Category Archives: agriculture

Under the DMI umbrella: Fonterra CEO to chair Global Dairy Platform, Danone sustainability strategist to join GDP operating committee

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Global Dairy Platform launched Pathways to Dairy Net Zero Initiative in September 2021, one year after DMI’s Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy launched the Dairy Net Zero Initiative (NZI) in October 2020 (A year prior to that in 2019, the current and former Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack testified to the Senate Ag Committee as a dairy-checkoff executive, serving then as president of the U.S. Dairy Export Council, and he foretold the nuts and bolts of the not-yet launched Dairy Net Zero Initiative and asked Congress to fund pilot farms. GDP has governance in and manages the Dairy Sustainability Framework that underpins what U.S. farmers, and their cows, will have to live up to — including how livestock methane is calculated, mitigated and monitored, which may be based on inaccurate math and science in terms of CO2 equivalents.

By Sherry Bunting, Farmshine, Friday, May 5, 2023

ROSEMONT, Ill. — Fonterra CEO Miles Hurrell has been named the new board chairman of the Global Dairy Platform (GDP), a non-profit industry association representing the international dairy sector. A portion of its revenue is from membership dues, but also from the 7.5-cents per hundredweight equivalent checkoff on U.S. dairy imports as well as grants for research and program services from Dairy Management Inc (DMI).

Fonterra’s Hurrell will replace Hein Schumacher, who is leaving his position as CEO of Royal FrieslandCampina to become CEO of Unilever.

In the April 26 news release, Hurrell cites Schumacher’s leadership in “accelerating climate action via the ground-breaking Pathways to Dairy Net Zero Initiative.” 

Announced in the same release is the appointment to the GDP operational committee of French multinational Danone’s senior vice president of sustainability strategy.

According to its 501(c)6 non-profit tax filings, “GDP is a pre-competitive collaboration,” and its governance groups — the board and the operational committee — “manage a ‘Dairy Sustainability Framework’ to unify the approach being taken by dairy organizations to the broad challenges of sustainability from environmental, social, and economic perspectives.”

The Dairy Sustainability Framework is part of the Dairy Sustainability Alliance of the Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy, another non-profit founded and funded by dairy checkoff organizations under the DMI umbrella. The Innovation Center sets U.S. Dairy Stewardship Commitments that are implemented through the FARM program and reviewed every three to five years to show U.S. dairy is, according to its website, “moving the needle toward achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations.”

DMI, its Innovation Center, Dairy Sustainability Alliance, Dairy Sustainability Framework, and U.S. Dairy Stewardship Commitments are all located at Suite 900, 10255 W Higgins Road, Rosemont, Illinois, and the Global Dairy Platform (GDP) address of record is Suite 820 at the same street address.

Along with New Zealand’s Fonterra, CEOs from these top-15 dairy multinationals serve on the GDP Board: Dairy Farmers of America (DFA), headquartered in Kansas; Arla Foods, headquartered in Denmark; Leprino, headquartered in Colorado; China’s Mengniu Dairy Company; Moringa Milk Industry, headquartered in Japan; Royal FrieslandCampina, headquartered in the Netherlands, and Saputo, headquartered in Canada.

Along with the board of directors, the GDP operational committee provides governance and includes sustainability executives for Arla, DFA, Fonterra, Land O’Lakes, Meiji Holdings and FrieslandCampina.

In a separate April 2023 bulletin, GDP announced the May 1, 2023 retirement of Dr. Greg Miller from his position as research lead for GDP since its inception. Known as ‘Dr. Dairy’, Miller has served as the chief science officer for the National Dairy Council for nearly 32 years and as executive vice president of research, regulatory and scientific affairs for DMI. Miller will continue as a member of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization Scientific Advisory Committee.

Key paid staff for GDP is Donald Moore, the executive director since 2010. Before that, he was a Fonterra senior executive in business development and ingredients marketing for 20 years.

