NMPF Senior Vice President of Communications Alan Bjerga discusses the organization’s recently concluded board of directors in Arlington, VA in an interview with RFD-TV. NMPF’s board unanimously approved a proposal to modernize the Federal Milk Marketing Order system to benefit farmers and better reflect today’s dairy industry. NMPF board members also discussed the ongoing fight against plant-based milk imitators, as well as advances in animal care and sustainability.
The National Milk Producers Federation’s (NMPF) Board of Directors unanimously endorsed a proposal to modernize the Federal Milk Marketing Order (FMMO) system today at its March meeting, a milestone that caps more than two years of discussion and more than 130 meetings on different aspects of the proposal.
The plan to reinvigorate the FMMO system that guides milk pricing reflects an industry that’s evolved significantly since the last comprehensive revamp in 2000. It’s a proposal all dairy can get behind, said Randy Mooney, chairman of NMPF’s board of directors and a dairy farmer from Rogersville, MO.
“After gathering dairy’s best minds and consulting with partners across the industry, today we are moving forward with a comprehensive FMMO proposal the entire industry can get behind,” Mooney said. “We look forward to leading a thorough, deliberative process as we submit this proposal to USDA and partner with our allies to modernize milk pricing in ways that serve dairy farmers and the entire industry.”
The board reviewed a package of changes initially developed and proposed by a task force of NMPF cooperative experts and later approved by the organization’s Economic Policy Committee. The adopted changes, listed here, reflects the industry’s evolution while benefiting the farmers who form the bedrock of U.S. dairy. With the board’s approval, NMPF’s next step is to move toward submitting the proposal to USDA as the basis for a federal order hearing while continuing conversations with other dairy stakeholder partners. NMPF President and CEO Jim Mulhern said the organization stands ready to assist farmers, the dairy industry and federal officials in any way it can as the process unfolds.
“We believe in a better future for this industry, and this proposal will help build that future,” he said.
Also speaking at the conference is House Agriculture Committee Chairman Glenn “GT” Thompson, R-PA, speaking on the farm bill expected in 2023 and other federal issues. NMPF looks forward to working closely with Chairman Thompson, a staunch ally of dairy farmers, to complete work on the 2023 farm bill and other matters.
NMPF’s board also welcomed new directors — Jacob Larson of Southeast Milk Inc., and Michael Lichte of Dairy Farmers of America – and released its annual report, highlighting the activities and accomplishments of the past year.
NMPF is the only nationwide organization devoted to advancing the interests of all dairy farmers of all sizes in all regions. A federation of dairy cooperatives, NMPF embodies the spirit of farmer self-help and community leadership.
Board members are also discussing:
The two-day conference concludes tomorrow.
By Beverly Hampton Pfifer, Director, FARM Animal Care.
Increasingly, dairy herds are being built with beef in mind. While that changes supply chains, it doesn’t change the need for quality calf care.
To that end, there’s a paradigm shift taking place on U.S. dairy farms. The National Association of Animal Breeders (NAAB) reports that since 2016, U.S. dairy semen sales dropped by 5.3 million units to settle at 17.1 million units. On the flip side, beef semen sales climbed from 2016’s 2.5 million units to reach 8.7 million units in 2021. That’s a 6.2 million-unit shift in a six-year window.
Due to the beef sector’s use of natural insemination and the fact that national dairy herd numbers have remained relatively steady over the past decade, it’s largely assumed that up to 5 million dairy-influenced animals are now entering the beef supply chain annually, though publicly available data related to beef processing by breed is limited.
That’s just the start of the shift in the dairy-beef narrative. A growing number of farm and ranch operations are being used solely for rearing of these crossbred animals, in addition to off-site calf rearing for dairy replacement heifers, creating an entirely new sector of animal production.
Over the years, we have learned that where there is supply chain traceability, dairy and beef customers expect risk mitigation through quality assurance programs. And while the National Dairy Farmers Assuring Responsible Management (FARM) Program framework is structured for farms with lactating dairy animals, the program recognizes the role of this new calf-rearing sector within the greater dairy and beef supply — and the need for the same quality assurance. Ensuring exceptional management and care of calves — regardless of their genetics — is critical to the future of the U.S. dairy industry.
