"To all you hunters that kill animals for food, shame on you; you ought to go to the store and buy the meat that was made there, where no animals were harmed."

It's amazing to me how quickly people forget about the food chain and the fact that animals exist to be a part of it. We still have a lot of educating ahead of us!

It said "Environmentalists are standing in the way of feeding humanity through their opposition to biotechnology, from chemicals, and nitrogen fertilizer... The fact is, we need both productivity and sustainability - and there is no reason we can't have both." This is a quote by Bill Gates at the World Food Prize Symposium in Iowa.

I thought this was a pretty valid quote. I got to thinking though, why is Bill Gates talking Agriculture? So I fired up the handy old computer and Googled the World Food Prize Symposium. To my surprise Bill and Melinda Gates have a foundation to increase farm production worldwide, particularly in Africa and South Asia. I was amazed at what this foundation is involved with. I didn't even know it existed.

It is worth checking out while surfing the internet to see what is happening around the world. It was an eye opener! You can even watch Bill's speech if you have about 20 minutes of spare time during this harvest and prepare for winter season!

I received a phone call this morning from a truck driver who had a delivery for our family feed mill. He needed directions and was hoping I could help him. I quickly realized this gentleman was directionally challenged as he had no idea which way was East or West, North or South. He was in the wrong town and had missed the road leading to our town. After what seemed like hours, I finally got him on the right highway coming towards our mill. I told him to turn right at the two big grain bins that sat next to the highway. He said, “What’s that?” I told him it was a large round circle that was silver, that it held corn and beans. He said, “I have no idea what you mean.” I then told him it was a round building that was silver and had a point on the top like a cone. He said, “I have no clue what you are talking about.” So I tried a different approach, I told him to look for the elevator. To this he replied, “What do you mean? I hate driving in small towns.”

By this time I was trying not to laugh. I knew this gentleman had never been to rural America before. In his mind I was speaking a foreign language. I was running out of ideas of how to explain what a grain bin looked like over the phone. I finally told him to call me when he went past the junction of two roads and I would talk him the rest of the way to the mill. He did call me, and when he saw the mill, he said, “I have no clue what I am looking at, it looks weird. These don’t look like no buildings I’ve seen before.” When he came inside the mill, I quietly told him he was looking at a grain elevator, or a feed mill, and that the large silver structures were called grain bins. He said, “this is weird. I can’t wait to get home.”

My experience today reminded me that the majority of our society has no idea what a grain bin looks like, much less what it is used for. This was a shining example of why agriculture needs to engage with our consumers on a daily basis. The next time this truck driver is told to turn at a grain bin, he will know what a grain bin looks like and what it is used for.

As for me, I am working on a better way to describe what a grain bin looks like!

It is within this context that dairy farmers are coming together to brainstorm ideas for how we should go about resolving the current dairy crisis. As you can imagine emotion tends to bleed into the conversation and discussion becomes heated at times. However, one thing that everyone seems to agree upon is that something needs to be done.

Over the last several months I have attended several local meetings in order to educate myself more on the challenges and opportunities that exist in this time of uncertainty. Many ideas were presented by dairy farmers and a lot of “how to’s” were discussed. Some farmers offered the suggestion that mandatory supply management was the way to go, as long as the government didn't intervene. Others thought that the market would rebound on it’s own and we should stay the course and see what happens. Still others thought we should revert back to some of the more traditional ways of managing dairy herds.

Other ideas were also presented including a tiered pricing system that would allow a dairy farmer to get a certain price for a predetermined quantity of milk. Once a threshold was met, the dairy farmer would get a lesser amount for any additional milk that they produced. Another interesting idea was that all farmers participating in the government MILC program should be required to sign up for Cooperatives Working Together (CWT). Yet other ideas focused on raising quality standards, reducing imports from other countries, adapting Canada’s quota system, and culling the national dairy herd.

In a recent U.S. Dairy Outlook Brief by Cameron Thraen (State Specialist of Dairy Markets and Policy at The Ohio State University) shrinking the size of the U.S. dairy herd by another 100 to 140 thousand animals seems to be a logical step to getting the dairy sector back on track. One of the biggest reasons for Thraen’s recommendation is because much of our export markets have dried up due to the larger, global economic crisis. People in other countries no longer have the disposable income to purchase milk and milk products from the United States, and as a result there is no outlet for the extra supply from our 9,126 million milk cows.

If interested, click on this link to read more.

I’m not sure if Thraen’s recommendation is the silver bullet to solving the problem, however, it is data that is needed for making the best decision for how to move forward. Right now however the dairy industry is kind of like two freight train engines that have collided on the track. One train is the status quo to keep milk production high. While the other train is the complicated milk pricing system. Until the mess is cleaned up, prices will continue to be volatile and milk production will seemingly follow its same trajectory as small farms become collateral damage and big farms look for more opportunities to grow.

Although I’m not an expert on the dairy industry, nor a dairy farmer, I am concerned about the implications of losing so many of our family farms across our nation. I’m also concerned about the quality of milk and milk products that are being imported from other countries, which often times have less regulations and minimal environmental standards. I’m concerned for our rural communities and the businesses that rely on the success of our farms. As more farms disappear from the countryside, we have less ability to produce food for our country, and ultimately less freedom as we become more dependent on other nations.