Moore also serves as chairman of the governance group for the Dairy Sustainability Framework since its inception in 2013.

With Fonterra’s CEO as the new board chairman of the GDP, and with a former Fonterra senior executive serving 13 years to-date as the executive director of the GDP and the chair of the governance group for the Dairy Sustainability Framework, it’s worth noting that Fonterra announced six months ago its new start-up company for alternative dairy ingredients. According to the October 2022 press release, Fonterra has partnered with Royal DSM, a Dutch company, in creating this start-up “to accelerate the development and commercialization of (animal-free) fermentation-derived proteins with dairy-like properties.” 

With Danone’s senior vice president of sustainability strategy now appointed to the GDP operational committee, it’s worth noting that in October 2022, Danone announced it would use artificial intelligence to reformulate 70% of its plant-based fake-milk products. This followed the 2021 earnings call where Danone executives outlined new fake-milk and dairy product launches with plans to use “new dairy-like technology” to “win over” the 60% of U.S. consumers not in the plant-based category because of taste and texture. The Danone executives told shareholders their Renew strategy identifies the U.S. as a “key plant-based market.” In January 2023, Danone announced it is eyeing sale of Horizon Organic, saying it falls outside of their key areas of focus.

Global Dairy Platform (GDP) was formed in 2006 as an alliance, according to its website. Its tax filings confirm incorporation as a 501(c)6 non-profit in 2012 and its address of record at Suite 820 at 10255 W Higgins Road, Rosemont, IL 60018.

According to the GDP’s most recent IRS 990s that are publicly available for 2017 through 2019, the years when former DFA CEO Rick Smith was its chairman, GDP had revenues between $3.7 and $4.2 million annually. This increased to $4.7 million in 2020, according to an available summary of the IRS 990 for that year.

The tax returns show approximately $1 million in GDP revenue came from membership dues and approximately $2.7 million annually from granted program services and research funds (checkoff). 

The GDP revenue also included approximately $500,000 in ‘import assessments.’ The 7.5-cent import checkoff, which was implemented in 2011 amid formation of the Innovation Center and its resulting alliances and frameworks.

GDP’s executive director Donald Moore is paid a salary package of nearly $600,000 annually. The top three independent contractors in 2018-19 included DMI receiving over $800,000 annually for program services and administration; Massey University in New Zealand $451,000; Emerging Ag in Calgary, Alberta, Canada $600,000 (for UN access), and Lindsey Consulting, in the UK nearly $300,000 with Brian Lindsey serving as the GDP’s sustainability lead.

According to GDP, its membership consists of more than 95 corporations, companies, associations, scientific bodies, and other partners, with operations in more than 150 countries, collectively accounting for approximately one-third of global milk supplies.

DMI manages the national nickel from the 15 cents per hundredweight checkoff deducted from U.S. milk checks for research, education, and promotion. DMI also manages the unified marketing plan many state and regional checkoff organizations contribute toward, and DMI manages the 7.5 cents per hundredweight equivalent import checkoff, handed off to the GDP.

DMI states in its 501(c)6 non-profit tax filing that it is “investing dairy producer checkoff funds in strategic, coordinated marketing programs designed to increase consumption of U.S. dairy products domestically and internationally.”

The Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy was initiated in 2008, but according to its tax filings, was incorporated as a 501(c)6 non-profit in 2012 under the name: The Dairy Center for Strategic Innovation and Collaboration Inc., doing business as Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy.

In 2017, DMI trademarked the names ‘Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy’ and ‘Dairy Sustainability Alliance.’

Leprino CEO Mike Durkin was elected chairman of the board of the Innovation Center in January 2023.