Establishing a framework that’s useful to farmers and ranchers while providing assurances to both dairy and beef supply chains isn’t easy. The Calf Care & Quality Assurance Program (CCQA) is a joint effort led by the FARM Program and National Beef Quality Assurance Program with support from the Dairy Calf and Heifer Association and Veal Quality Assurance. With input from a technical task force of calf producers, veterinarians, and academics, CCQA maintains a unified set of standards, provides training resources for employees, and through an audit tool coming later this year, also provides quality assurance to the dairy and beef supply chain.
CCQA largely formalizes the existing standard of care for calves already occurring on farms and ranches across the United States. This ranges from calf health priorities to animal handling and stockmanship best practices to management and care practices. For dairy farms already participating in the FARM program, the CCQA caretaker course provides continuing education for calf care and earns the farms a CCQA/FARM equivalency certification. Employee training and continuing education are key components of quality animal care. Some best practices from each of the main CCQA categories are:
Veterinarians are key assets on successful calf-rearing operations. In addition to helping establish and maintain a health management plan and advising medical cases, veterinarians can serve as a training resource and assist in determining gaps in management or protocol drift.
Handling and facility design should prioritize low stress handling techniques. This is not only important for reducing calf stress, but it can also improve safety for staff. A zero-tolerance policy for unacceptable handling must be in place, and best practice for all management practices should be reinforced through training of those with animal care responsibilities.
It is recommended that calves be provided with a high-quality colostrum measuring 10% of the calf’s body weight within six hours of birth. Additionally, calves fed 20% of their birth weight, or at least eight quarts of milk daily, are shown to have high levels of gain and increased immune system function. Young calves should be provided access to fresh drinking water and palatable grain.
Calf housing should be designed to protect animals from weather conditions. This includes a sufficient quantity of dry bedding, ventilation, and lighting with consideration given to allowing calves to have the opportunity for visual contact with other calves.
For the complete list of CCQA standards and priorities, check out the CCQA Reference Manual. Dairy farms and calf raising facilities curious about program participation, CCQA caretaker training, protocol templates, or other resources should visit the FARM Program Resource Library or the CCQA website.
This column originally appeared in Hoard’s Dairyman Intel on March 6, 2023.
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ARLINGTON, VA – Cooperatives Working Together (CWT) member cooperatives accepted 14 offers of export assistance from CWT that helped them capture sales contracts for 181,000 pounds (82MT) of American-type cheese, 333,000 pounds (151MT) of butter and 679,000 pounds (308MT) of cream cheese. The product is going to customers in Asia, Central America and the Caribbean, and will be delivered from March through June 2023. CWT-assisted member cooperative year-to-date export sales total 10.9 million pounds of American-type cheeses, 383,000 pounds of butter (82% milkfat), 17.8 million pounds of whole milk powder and 2.0 million pounds of cream cheese. The products are going to 16 countries in five regions. These sales are the equivalent of 254.2 million pounds of milk on a milkfat basis. Over the last 12 months, CWT assisted sales are the equivalent of 1.04 billion pounds of milk on a milkfat basis. Assisting CWT members through the Export Assistance program positively affects all U.S. dairy farmers and cooperatives by fostering the competitiveness of US dairy products in the global marketplace and helping member cooperatives gain and maintain world market share for U.S. dairy products. As a result, the program has helped significantly expand the total demand for U.S. dairy products and the demand for U.S. farm milk that produces those products. The amounts of dairy products and related milk volumes reflect current contracts for delivery, not completed export volumes. CWT pays export assistance to the bidders only when the export and delivery of the product are verified by the required documentation.
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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) unwillingness to limit dairy terms to true dairy products makes passage of the DAIRY PRIDE Act more necessary than ever, Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-WI, said in a Dairy Defined podcast released today.
“They’re going to continue to allow mislabeled imitation products to be on the market,” Baldwin said. “Wisconsin farmers work so hard to meet the FDA standards of nutrition and quality. They can’t put the word ‘milk’ on the side of a carton of milk unless they meet those standards. It is not fair for plant-based products to be able to say they’re milk when they don’t meet those standards at all.
Baldwin, along with Sens. Jim Risch, R-ID; Peter Welch, D-VT, and Susan Collins, R-ME, last week reintroduced the DAIRY PRIDE Act, which would require FDA to enforce its standards of identity and supersede the inadequate draft guidance it offered in February, in which plant-based beverages could call themselves “milk” as long as they clearly state their nutritional differences with real dairy.
Baldwin said DAIRY PRIDE could pass Congress this year via one of several vehicles, including the farm bill due this year.
