World Dairy Diary

Stork shared results from a dairy farm that followed Stoller’s alfalfa program. The Vos family of Burlington, Wisc. began adding Stoller products to the foliar insecticide spray application used on their alfalfa. Bio-Forge® is the key to Stoller’s Alfalfa Program, applied approximately seven days after each hay cutting to boost root growth and plant vigor. Bio-Forge is a yield enhancer and stress reducer for all crops. It offsets the negative effects of plant stress caused by drought, excessive moisture, frost, herbicide damage and other crop stressors. Bio-Forge keeps the root systems functioning normally under stressed conditions promoting more normal growth activity. This allows more impressive second cuttings and improved digestibility.

Second generation dairy farmers Ray and Ron Vos, like all dairy farmers, are working to manage their operation by looking for efficiencies and improved ROI. The result of their use of the Stoller Alfalfa Program was exceptionally healthy hay with increased tonnage and feed value. With just four cuttings they calculated 6.7 tons of dry matter/acre.

The increased tonnage allowed them to manage their feed needs efficiently – eliminating the previous year’s $11,000 expense of buying alfalfa from an outside source. In addition, the quality of the feed improved significantly. The second cutting feed analysis of the Bio-Forge-treated alfalfa showed an Relative Feed Value (RFV) rating of 189 with a 21.26% crude protein level. This represents a significant increase from recent regional data showing the average RFV as 145-160. In addition, the Vos operation noted higher milk production – with over 28% of the herd averaging milk production of over 100 lbs/day.

A key initiative is the second round of DFA’s Gold Standard Dairy quality assurance program. DFA introduced the program in 2007 to proactively address the concerns of consumers, retailers and processors who are interested in how food is produced. The on-farm review includes animal well-being, environmental stewardship, employee training, and milk safety and quality. More than 90 percent of DFA member farms have participated in the Gold Standard process.

When the second round of the Gold Standard Dairy process begins in 2010, the program will incorporate measurement criteria from the National Dairy Farmers Assuring Responsible Management (FARM) program, a nationwide, verifiable animal well-being program that demonstrates U.S. milk producers are committed to producing high-quality milk in a high-quality environment.

Further demonstrating its commitment to animal welfare, at its March meeting, the Board approved a resolution affirming that the public image of dairy, including animal housing and care, is of utmost importance to DFA and its dairy farmer members. The resolution states that DFA will continue to emphasize an expectation of proper and caring treatment of animals through individual dairy farm quality programs, the Gold Standard Dairy program, and participation with other dairy industry organizations to establish animal well-being standards for the U.S. dairy industry.

The company’s efforts to retool and promote its pizzas are paying off, resulting in traffic growth in all four quarters of 2009, Domino’s Chief Executive Office David Brandon said. Domestic same-store sales rose 0.9 percent for all of 2009, Domino’s said.

Growth was “most significant” during the fourth quarter, Brandon said in today’s statement. “This positive momentum has continued thus far in 2010, as sales and traffic have increased significantly since the launch of our new core pizza.”

Increased pizza consumption may help trim excess cheese supplies and provide a lift for beleaguered dairy producers still reeling from a milk price crash. Pizza generates about $32.5 billion in annual restaurant and grocery store revenue, and about a quarter of all cheese sold is used to make pizza, according to Dairy Management Inc.

The same-store sales outlook is “some much needed good news for the market,” said Scott Brown, a livestock and dairy economist at the Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute in Columbia, Mo. “We must have some demand growth if we want milk prices to move higher and stay higher in 2010.”

At the end of January, U.S. cheese inventories totaled 980.8 million pounds, up 11 percent from a year earlier, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data. Cheese prices will likely stay below $1.40 a pound for a few months without some additional cheese sales, Brown said. “We have a ways to go yet but this hopefully is the start of good news on the demand front,” he said.

In November, Brandon, the Domino’s CEO, told Dairy Herd Management that using more cheese was yielding benefits. The company’s “cheese-enhanced” American Legends pizzas accounted for a double-digit share of overall pizza sales, and the share is growing, Brandon said.

“With almost 50 percent of consumers reading food labels for sodium content, we’re responding to their interest in lowering their daily intake by offering Reduced Sodium Sargento cheeses,” said Chris Groom, marketing director. “However, we only wanted to launch the line if we could still provide the great tasting natural cheese that consumers love, which this line does successfully.”

Consumers, regulators and health groups are increasingly watching sodium intake as public service organizations are referring to high sodium diets as the single greatest problem in the American diet. The average daily sodium intake is now 4,000 milligrams, which is about twice the government’s recommended amount for the average person. Health experts claim that as little as a one gram sodium reduction in the American diet per day can help, which is equivalent to 25 percent less, matching the decrease in Sargento Reduced Sodium cheeses.

The information on the site originated from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, but Fitzgerald says it was being made available in a several-hundred page PDF document that was difficult to navigate. Hoping to make the information more accessible and easier to navigate for consumers, Fitzgerald built the Web site.

Consumers can now enter the code found on their dairy products, and the Web site lists where the product originated from.

Dairy products from milk and cheese to yogurt, sour cream and cottage cheese are included.

He expanded his collection to include other bottles from the city and, before long, the area. And as is wont to happen with collectors of things, eventually he expanded again and started searching out bottles from around Massachusetts.

With the man who most loved the bottles gone, the Wentzell family has pondered what to do with the 2,500 or so specimens he’d lovingly collected. They checked with local historical societies and museums, and a collector did buy a few that he badly wanted. Still, it’s too large a collection for any one place to take.

“If we could keep some part of the collection together,” Mrs. Wentzell said, “I think he would want that. We don’t have to sell them. I just want to do the right thing.”

This decision amends the producer-handler definition of all federal milk marketing orders to limit exemption from pooling and pricing provisions of the orders to those producer-handlers with total route disposition and sales of packaged fluid milk products to other plants of 3 million pounds or less per month.