NMPF CEO's Corner

2012 Shaping Up To Be Good Year For Exports

Sarah — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 09:37:00 -0600

Although dairy commodity prices have faltered in recent weeks, there’s no disputing the fact that 2011 was a year with strong milk prices, due in no small part to a robust global market. While the final, official tally isn’t yet in, it appears that 13.3% of U.S. milk production in 2011 was sold to customers outside of our borders. That’s a new record, and a welcome development for farmers and processors alike.

While the outlook for both the global economy and dairy prices in 2012 is anything but clear, what is clear is that we need to continue building on our track record of success in developing foreign customers, whether close to home in Mexico and Canada, or in Pacific Rim countries miles from home.
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A Busy Year Ahead

Sarah — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 09:31:40 -0600

Supposedly, the Mayans predicted that the world will end in 2012. Of course, I don’t place any stock in their thousand year-old forecast, but I do predict that it will be a busy and turbulent year ahead…picking right up where 2011 left off. Here are a few things that we’ll be watching in the months ahead:

First and foremost, farmers need to push Congress to pass a new Farm Bill – sooner, rather than later. The current one expires in nine months, but what’s worse, the distractions caused by the upcoming elections in 10 months will make it increasingly difficult to get the House, Senate and White House to agree on anything as the year unfolds.
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Farm Bill to Rise from Supercommittee’s Ashes

Sarah — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 10:13:28 -0600

Often times, the wheels of government hardly turn at all…until an emergency appears, and then suddenly they spin like crazy to get traction. Such has been the case in Washington regarding farm policy, where a process that could have taken years has been accelerated into a period of a couple months. The threat of shrinking federal budgets has been the torque to prompt our legislators to make hard, necessary and prudent choices about the future.

By all appearances, it looks like the next Farm Bill essentially has been drafted, in a very focused fashion. And that means that regarding dairy policy, a lengthy journey is nearer to completion…even while we can’t (to mix metaphors) count our chickens before they’re hatched.
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2011 NMPF Annual Meeting Presentation

Sarah — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 11:18:06 -0500

For the November CEO's Corner, we are including the joint presentation made November 15th, 2011 by Jerry Kozak and NMPF Chairman Randy Mooney at the NMPF Annual Meeting in San Diego, California.

Jerry Kozak (JK):

Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. I know that our presentation is all that’s standing between you and the cheese reception, so we’ll try to make this short and sweet. Let us begin by reflecting not on the time of day, but on the time of the year.

Last Friday was Veteran’s Day: the 11th day of the 11th month of 2011. So it’s appropriate that we start this speech by acknowledging and thanking the veterans in our audience. Let's have our veterans stand, and let us thank them for their service to our country.

Randy Mooney (RM): read more»

The Correct Course

Sarah — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 10:10:29 -0500

In the development of any new concept or product, there comes a time when the pursuit of perfection ultimately shifts toward the exploration of what’s possible. We’ve now reached that point in the development of new federal dairy policy.

From the summer of 2009 – when the brutality of the Great Dairy Depression first manifested itself – to this past summer, NMPF solicited and then synthesized a variety of viewpoints in the development of a radical reassessment of the best safety net for dairy farmers. We called it Foundation for the Future, and a great deal of spadework was done by a full cross-section of the dairy industry in providing unique, and sometimes opposing, perspectives on how best to form that foundation.
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The Wrong Path

Sarah — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 08:33:29 -0500

When it comes to milk safety, the dairy industry and government regulators usually see eye to eye. Obviously, dairy farmers have their livelihoods riding on the reputation and reality of milk being a safe, wholesome food. State and federal regulators make sure that hygiene and sanitation rules are being followed (and enforced), but there is in dairy production generally a shared cooperative sense between the private and public sectors that we have the same goals.
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If You Can’t Stand the Heat...

Sarah — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 10:33:23 -0500

The last two weeks of July have been brutally hot across much of the nation, including the nation’s capital. It’s been hot in Washington not just because of the weather, but also from the friction of the high-stakes negotiations between Congress and the White House, Democrats and Republicans, special interests and NGOs…all of whom are fixated on efforts to rein in spending, reduce the deficit, and prevent a default on the national debt.

This same process has also affected what has happened recently with dairy policy. By now, most are aware that the ideas of NMPF’s Foundation for the Future dairy policy package, which we’ve developed during the past two years, have been written into legislative language and introduced as a discussion draft by Congressman Collin Peterson of Minnesota. This is a huge, and welcome, next step in our ongoing efforts to overhauling dairy policy.
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Hanging Together

Sarah — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 10:26:18 -0500

As we swing into summer, Americans planning to barbecue on the 4th of July were confronted with yet another undercover video, from a hog farm in Iowa, where allegedly malicious acts against pigs were captured on tape. These videos are appearing so frequently now they’re becoming predictable.

Meanwhile, the Center for Science in the Public Interest recently held a webinar to help organize what it calls “Food Day,” when, on October 24th, people will be encouraged to "eat real" and support “healthy, affordable food grown in a sustainable, humane way.” Naturally, those objectives can’t be met with food from “factory farms,” which CSPI and other like-minded groups claim are responsible for negative impacts on soil, air, water, biodiversity, the decreased social capital in rural America, global climate change…all because they supposedly rely on chemicals, hormones, and antibiotics.
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Next Steps in the Journey

Sarah — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 07:47:34 -0500

Yes, we’ve all heard the axiom that every great journey starts with a single step. Regarding the journey toward implementing a major overhaul of America’s dairy policy, we’ve taken a whole series of steps in the past 24 months. More lie ahead of us. Here are some of the next ones:

As this column is being written, a far more challenging writing project is underway: key leaders of the House Agriculture committee are taking the concepts of NMPF’s Foundation for the Future (FFTF) program, and turning those concepts into legislative language suitable for consideration by Congress. We’ve been as clear as possible about how the key elements of FFTF will work, but NMPF doesn’t create and pass laws – Congress does – and it’s ultimately Congress’s role to craft the legislative package embodying the goals of FFTF.
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The Other Front Burners

Sarah — Mon, 02 May 2011 09:28:43 -0500

During the course of the past year, much of the discussion in this column has been about the urgent need for comprehensive reform of dairy policy. I’m pleased that the broad and deep work that farmers across the country have undertaken toward that end is bearing fruit, and we hope this spring to have new legislation in Congress that encapsulates the details of our Foundation for the Future package of policy reforms. The arrival of this legislation will then give us a once in a generation opportunity to make dramatic and positive changes in the safety net programs that farmers need.

But even as that process continues, so does a great deal of effort on other fronts. I’d like to single out three of them, as each signifies something important about what NMPF is also tackling in other areas.
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