“Many of the folks that I’m joining forces with are going to have significant input as we draft a new farm bill, which is something that I expect to get completed this calendar year. So that’s certainly one area that we can look towards. We also have funding bills for the Food and Drug Administration, and that would certainly be another opportunity to look at this type of legislation.”
DAIRY PRIDE is an acronym for the Defending Against Imitations and Replacements of Yogurt, Milk, and Cheese to Promote Regular Intake of Dairy Everyday Act.
FDA’s guidance is open for public comment until April 24. Dairy advocates may learn more about the issue and offer comments here.
The full podcast is here. You can also find the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts. Broadcast outlets may use the MP3 file. Please attribute information to NMPF.
Today, the National Milk Producers Federation (NMPF), Consortium for Common Food Names (CCFN), U.S. Dairy Export Council (USDEC), and a coalition of other dairy stakeholders prevailed in their ongoing battle to protect the right of producers to use generic names in the U.S. market.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit upheld the prior decisions of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia and of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s Trademark Trial and Appeal Board in finding “gruyere” to be a generic term for a variety of cheese. The Fourth Circuit’s clear decision should put an end to the attempt by Swiss and French consortiums to expropriate a common food name through a U.S. certification mark registration.
The Fourth Circuit found that the evidence “is ‘so one-sided’ that there is no genuine issue as to any material fact and Opposers must prevail as a matter of law. “ The Court reasoned that the “the common usage of gruyere ‘establish[es] that when purchasers walk into retail stores and ask for [gruyere], they regularly mean’ a type of cheese, and not a cheese that was produced in the Gruyère region of Switzerland and France.“ The Fourth Circuit concluded that “the Consortiums cannot overcome what the record makes clear: cheese consumers in the United States understand ‘GRUYERE’ to refer to a type of cheese, which renders the term generic.”
For over a decade, well-resourced European interests have attempted to confiscate common names to prevent non-European producers from using long-established generic terms, essentially monopolizing the ability to produce certain products for producers in limited and specific regions.
This decision reinforces that generic terms like “gruyere” refer to types of food, and a method of production regardless of where they are produced.
“The United States remains a bastion for the defense of consumers’ and producers’ property rights that have been trampled in Europe and many countries around the world,” said Jaime Castaneda, executive director for CCFN. “The court has sent a clear message that European attempts to stop American producers from using generic food names in the U.S. will be firmly rejected. It is a momentous victory for American consumers, farmers and food manufacturers.”
NMPF Senior Vice President for Communications Alan Bjerga discusses next steps in the effort to bring transparency to plant-based beverage labeling in an interview with the National Association of Farm Broadcasters. While the FDA’s proposed guidance accepts dairy’s core argument — that beverages that falsely call themselves “milk” falsely imply a similar nutritional profile — the acceptance of such terms, even with disclaimers, still falls short of recognizing FDA’s own standards of identity and ending the confusion once and for all. That makes efforts such as congressional passage of the DAIRY PRIDE Act all the more essential, he said.
Dairy producers representing NMPF members Michigan Milk Producers Association and Agri-Mark flew to Washington on Feb. 1-2 to renew calls for a more proactive and dynamic trade policy from the U.S. government.
Organized by Farmers for Free Trade, in which NMPF is an active member, dairy producers met with members of Congress and staff serving on agriculture and trade committees this session. NMPF’s Tony Rice joined the fly-in as well and represented NMPF as part of the FFT-organized meeting with Alexis Taylor, the new USDA Under Secretary for Trade and Foreign Agricultural Affairs, on Feb. 3.
NMPF and its members in each meeting stressed the importance of market access to the success of American farmers, producers and exporters, and specifically asked lawmakers to advance trade promotion authority to help make the political environment more conducive to passing trade agreements.
NMPF’s Jaime Castaneda and Shawna Morris also met with Under Secretary Taylor on Feb. 17 to address a full suite of dairy trade priorities, including the need for a more competitive landscape for U.S. dairy exporters, a robust U.S. agenda on protecting common names like “parmesan,” strong enforcement of existing trade deals, and heightened action to beat back nontariff barriers in key dairy markets around the globe.
NMPF submitted comments Feb. 16 urging FDA to modify the proposed rule to allow for a broader range of dairy products to qualify, including milk, cheese and yogurt at all fat levels and that contain modest amounts of added sugar.
