Doud Takes Reins at NMPF

NMPF began its new year with a new President and Chief Executive Officer, as Gregg Doud succeeded outgoing leader Jim Mulhern on Jan. 1.

“As NMPF’s new president and CEO, I am duty-bound to defend this industry. And because of our farmer and co-op leadership and first-class staff, we defend it well,” Doud said in his first CEO’s Corner, published yesterday. “2024 is also exciting because of the great potential we in dairy have to take the initiative. We can attack as well as defend. 2024 is going to be a great year for this industry. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to share in the leadership of this journey.”

Doud has served in numerous leadership roles in trade association and government work in his more than 30-year career in agricultural policy and economics, most recently at Aimpoint Research, a global intelligence firm specializing in agriculture and food. From 2018 to 2021 he served as Chief Agricultural Negotiator for the U.S. Office of the Trade Representative, appointed by President Donald Trump and confirmed by the Senate, where he led numerous successful efforts to create a fair, prosperous environment for U.S. agricultural exports, including the U.S.-China “Phase One” agreement and the USMCA negotiations.

Before that role, he served as president of the Commodity Markets Council, a trade association for commodities exchanges and industry counterparts; as senior professional staff on the Senate Agriculture Committee; and as chief economist for the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, among other roles.

Mulhern leaves NMPF with the organization spearheading a once-a-generation update of federal milk marketing orders; with dairy farmers benefiting from a comprehensive federal safety net that features a suite of risk-management programs tailored to farms in all sizes and regions; agriculture-leading initiatives on sustainability and animal care; and undeniable progress in creating a more transparent marketplace for consumers amid the proliferation of plant-based dairy imposters, among other accomplishments.

Jim Mulhern to Retire as NMPF CEO; Gregg Doud Named Successor

NMPF President and CEO Jim Mulhern announced Tuesday he will retire from his position at the end of this year, concluding a decade of service leading the organization and capping a 45-year career in U.S. agricultural and dairy policy. Gregg Doud, a globally recognized agricultural leader and former Chief Agricultural Negotiator for the U.S. Office of the Trade Representative, was named his replacement by NMPF’s Board of Directors later that day.

“Directing the policy efforts of the nation’s dairy farmers and their cooperatives has been the highlight of my professional career,” said Mulhern, who was asked to lead the organization in 2013 and guided NMPF through two completed farm bills, the .COVID-19 crisis, and an ever-quickening pace of change in an industry that in some ways is unrecognizable from that he entered in 1979, when he began his career working for a Midwest dairy cooperative.

Mulhern leaves NMPF in a commanding position, with the organization spearheading a once-a-generation update of federal milk marketing orders and advancing both a fairer economic and regulatory environment for dairy farmers and a more transparent marketplace for consumers amid the proliferation of plant-based dairy imposters. Through its partnerships with the U.S. Dairy Export Council and others, NMPF has supported policy changes to boost dairy exports, which are reaching records; and through its stewardship of the National Dairy FARM Program, it is enhancing dairy’s leadership agricultural sustainability and animal care.

“Dairy farmers have numerous reasons to be thankful for Jim Mulhern’s leadership at NMPF,” said NMPF Board of Directors Chairman Randy Mooney. “Jim has been a leader, a visionary, and a friend to dairy, and through that, a leader in agriculture. The combination of his depth of knowledge, his energy, and his unflagging passion for dairy producers is impossible to replace, but we all will know that his influence and achievements will resonate in this industry for years to come.”

Doud has served in numerous leadership roles in trade association and government work in his more than 30-year career in agricultural policy and economics, most recently at Aimpoint Research, a global intelligence firm specializing in agriculture and food. As Chief Agricultural Negotiator for the U.S. Office of the Trade Representative, from 2018-2021, he led numerous successful efforts to create a fair, prosperous environment for U.S. agricultural exports, including the U.S.-China “Phase One” agreement and the USMCA negotiations.

Before that role, he served as president of the Commodity Markets Council, a trade association for commodities exchanges and industry counterparts; as senior professional staff on the Senate Agriculture Committee; and as chief economist for the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, among other roles.

Doud said that as the organization’s next leader, he’s excited to engage on critical issues facing dairy farmers. “From the policy arena to new technologies, there are many great new opportunities for dairy producers at home and internationally,” he said. “It is a tremendous privilege to have the opportunity in these exciting times to lead NMPF, one of Washington’s oldest, most prestigious and well-respected agricultural trade associations.”

Doud was born and raised on a 1,000-acre grain, hog and cattle farm near Mankato, KS. He is a graduate of Kansas State University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in animal science and a master’s in agricultural economics. He remains actively engaged in production agriculture through partnership in a cow-calf operation and lives with his wife and two children on their horse farm in Lothian, MD.

Doud will begin official work at NMPF in September as its chief operating officer before assuming the role of president and CEO upon Mulhern’s retirement.

“Dairy farmers across the nation are pleased to endorse a true champion of agriculture, someone who both understands the hard work we do and the opportunities and challenges we face both here and abroad,” Mooney said. “NMPF has long been blessed with leadership that’s been able to take its advocacy for dairy to a higher level. We strongly believe that Gregg Doud more than amply provides the expertise, the background, and the passion we will need as we navigate a challenging, but promising, new era.”