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AUTHOR’S NOTE: Why do these connections matter? Because the UN Food and Agriculture Organization is getting ready to make a decision about how livestock methane is calculated using GWP100, a 30 year old measure that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change even agreed overblows the problem by 3 to 4 times, or GWP*, which includes not just the sources but also the natural sinks for methane as a short-lived greenhouse gas. Dr. Frank Mitloehner has written about this, and Farmshine readers have read my many articles about the differences between the calculations and what they mean for our cows in the future. The Global Dairy Platform put out a bulletin a few months ago and pinned it to their website exploring the differences in these calculations, saying that “GWP* is not appropriate as a benchmarking tool at less than a global level.” This is concerning because it means that global dairy multinationals have oversight through dairy checkoff non-profits and alliances into formulating and deciding what U.S. dairy farmers — and their cows — will be expected to live up to, even when the science behind the decision is highly debatable. As we now know, even scientists are becoming frustrated. It’s important to know that multinational companies investing in competing animal-free fermentation-produced DNA-altered dairy-like ingredients are in leadership positions in these collaborations.

FDA launches ‘rumor control’ hub, will this eventually include its ‘nutrition initiatives’?

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By Sherry Bunting, Farmshine, May 19, 2023

WASHINGTON D.C. — The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) launched a new “rumor control” webpage on May 16, described as the hub to stop what the FDA calls “false, inaccurate, or misleading health information” that is “negatively impacting the public’s health.” 

How does FDA define misinformation? “It’s information, spread intentionally and unintentionally, that is false, inaccurate, or misleading according to the best available evidence at the time,” the announcement explains.

Who decides what is the best available evidence at the time? An info-graphic recommends checking sources and cross-referencing the information with reliable sources.

What is a reliable source? FDA describes it in one section as “the federal government and its partners” and describes it in another section as “a non-profit fact-checking source or government resource.”

A video narrator at FDA rumor-control explains the next step is to read beyond the headlines on the internet for context and to “understand the purpose of the post.” 

Scrolling to the bottom of the landing page are instructions to report misinformation.

“We face the challenge of an overabundance of information related to our public health. Some of this information may be false and potentially harmful,” the FDA rumor control webpage states. “If you see content online that you believe to be false or misleading, you can report it to the applicable platform.” 

These words are followed by icons to click for administrators at Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, and WhatsApp.

FDA has posted to this hub its ‘fact documents’ on several hot topics such as vaccines, dietary supplements, and sunscreen, stating that more topics will be added in the future.

Will nutrition become one of them, now that the Administration has placed a priority on FDA’s role as purveyors of the Dietary Guidelines as gospel?

Case in point, just three weeks prior to launching the rumor-control hub, the FDA announced it is “prioritizing nutrition initiatives to ensure people in the U.S. have greater access to healthier foods and nutrition information to identify healthier choices more easily… to improve eating patterns and, as a result, improve everyone’s health and wellness.”

These FDA initiatives came out of the “whole of government approach” pledged by President Biden and Ag Secretary Vilsack in the White House Strategy on Hunger, Nutrition and Health.

“People need to know what they should be eating, and the FDA is already using its authority around healthy labeling, so you know what to eat,” said the President during the White House Conference where the Biden-Harris National Strategy was unveiled in September 2022. 

The FDA proposed rule on ‘healthy labeling’ came out on the same day. Comments ended months ago but the final rule has not yet been published in the Federal Register.

The FDA nutrition initiatives are being pursued “to help accelerate efforts to empower consumers with information and create a healthier food supply.”

According to the FDA news release, the federal government currently believes obesity and chronic diet-related diseases are on the rise because American eating patterns are not aligning with the federal Dietary Guidelines. The press release states that most people consume too much saturated fat, sodium and added sugar, and the FDA nutrition initiatives aim to correct this.

FDA’s nutrition priorities in progress, include:

1)    Developing an updated definition and a voluntary symbol for the ‘healthy’ nutrient content claim, front-of-package labeling, dietary guidance statements and e-commerce labeling, and

2)    Supporting innovation by changing standards of identity such as labeling requirements for plant-based foods.