The proposed rule aimed to update the definition of the “healthy” claim to align more closely with the Dietary Guidelines for Americans. NMPF emphasized that while in theory this is a good approach, it runs the risk of ignoring the best and newest nutrition science, such as newer science on the positive and neutral impact of dairy fats. According to the 2020-2025 DGAs, nearly 90 percent of Americans under-consume dairy.
“The ability to make “healthy” claims on dairy foods holds the potential to educate consumers about dairy’s nutritional value and could improve consumption closer to DGA recommendations,” NMPF noted in its comments.
National Milk also urged FDA to take no actions which would imply that plant-based beverages are nutritionally equivalent to real dairy. Several nutrition organizations including Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, the American Academy of Pediatric Dentistry, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the American Heart Association do not recommend plant-based imitators as they are not nutritionally equivalent to dairy products.
U.S. dairy exports set new records in 2022, helped along by work from NMPF in collaboration with the U.S. Dairy Export Council (USDEC), policymakers and stakeholders who delivered on targeted policy priorities.
More than $9 billion of U.S. dairy products reached international customers in 2022, according to data finalized in February. The volume shipped accounted for 18% of total milk production. This marked the third straight record year for volume and the second for value.
In a year full of challenges, NMPF was proud to work with members and policymakers to find solutions to support dairy exporter, including:
Three NMPF cooperative members gave voice to critical dairy producer priorities at a bipartisan House Agriculture Committee farm bill listening session held in Tulare, CA on Feb. 14. California dairy farmers Brad Bosch, Jared Fernandes, and Tony Lopes spoke up for dairy at the session.
House Agriculture Committee Chairman Glenn ‘GT’ Thompson, R-PA, presided, accompanied by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-CA, and Representatives David Valadao, R-CA, Jim Costa, D-CA, John Duarte, R-CA, Jimmy Panetta, D-CA, Doug LaMalfa, R-CA, Salud Carbajal, D-CA, David Rouzer, R-NC, and John Rose, R-TN. Dairy was top-of-mind as farmers and lawmakers discussed critical agricultural policies at this session held in the nation’s largest milk-producing county. All members emphasized the urgency of completing the new farm bill in a timely manner, with Chairman Thompson and Speaker McCarthy voicing support for completion of a bipartisan bill on-time this year.
“Just as NMPF appreciates the work dairy producers do every day to nourish our nation and the world, we are grateful to each of our members for taking time out of their day to attend this important session,” said Jim Mulhern, president and CEO of NMPF. “We also thank Chairman Thompson, Speaker McCarthy, Representatives Valadao and Costa, and their colleagues for hosting today’s farm bill listening session.”
NMPF cooperative member farmers highlighted critical issues NMPF is hoping the House Agriculture Committee will consider in crafting the 2023 farm bill, including key matters related to the Federal Milk Marketing Order system, the Dairy Margin Coverage program and other risk management tools, and the important sustainability opportunities that farm bill conservation programs provide to dairy producers of all sizes.
Brad Bosch, a southern California dairy farmer and California Dairies, Inc. and Dairy Farmers of America member-owner, highlighted the work NMPF is doing to lead the dairy industry toward a consensus proposal for modernization of the Federal Milk Marketing Order system. Bosch highlighted the need to return to the previous “higher of” Class I mover formula on account of the asymmetric risk farmers bear under the current formula, as well as NMPF’s support for farm bill language to require USDA to conduct mandatory plant cost studies to provide all industry stakeholders with a better understanding of real dairy manufacturing costs.
Jared Fernandes, a third-generation dairy farmer from Tipton, California and Land O’Lakes member-owner, urged the committee to maintain and strengthen the Dairy Margin Coverage program as well as risk management tools that were previously improved in the 2018 farm bill. Fernandes also urged members to support USDA conservation programs, which provide vital support toward dairy’s ongoing sustainability efforts, and to include farmer cooperatives as part of the conservation delivery system.
Finally, Tony Lopes, a fourth-generation dairy farmer from Gustine, California and CDI and DFA member-owner, voiced appreciation for the successes included in the 2018 farm bill but also noted that recent pandemic and supply chain constraints have put a spotlight on the need to make further improvements to dairy policy. Lopes also recognized the importance of nutrition programs that feed families across the country, including dairy’s role as a nutrient powerhouse within those programs.
NMPF looks forward to working with members of Congress on these and other critical priorities as work gets underway on the farm bill this year.
