Digest Highlights

Land O’Lakes to conduct intensive on-farm sustainability assessments

Land O’Lakes Inc. announced new on-farm sustainability commitments to be adopted by 2025 as the company strives to align on-farm best practices with farm-to-fork sustainability goals of customer sand partner brands.

Natzke dave
Dave Natzke
Editor / Progressive Dairy

Within the next four years, more than 1,600 Land O’Lakes’ dairy farmer-owners will complete an intensive on-farm sustainability assessment. The large-scale project will yield more than 250 data points per farm, providing measurable, actionable information on fuel, electricity and water usage, nutrient application, crop rotation and manure management.

To support this effort, Land O’Lakes has created a new “Dairy 2025 Commitment” team dedicated solely to the collection of the on-farm data and help farmer-members develop measurable ways to improve efficiencies and further reduce their environmental footprint.

The assessments are aligned with the U.S. Dairy Stewardship Commitment while maintaining universal compliance with the National Milk Producers Federation’s (NMPF) FARM Program.

The step is part of Land O’Lakes’ enterprise-wide focus on quality, transparency and accountability across its supply chain, said Tim Leviny, Land O’Lakes’ senior vice president of global dairy ingredients.

Advertisement

“Farmers are the original conservationists, so this initiative is us putting a stake in the ground around on-farm sustainability measurement and more proactively telling our story to our valued customers and consumers,” said Pete Kappelman, Land O’Lakes senior vice president of member and government relations.

Texas: Milk production recovering but cow culling is up

Although the full impact of damaging mid-February winter storms is still being determined, regional milk production is picking up in Texas and neighboring states, while dairy cow culling is also on the rise.

According to summaries included in the USDA’s latest Dairy Market News, milk yields in affected states have begun to grow again. For the week ending March 11, bottling demand was also growing in the south-central and southeast regions as outlets continued to refill pipelines disrupted by the weather.

Dairy Market News contacts suggested animal health issues caused by the weather were leading to increased cow culling. The USDA weekly cow slaughter data is updated on Thursdays and generally includes a two-week lag.

Latest available USDA Region 6 cow culling data estimated 10,600 dairy cows were slaughtered under federal inspection for the week ending Feb. 27, up from 6,900 head during the comparable week a year earlier. The region includes Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas.

For the same time frame, dairy cull cow slaughter totals were also about 1,600 head (145%) higher in the USDA Region 7, covering Iowa, Kansas, Missouri and Nebraska.

Some of the ongoing increase may be attributed to livestock market disruptions also caused by the winter storms, which caused trucking delays and market closures in mid-February.

Global Dairy Trade index slips

After reaching its highest level since March 2014, the index of Global Dairy Trade (GDT) dairy product prices fell 3.8% in the latest auction, held March 16. A price summary of individual product categories follows:

  • Skim milk powder was up 0.7% to $3,350 per metric ton (MT).
  • Butter was down 2.8% to $5,659 per MT.
  • Whole milk powder was down 6.2% to $4,083 per MT.
  • Cheddar cheese was not available.
  • Anhydrous milkfat was up 3.7% to $6,155 per MT.

The next GDT auction is April 6.

Bill would bring whole milk back to school

A bill allowing unflavored and flavored whole milk in school cafeterias has been introduced. U.S. Rep. Glenn “GT” Thompson (R-Pennsylvania), chair of the House Ag Committee, and Rep. Antonio Delgado (R-New York) introduced the Whole Milk for Healthy Kids Act of 2021.

Efforts to allow higher-fat milk varieties to be served in school lunch and breakfast programs have been ongoing for nearly a decade after Congress passed the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act in 2010. That law amended nutrition standards in the federal School Lunch Program. Among the changes, the law mandated that flavored milk served through the program must be fat-free.

In 2017, Thompson introduced the School Milk Nutrition Act of 2017, which provided schools the option to serve 1% flavored milk varieties. Later that year, the USDA announced a rule that allowed schools to receive waivers for low-fat (1%) flavored milk, rather than only fat-free.

The Whole Milk for Healthy Kids Act was previously introduced in Congress in 2019 but did not advance to a vote.

(Read: Is whole milk headed back to schools?)

For additional background, read these articles from Progressive Dairy:

USDA rule permanently expands school milk options

Dairy getting upgrade in school feeding programs

FAPRI offers a 10-year dairy outlook

The Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute (FAPRI) released its 10-year projections for agricultural trends, including dairy.

Economists with FAPRI and the Missouri University Agricultural Markets and Policy (AMAP) team release the annual U.S. Agricultural Market Outlook report each spring. The broad-brush outlook provides potential long-term baselines for production and prices. The forecast does not, however, reflect the unpredictably of market volatility.

Based on the FAPRI forecast, here’s what to expect in the decade ahead:

  • U.S. cow numbers follow a nearly flat trendline, from a high of about 9.404 million in 2021 to a low of 9.362 million in 2024, before rebounding again to 9.391 million by 2030. California, Wisconsin, New York and Pennsylvania are expected to exhibit a decline in cow numbers over the decade, while Texas, Idaho, Michigan continue to grow.

  • Average milk per cow maintains a fairly steady growth rate of about 1.1%, reaching 26,502 pounds of milk per cow in 2030.

  • Combining cow numbers and milk per cow, U.S. annual milk production also grows about 1.1% per year, reaching 248.9 billion pounds in 2030.

  • If you’re looking to take some long-term projections to your lender, FAPRI forecasts an annual average all-milk price of $18.04 per hundredweight (cwt) through 2030, with an average income margin over feed costs of $8.82 per cwt. Both corn and soybean prices are expected to peak in 2020-21 and then decline slightly through most of the 10-year period.

  • There will be steady but small growth in both per-capita domestic consumption and exports, although fluid milk consumption continues its long-term downward trend.

USDA solicits bids for cheese

The USDA announced bidding periods for delivery of dairy products for federal food and nutrition assistance programs. Solicitations included:

  • 2.85 million pounds of sliced processed cheddar in 5-pound loaves for delivery throughout the U.S. between May-September 2021 – Bids close March 23.

  • 12.3 million pounds of cheddar cheese (1-pound blocks, 2- and 5-pound packages of shreds) for delivery throughout the U.S. between May-September 2021 – Bids close March 25.

NASDA urges changes to ‘food box’ program

The National Association of State Departments of Agriculture (NASDA) is urging continuation of the USDA’s Farmers to Families Food Box program, albeit with recommended changes. In a letter to U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, the state ag leaders recommended adjustments to allow more producers to contribute and increase the amount of food shared with families in need.

Recommendations included considering the adverse impact on smaller farms when awarding contracts based on price, enabling vendors to curate boxes based on local preference and availability of food, and encouraging the participation of socially disadvantaged farmers.  end mark