In addition to issuing its controversial plant-based milk labeling rule earlier this year, which would allow the pattern of fake milk proliferation to simply continue, the FDA in the first four months of 2023 sent letters of ‘no objection’ to three companies in their respective requests for GRAS (generally regarded as safe) status for cellular lab-created meat. 

Several ferrmentation-vat dairy protein analog makers — including Perfect Day with its genetically-altered yeast excrement posing as dairy protein — received their ‘no objection’ to GRAS letters from FDA in 2020.

As reported in Farmshine over the past several years, the FDA has been on its “multi-year nutrition innovation strategy” since 2018. However, the pace has accelerated since September 12, 2022, when Executive Order 14081 was signed by President Biden just 10 days before the White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition and Health.

Entitled Advancing Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing Innovation for a Sustainable, Safe and Secure American Bioeconomy, the Presidential EO 14081 states: “For biotechnology and biomanufacturing to help us achieve our societal goals, the United States needs to invest in… and develop genetic engineering technologies and techniques to be able to write circuitry for cells and predictably program biology in the same way in which we write software and program computers; unlock the power of biological data, including through computing tools and artificial intelligence; and advance the science of scale‑up production while reducing the obstacles for commercialization so that innovative technologies and products can reach markets faster.”

(AUTHOR’S NOTE: All roads lead back to the umbrella of the Dietary Guidelines. The current DGA Committee began meeting recently in the process of formulating the 2025-30 DGAs. Entrenched in four decades of low-fat dogma, the USDA and HHS, along with the 2010, 2015 and 2020 DGA Committees, repeatedly left out of the discussion dozens of scientific papers, even research by the National Institutes of Health, that showed the neutral to beneficial impact of saturated fats on human health and the positive role of nutrient dense foods that are high in protein and essential nutrients but also contain saturated fat such as whole milk, full-fat dairy, and unprocessed red meat. Given the fact that childhood obesity and chronic diet-related disease incidence are rising rapidly, an objective fact-checker could easily determine that the Dietary Guidelines, themselves, are health misinformation. Clearly, children are the sector of the population whose eating patterns closely align with the Dietary Guidelines since 2010. They don’t have a choice. Most children today eat two meals a day, five days a week, three quarters of the year at school where the Dietary Guidelines rule with an iron hand. Let’s not forget the 2020 DGA Committee admitted that all of the DGA eating patterns came up short in essential nutrients found in animal foods, but when a committee member warned of this on final public reading, the saturated fat subcommittee chair mentioned taking vitamin pills and noted ‘new designer foods are coming.’)

Coca-Cola gives New York the nod for new fairlife milk plant

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Officials say it will be Northeast’s largest milk plant, using 5 million pounds of ‘locally sourced’ milk per day

By Sherry Bunting, published in Farmshine, May 12, 2023

WEBSTER, N.Y. – New York got the nod this week as the “preferred location” where The Coca-Cola Company will build its new fairlife ultrafiltered milk processing plant in the Northeast.

New York State Governor Kathy Hochul made the announcement Tuesday (May 9) that the company selected a site in Webster, Monroe County, New York for the $650 million project, expected to break ground this fall and be operational by the fourth quarter of 2025, pending final due diligence and appropriate approvals.

The 745,000 square-foot facility is expected to create up to 250 new jobs and “utilize an estimated 5 million pounds of locally sourced milk per day, making it the largest dairy plant in the Northeast,” the NYS Governor’s announcement stated.

Founded in 2012 through a “strategic partnership” between Select Milk Producers cooperative and Coca-Cola, with early grants from Dairy Management Inc (checkoff), fairlife is now wholly-owned by Coca-Cola since 2020.

Calling the fairlife project a “major opportunity for New York,” Gov. Hochul said it will “drive economic impact, particularly in the Finger Lakes,” and it will “position New York to regain its spot as the 3rd largest producer of milk in the U.S.”

