NMPF Chief Science Officer Jamie Jonker discusses the International Dairy Federation World Dairy Summit taking place in Chicago this week in an interview with RFD-TV. The summit, which is being hosted by the United States for the first time since 1994, brings together dairy experts from around the world and is proving to be a great showcase for U.S. dairy excellence.
By Paul Bleiberg, Executive Vice President for Government Relations, National Milk Producers Federation
Today’s political climate seems to feature one surprise after another. Congress shocked the country late last month by voting in an overwhelmingly bipartisan fashion to avert a government shutdown that had been considered all but guaranteed. Another jolt came three days later when the House voted for the first time in American history to remove its speaker — all because he allowed the shutdown to be averted!
But even as shocking headlines seem to become the norm, important bipartisan policy work is quietly, gradually advancing. The National Milk Producers Federation (NMPF) has continued its efforts in 2023 to enact policies that position dairy farmers to fulfill their goal of becoming greenhouse gas neutral or better by 2050. A cornerstone of this goal is feed management to reduce enteric methane emissions, which can comprise as much as one-third of a dairy farm’s greenhouse gas footprint.
To make successful feed management a reality, NMPF is pursuing a two-step strategy. The first is securing Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval of animal feed additives that can reduce enteric emissions. The second is using United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) conservation programs to get these innovative animal feed ingredients into enterprising producers’ hands. This year has been marked by critical progress on both steps.
In June, the Senate HELP Committee passed the Innovative FEED Act by a bipartisan of 19 votes to 2 votes. This important bill, led by Senators Roger Marshall (R-KS) and Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) would provide clear direction for the FDA to review promising animal feed ingredients in a safe but expeditious manner, getting them to market faster than animal drugs to help U.S. dairy farmers remain competitive globally. NMPF is working closely with partners in agriculture and conservation to enact this bill into law this year.
Then, just last month, USDA formally recognized feed management as a climate-smart conservation practice, better positioning dairy farmers to seek conservation support for voluntary uptake of animal feed ingredients. In that spirit, several NMPF members and partners have applied for Regional Conservation Partnership Program funding for the 2023 fiscal year to support dairy farmers who want to be on the front end of the rapid uptake of new feed additives.
Dairy farmers have long been environmental stewards who adapt to new technologies and opportunities. Important progress made on feed management this year, on Capitol Hill and at USDA, is setting the stage for continued innovation on the dairy farm for many years to come.
This column originally appeared in Hoard’s Dairyman Intel on Oct. 16, 2023.
NMPF Executive Vice President for Communications and Industry Relations Alan Bjerga offers an update on where the USDA’s Federal Milk Marketing Order hearing stands as it goes on hiatus until late November. Bjerga also discusses the importance of the IDF-World Dairy Summit in Chicago and where the public can go to learn more about the FMMO discussion, in an interview with WEKZ radio, Janesville, WI.
ARLINGTON, VA – The National Milk Producers Federation (NMPF) thanked the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) for extending the application deadline for critical, long-awaited financial assistance for dairy farmers affected by natural disasters.
The Milk Loss Assistance program administered by the Farm Service Agency will compensate eligible dairy farms and processors for milk dumped due to qualifying disaster events in 2020, 2021 and 2022, including droughts, wildfires, hurricanes, floods, derechos, excessive heat, winter storms and smoke exposure.
“We are grateful to USDA for giving dairy farmers extra time to enroll in the Milk Loss Program,” said Jim Mulhern, president and CEO of NMPF. “This essential program will compensate producers for milk dumped due to disasters over several years. This extension will allow farmers more time to prepare their applications and fully benefit.”
The Milk Loss Program will help farmers and, in certain cases, cooperatives, recover losses previously overlooked by disaster assistance. Affected dairy farmers and cooperatives are encouraged to sign up as soon as possible. For eligibility and application information, as well as details about how payments will be calculated, visit USDA’s original Milk Loss Assistance program announcement.
By Shawna Morris, Executive Vice President, Trade Policy & Global Affairs, National Milk Producers Federation
In business, a top customer is a very important relationship, one that requires careful tending and cultivation to maintain. The best business relationships are two-way streets, with each party tending to the other’s needs with care. These are simple principles for successful commerce — but they also seem to have been forgotten in the European Union (EU) when it comes to dairy.
The U.S. is one of the EU’s top food and agricultural export markets; in dairy alone, it shipped an eye-popping $2.7 billion of cheese, butter, food preparations, and other dairy products to America. This year it’s on track to top that record, with sales through July up 12%. The U.S. is a major and lucrative market for the EU’s dairy industry and other food sectors.