Dairy’s Certainties Help Guide the Industry

Note: This is an abridged version of NMPF President and CEO Jim Mulhern’s speech at the organization’s annual meeting on Nov. 16 in Las Vegas.

One of the greatest challenges dairy faces today is the incredible amount of uncertainty in the world we live in. We didn’t have to worry that much about supply chains or closed restaurants and schools just two years ago, but now they mean dollars and cents to our bottom lines. And as our industry grows larger, the dollars and cents involved only get bigger.

But along with the uncertainty, we’ve learned a lot as well. In some cases, we have perhaps even more certainty than we had two years ago.

The first, most basic certainty is this: People want our product because they love its taste, and they know they need it. In a year when store shelves were emptied of milk across the country, schools shuttered nationwide, restaurants closed and cheese prices hit records, U.S. dairy consumption increased three pounds per person last year — to the highest consumption level since 1960.

We also know from the past year that exports more than ever are not only dairy’s future, they’re dairy’s present. U.S. dairy farmers can serve these markets more sustainably than anyone else in the world, and other countries are increasingly recognizing that. So we know that customers here and overseas support us. But we also know a lot more than that.

NMPF is the voice of dairy farmers in our nation’s capital. We’re well positioned to meet the many challenges that lie ahead. Here are a few numbers that show what we’ve done and point at what needs to be done:

$6 billion. It’s a big number, but it’s the amount of federal aid we’ve been able to procure for the dairy industry as needed assistance during the pandemic.

And here’s an individual, farm-level number that in some ways best illustrates our efforts to make a challenging policy climate work for our members: $750,000. It reflects the extent to which the federal government committed important resources to help individual dairy farmers all across this country. It’s also six times larger than what USDA first announced as the payment limit for dairies and all of agriculture under the Coronavirus Food Assistance, or CFAP program. When USDA announced CFAP, it said there would be a payment limit of $125,000 per commodity or person. We knew that was too little to be meaningful for many farms, so we went to work, and we got the maximum raised to $750,000.

$400 million. That’s the money allocated for the new Dairy Donation Program, an effort we conceived and shepherded through the legislative process, working closely with our partners in the food bank community who provide food to folks in need every day. The Dairy Donation Program connects our nutritious products to the families who ask for dairy more than anything else from their local food banks. Again, we worked hand in glove with lawmakers from both parties to get this through.

$1 billion and counting. That’s what’s been paid out this year under the Dairy Margin Coverage Program. The program is fast, it’s market-responsive, and we’ve continued to work to improve it. Changes we helped make happen this year will give us more dedicated federal funding to work within the next farm bill as we seek further improvements for producers of all sizes.

But DMC is only part of a suite of programs we’ve made better. Dairy Revenue Protection, LGM Dairy — These programs worked better because the funding caps that hobbled past dairy risk management efforts were eliminated thanks to our work. We’re proud to have led those efforts.

One final number. $750 million. That’s the amount of money that due to the wild market gyrations of the pandemic we lost with that change in the Class I pricing formula made in the 2018 Farm Bill. The data is clear and so is the cause. When USDA began the pandemic food box purchases, they were heavily weighted toward cheese, creating disorderly markets.

We warned USDA this would happen, but we also knew that if there were no purchase program, many dairies would not survive. We can’t ignore the lessons learned from the unintended consequences of the government’s actions. The Class I mover needs to be fixed. The losses violated the spirit of our revenue-neutral agreement between farmers and processors that we’re working to make right. We’ve recovered $350 million of our losses. But as we all know, it’s not a complete win. We’ve been working with members of Congress since the announcement of this program, to try to get up to an additional $400 million, funding that beyond what we’ve already been able to achieve, that would cover the balance of the losses.

It’s still a work in progress. We will fight for every dollar we can to make every dairy receive its fair compensation. Beyond that, we also need to tackle thorny issues related to the Federal Milk Marketing Order system, which has gone two decades without a thorough re-examination. This won’t be easy, but as the only dairy organization with the depth and breadth of membership to lead the industry on this issue, we move forward with confidence.

Our work for the industry goes beyond numbers. When our producer community has a concern about a regulation, we respond. Our regulatory work ranges from policy improvements to serving as a resource for farms concerned about everything from water regulations to workplace safety rules.

And our work goes beyond Washington policy to our efforts to ensure that customers and consumers understand and trust our industry and our on-farm practices through our FARM Program. As the threat of climate change and the importance of sustainable food production become increasingly important, we’re guiding Washington’s priorities in ways that will help our dairy farmers be part of the solution. The Net Zero Initiative is a model, one that other agriculture sectors are starting to follow.

Dairy’s been blessed with great leadership from the farm to the boardroom, but it only works through collaboration, honest communication and good-faith awareness of each other’s needs. These are a few of the certainties we can share today. We have much to look forward to. It’s a tribute to the work we’ve done, and it shows that we have the strength we need to achieve what we need. Let’s keep harnessing that strength and move forward together.