“The Town of Webster is well situated between high-quality dairy cooperatives in the Rochester and Niagara regions, with a surrounding workforce that has the relevant manufacturing and food and beverage experience, making it the ideal location for fairlife’s expansion,” said fairlife CEO Tim Doelman in a statement at the company’s website.

He noted the new facility will allow the company to “significantly increase capacity and deliver fairlife to more households.”

Empire State Development (ESD) is providing up to $21 million in assistance for the fairlife project through the performance-based Excelsior Jobs Tax Credit Program in exchange for the job creation commitments.

Monroe County Industrial Development Authority (IDA) is expected to apply to the ESD for a separate $20 million Capital Grant, to provide adequate power and infrastructure services to the site. Also collaborating on the project are the Town of Webster, Rochester Gas and Electric and Greater Rochester Enterprise, and NYS Ag and Markets.

ESD Commissioner Hope Knight highlighted Upstate New York’s farm and dairy infrastructure, and Assemblyman Brian Manktelow observed the increased demand for local dairy production and transportation would be additional economic benefits on top of the creation of in-facility jobs.

NYS Ag Commissioner Richard Ball said the decision “highlights the excellence of our dairy community whose farmers will be supplying the milk.”

New York Farm Bureau president David Fisher, a dairy farmer, said the news “is needed for the long-term success of our dairy farms.” He noted the state has 3500 dairy farms, milking 620,000 cows and producing over 15 billion pounds of milk annually with “abundant resources, good land, access to water, and innovative farmers.”

“We were in tough competition with other states,” said New York Gov. Hochul, noting her own heritage coming from a family of dairy farmers in Ireland.

One of the states competing for selection was Pennsylvania.

“While the outcome of this selection is not what we hoped, the Shapiro Administration remains strongly committed to supporting Pennsylvania’s dairy industry and attracting processors to grow here,” said Pennsylvania Ag Secretary Russell Redding in an email response to Farmshine questions Wednesday (May 10).

Redding noted that Gov. Shapiro and teams across agencies were engaged in this project “allowing us to meet fairlife’s criteria for tax climate, resources, utilities, permitting, and incentives.” He reported that Pennsylvania currently makes $15 million in tax credits available annually for dairy manufacturing companies to expand processing in the Commonwealth.

“Just as we were nationally competitive for this project, we plan to be in the running for other selections of this type,” Redding added, thanking all industry and government entities who work on these coordinated efforts to welcome businesses and support agriculture.

When asked specifically about the whether or not Pennsylvania’s state-mandated Class I fluid milk over-order premium (OOP) played any role in the outcome, Redding stated: “The OOP was not a factor.”

The fairlife line includes Class I fluid milk products as well as dairy beverages that fall outside of the Class I criteria into manufacturing milk classes. The company offers a range of products including fairlife ultrafiltered milk, Core Power protein shakes, and fairlife Nutrition Plan  meal replacement shakes.

The fairlife products are made through an ultrafiltration process that removes lactose and condenses other solids to raise the protein content while lowering the natural sugar (lactose) content. For flavored beverages, this means more sugar and other sweeteners can be added because the natural sugar content is lower.

According to the New York Governor’s press announcement, this ultrafiltration process “gives milk a longer shelf life.” 

All fairlife products carry the UHT mark for ultra high temperature pasteurization, which also increases shelf-life. Some of the flavored fairlife products, such as YUP and CorePower are already offered as shelf-stable beverages in supermarkets and online, so it is unclear whether aseptic packaging will extend to all fairlife milk and beverage products in the future.

Other leaders from the collaborating New York State agencies and organizations highlighted the project expands their goal of positioning New York as a hub for attracting technology and innovation in food and beverage manufacturing.

In fact, the Governor’s press announcement stated that, “The research for fairlife’s branded milk process (ultrafiltration) originated at Cornell University over a decade ago.”