With all that on the line, it would be reasonable to expect the EU to prioritize U.S. trade concerns. Instead, the EU is increasingly seeking to use trade policy to dictate to the world — including American dairy farmers — how to farm and, while serving its own self-interest, how to properly produce products.
National Milk Producers Federation (NMPF) and U.S. Dairy Export Council (USDEC) staff met last week with the EU’s Health and Food Safety Agency on one of the EU’s latest policies advancing that goal. Article 118 is a rule slated to impose new restrictions on which veterinary medicines EU trading partners can use for any products destined for the EU. Given the interconnected nature of milk flows in the U.S., however, requirements for EU shipments can impact a much wider swath of U.S. production to avoid disrupting supply chain flexibilities.
In that meeting, NMPF and USDEC, together with the other U.S. agricultural organizations, strongly objected to the EU imposing its domestic farm process steps on American farmers. We also pointed out the importance of a two-way relationship: The EU relies on the United States continuing to reliably import billions of dollars of EU products that are produced in keeping with EU farm process requirements, not American ones.
NMPF staff, working closely with our partners at USDEC, has engaged with the U.S. government, other agricultural sectors, and the EU itself for the past few years in trying to shape the implementation of this regulation. Thanks to that extensive investment in staving off the worst edges of this ill-conceived EU policy, U.S. dairy exports aren’t expected to be affected by the initial list of targeted veterinary medicines. But what’s true today may not be tomorrow. NMPF continues to work on this issue to guard against any future inclusion of more broadly used safe veterinary medicines down the road.
Article 118 is just one of many policies the EU is pushing to foist its farming preferences onto the world’s farmers. Issuing specific animal welfare standards for trading partners is also under development, even though U.S. dairy farmers know how to farm safely and hold high standards while exporting to more than 100 markets worldwide. European bureaucracy does nothing to elevate the quality of U.S. dairy products, but it does risk exacerbating trade tensions.
Because of this growing EU tendency to attempt to serve as a global regulator, NMPF is encouraging the U.S. government to look more strategically at the U.S.-EU agricultural trade relationship. Every customer has its breaking point, and the U.S. should make clear to the EU that we are no different. The trans-Atlantic partnership between U.S. and EU interests is one of the world’s most important. But all good relationships are based on care and respect. We in dairy are urging the EU to tend its trade relationship with the U.S. more carefully, because if they don’t, the consequences will be pleasant for no one.
This column originally appeared in Hoard’s Dairyman Intel on October 5, 2023.
USDA’s Federal Milk Marketing Order hearing in Carmel, IN, is providing the dairy industry with mountains of valuable information and insight that goes well beyond facts and figures.
The hearing isn’t only about shaping milk pricing; it’s also showing what needs improving in our industry, and it’s an opportunity to demonstrate what keeps dairy strong. And nothing is on display more emphatically than the power of dairy farmers and the cooperatives they own, and the importance of the cooperative structure to future progress in dairy, at all levels of production, processing and marketing.
Our breadth of membership and depth of milk marketing expertise has risen to every occasion during this hearing, relentlessly advancing the consensus proposal we adopted after two years of exhaustive study and discussion.
That plan, the only comprehensive solution that adequately makes the adjustments the FMMO system needs, would not have come about in the first place were we not able to rely on our farmer-cooperative members and staff to lead the industry. And without the unified voice a farmer cooperative provides its members in policy discussions, we never would have been able to achieve the unanimity in our membership that was necessary for USDA to take up our plan at all.
That final point is important. Cooperative membership holds multiple benefits for member-owners, beginning with having a guaranteed market for milk each day, but adding up to much more. Cooperatives provide technical expertise and risk-management assistance. Cooperatives pool supplies and capital, finance exports, enhance farmers’ bargaining position with proprietary processors, and even enable those farmers to become processors themselves.
These benefits have allowed dairy farmers to build multimillion-dollar processing plants in local communities, access needed financial resources, and capitalize on efficiencies in areas like milk hauling. Membership in a cooperative is the best way, and sometimes the only way, for a dairy farmer to get products to market and earn a decent return from doing so. Simply put, cooperatives make farmers stronger.
But for cooperatives to remain strong, they also need their members to actively engage.
