Classifieds
Heifers for Sale (SC):
18 Bred Registered Holstein Heifers. Big heifers
4 Due in October
6 Due in November
5 Due in December
3 Due in March
50 years in the Dairy business,
Top herd in South Carolina.
Bull Calves WANTED: Competitive pricing with 6 day a week pickup. Brandon Mason Cattle Company 912-632-4490
For HIRE: Southeast DHIA
has a position to fill in the
West Central Georgia area for a
FIELD SERVICE TECHNICIAN.
Responsibilities include data
collection on area dairy farms
during milking time. S
chedule is somewhat flexible
but the hours are non-typical. S
ome travel and out-of-town
work likely.
Applicants should be comfortable
with computers and software and
have good communication and
organizational skills as well as
reliable transportation. Pickup Truck required. I
f interested send a resume to
For Sale:
WW Livestock Systems Hydraulic Head shoot, never used, excellent condition, kept under roof. Listed for $23,041 asking $15,000 or reasonable offer. Call M
For Sale: Custom manure application and Dryhill manure equipment sales.
Contact Edwin @ 478-299-0717 with
Agboys Custom Services LLC -
New 8"x52' lagoon pump with outriggers $24,000 (Pictured right)
For Sale 3000 gallon Surge/Westfalia milk tank and wash system. Three phase condensers. 2002 model. Excellent condition. John B Gay, 478-494-5107
WANTED: DeLaval
Westfalia
Neck Transponders: TN Dairy seeking used Westfalia neck band transponders.
Please contact Bill or Peggy Howell if interested at 423-972-9254 or 423-371-3032.
WANTED: Looking for used pasteurizing and bottling equipment in working condition; Linda and Darrell Rankins, Jr.; 334-745-2357 (best times: mid-day and after 8 p.m.)
For Sale:
Jersey cows, heifers and calves for sale. Registered with AJCA, all ages! Contact Matt Holton at 770-718-8271, call or text. Dawsonville, GA.
FOR HIRE: Custom Silage Harvesting. Late model JD chopper. Will travel. Let me put your quality forage up! Nic Haynes, Muddy H Farms, 678-617-3379.
FOR SALE:
We have a continuous selection of fresh and springing heifers.
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Upcoming Events:
October 6 - Dress-A-Cow Contest at GA National Fair
October 7
Commercial Dairy Heifer Show at GA National Fair, Perry
October 11 - The Dairy Alliance's Community and Cows Dinner at GA National Fair, Perry
October 25 -
The Dairy Alliance's Community and Cows Dinner at FarmView Market, Madison
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