However, the story told by fairlife co-founders Mike and Sue McCloskey, as recently as the 2020 Pennsylvania Dairy Summit, and in earlier meetings, presentations, and published interviews, is that they discovered the reverse osmosis and membrane filtration process when dealing with a well issue on their former dairy in New Mexico.

After seeing what this filtration did for separating minerals in the water to make it more palatable to the cows, they started tinkering with filtration for milk, the story goes.

Select Milk Producers (SMP), also founded by the McCloskeys, then began using reverse osmosis and ultrafiltration as early as 1995 to reduce the water when moving loads of milk to cheese plants. At the same time, they began their high protein, low sugar milk proposition by partnering first with H-E-B supermarkets across the Southwest under the Mootopia brand in 1996 – a precursor to what is fairlife today.

Sue McCloskey explained to Pennsylvania producers at the 2020 Summit that they saw other protein drinks in the market they could compete with by concentrating the protein in the milk. 

She said this means that the raw milk going into the ultrafiltration process must be very low in somatic cell counts because the process separates some solids, like lactose, while concentrating other solids.

Products in the fairlife line are currently made at the original SMP ultrafiltration plants in Dexter, New Mexico and Coopersville, Michigan. Newer plants opened in Goodyear, Arizona in 2021 and Petersborough, Ontatio, Canada in late 2020. The latter sources all of its milk from Canadian farms for the Canadian consumer market.

Ultrafiltration is employed by other dairy companies, such as Cayuga Milk Ingredients (CMI) using proprietary European technology to produce unique liquid and dry milk and dairy ingredients for sale in the U.S. and internationally. 

Also located in the Finger Lakes Region of New York in the town of Auburn, CMI announced its own expansion last year to break ground this spring on a second facility that will have aseptic packaging capabilities for manufacturing a range of shelf-stable fluid milk, filtered milk, and dairy-based beverage products.

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My thoughts on the ABC’s of PA’s state-mandated OOP

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By Sherry Bunting, published in Farmshine, May 5, 2023

The purpose of Pennsylvania’s 1930s Milk Marketing Law was to regulate and support the Commonwealth’s dairy industry. Today, it continues to set a retail minimum price for milk through the Pennsylvania Milk Marketing Board (PMMB) while most other states have zero protection against supermarkets using milk as a loss-leader to attract shoppers. 

To me, that’s the real problem. Nationwide, consumers don’t know or appreciate the true value of milk after years of rampant and extreme loss-leading. I’m not talking about random sales to clear inventory, I’m talking about day-in-day-out well-below-cost prices as a retail business model.

Supermarkets chains have gotten into doing their own milk bottling or refuse to pay for services or quality as a way to avoid eating all of the cost of their own decisions to knock the price of milk back several dollars per gallon. They know milk is in 95% of shopping baskets. It’s a staple. If their store brand is the cheapest around, they’ll get your business and sell other high margin items at the same time.

Dairy farmers and milk bottlers, quite frankly, should not be on the hook for that. Period. But indirectly they are.

At the federal level, no one wants to address this because USDA also benefits when it comes to buying cheap (skimmed) milk for food programs like school lunch, where they also reimburse Impossible not-burger, nacho chips and pop-tarts — but not whole milk, only skimmed.

Is it any wonder consumers balk at spending $5 for a gallon of milk in Pennsylvania but will pay $1.50 for a cup of water, even more for a cup of water with artificial additives? 

Is it any wonder consumers don’t think of milk’s nutritional value next to other protein and vitamin drinks? Intrinsically, the higher margin drinks are perceived as more valuable because the price is higher. Milk is perceived as worth less than water!

This makes Pennsylvania a sitting duck in a national, no, a global market. Why? Because Pennsylvania sets a minimum retail and wholesale milk price each month.