That’s why it’s important to always remain vigilant against any effort to weaken cooperatives by limiting their ability to speak with a unified voice or adequately represent the best interests of their members. From time to time we hear of efforts on Capitol Hill or elsewhere to dilute the power of cooperatives to speak with one voice on votes on issues such as the Federal Milk Marketing Order system. Offered under the guise of encouraging individual choice, in practice these efforts are more like “divide and conquer” – chipping away at the benefits cooperatives provide by weakening their ability to pursue their members’ best interests.
Such efforts tend to be pursued by the same interests that, in the end, would rather that co-ops go away: companies that would prefer the benefits (to them) of vertical integration; agribusinesses that would rather not bargain with co-ops to get a better price for farmers; individual farmers who don’t feel they “need” co-ops to succeed (even as they buy inputs and sign contracts with them); and political ideologues who just don’t like the idea of farmers helping one another for mutual benefit. We’ve always been able to successfully resist them because, in the end, we use the very power we have to work together and protect our members’ interests.
As we celebrate October as National Co-op Month, with Farm Bill discussions underway and FMMO modernization making its way toward an eventual producer vote, we stand ever ready to defend cooperatives and their principles. Every day, at the federal order hearing in Indiana, we’re proving just how valuable to dairy the cooperative model remains. And every day across America, on farms, in milk trucks and in supermarkets, we remain proud of all we do to facilitate orderly marketing of milk and keep this nation nourished – and will continue to do so, with a strong, united voice, for many years to come.
By Christopher Galen, Executive Director, The American Butter Institute
In a year when dairy commodities have been hit hard by slumping prices, butter has remained at the head of the class, barely dipping below $2.50 per pound at the wholesale level and recently rebounding to $2.75 per pound heading into the holiday baking season. Part of the reason for the strong demand, even with high inflation over the past two years, has been the American Butter Institute’s consumer awareness campaign about the value of butter in so many uses.
Our “Go Bold With Butter” campaign — funded mostly through the national dairy checkoff — reminds consumers of how useful butter is compared to plant-based oils and spreads. It also offers new recipes and product use ideas, from butter boards to butter bombs. You’ve probably heard of butter boards; basically, they are party-ready charcuterie trays featuring softened butter rather than meats and cold cuts. Meanwhile, butter bombs are a social media-worthy creation of a hollow sphere of butter filled either with savory ingredients like herbs, which people can melt on a grilled steak, or sweet ingredients like cinnamon sugar, suitable for use on breakfast foods like pancakes.
We also recently started a new consumer education program we’re calling “Butter Bits.” These are digestible snippets of friendly education we are sharing on social media that highlight butter as the solution to everyday cooking and baking challenges. This series of videos will follow a problem-and-solution format in a fast-paced, engaging, and entertaining way.
Since we are approaching the prime Christmas cookie-baking season, one of our regular seasonal promotions is our recipe contest. Each fall, the contest invites consumers to submit as many original cookie recipes as they wish. The “Go Bold With Butter” experts narrow the field of entrants to a few dozen and then bake up a (baker’s) dozen of the finalists to determine the best of that year’s class. The contest is open from now until November 1, and the rules and entry requirements are at www.goboldwithbutter.com.
Butter has clearly won the hearts, minds, and stomachs of many consumers whose preference for real dairy over vegetable spreads in the past generation has forced competitors to start calling their margarines “vegan butter.” But we can’t rest on our laurels: The “Go Bold With Butter” campaign reminds us that even though retail butter prices may rise, the elevated value real butter offers is worth it.
This column originally appeared in Hoard’s Dairyman Intel on September 18, 2023.
NMPF Senior Director of Economic Research & Analysis Stephen Cain discusses progress thus far in USDA’s Federal Milk Marketing Order hearing on the Agriculture of America podcast. “We haven’t had a major update like this in over two decades, so it’s time for an update, and we’re trying to make sure we do it right,” Cain said. “So it’s going a go slowly, but we’re making progress and we’re moving through a lot of the key issues here to make sure that the orders are operating as effectively as they can.”
NMPF Senior Vice President of Communications Alan Bjerga discussed progress so far at USDA’s Federal Milk Marketing Order hearing, which began last month, in an interview with RFD-TV. Testimony thus far has focused on proper pricing for milk components, an area in which dairy farmers have made significant headway in the past quarter century.
NMPF Senior Vice President of Communications Alan Bjerga discusses where USDA’s hearing on Federal Milk Marketing Orders stands and outlines the road ahead once the process is complete. Bjerga was interviewed on RFD-TV.