Pennsylvania’s Milk Marketing Law prevents supermarkets from selling milk under the monthly announced state-minimum price. The over-order premium (OOP) portion of this price was intended to help Pennsylvania farmers. The Milk Marketing Law already gives the retailers and bottlers a 2.5 to 3.5% profit margin over average industry costs within that set minimum-price buildup.

The OOP is currently set by the PMMB at $1.00 per hundred pounds of milk plus a 44-cent per hundredweight fuel adjuster. This come out to 13 cents per gallon paid within the state minimum retail price that is meant to be the farmer’s over-order premium (OOP).

A variety of loopholes have diminished how much of the state-mandated OOP gets back to Pennsylvania dairy farmers as intended by the law. It has encouraged interesting business models that involve more out-of-state milk coming in to displace Pennsylvania milk in some Pennsylvania stores (and some creative accounting for sure).

Whether in tankers or packages, more out-of-state milk is competing with an unfair advantage when the built-in OOP is either collected and not paid to farmers or remains completely undocumented — floating around and up for grabs by the supply chain.

Senate Ag Minority Chair Judy Schwank had an interesting exchange with Chuck Turner of Turner Dairy near Pittsburgh during the recent Senate Ag hearing on the matter. She asked whether or not the aseptically processed, shelf-stable milk, which she buys, has the OOP built into its price.

Good question.

Turner explained that for the members of the Pennsylvania Association of Milk Dealers, the OOP is factored in as a cost that they incur when they procure milk within the state and then return this OOP to their Pennsylvania farmers based on their sales of Class I fluid milk products within the state.

On the other hand, when a Nestle or some other company, like fairlife, makes a shelf-stable flavored milk that ends up in a retail dairy case in Pennsylvania, the OOP doesn’t enter into their thought process on these products coming most likely from Indiana (and New York), he said. To his mind, that means it does not “collect” OOP.

In reality, such out-of-state packaged fluid milk products that fall into the Class I fluid milk category are ‘collecting’ the OOP — even ultrafiltered and aseptically packaged milk. These products compete for Pennsylvania consumer dollars. Whether out-of-state fluid milk products are unflavored or flavored, fresh or shelf-stable, they are part of the unknown number Schwank said the Senate Ag Committee needs to know.

It doesn’t matter if the milk is sold above state-minimum price, the OOP is in there.

Take for example the fresh fluid milk brands that are bottled in Pennsylvania — that are not shelf-stable – but are priced on supermarket shelves above the state minimum retail price.

This happens when stores like Walmart and Costco want to differentiate their private label store brands as the lowest-price. What do they do? They put other brands higher.

Since supermarkets in Pennsylvania cannot go below the state’s minimum price to “loss-lead” with their in-house private label, they bump-up the price on competing name brands instead.

In some cases, this pressures sales volume even lower for name brands that are produced, processed and sold in Pennsylvania, reducing the OOP that goes back to the Pennsylvania farms. At the same time, some of the private-label store brands sold at state-minimum fall into the category of breaking the chain of produced, processed and sold in Pennsylvania, which affords them the ability to keep the farmer’s OOP.

Here’s my bottom line from the recent Pennsylvania Senate Ag hearing on the OOP:

For 15 years grassroots dairy producer groups have been grappling with the concerns shared at the hearing, and how the OOP may be affecting the use of Pennsylvania-produced milk in Pennsylvania consumer markets. The embarrassment of not knowing definitively how much fluid milk is sold in the state and how much premium is stranded off-record or on-record has been the subject of meetings, hearings, estimates, emotion, stonewalling and bickering for over 15 years!

Attempts have been made by lawmakers like former State Senator Mike Brubaker and current State Representative John Lawrence repeatedly putting forward bills that would have penetrated the armor surrounding this issue.

Now, in the past 12 to 18 months, we have the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau on high-alert, the Department of Agriculture now is involved and has come up with a plan. 

The CDE and PDMP are studying the issues around the premium and the obstacles to processing investment with the help of a Cornell economist. 

And the Senate Ag Chairman and Minority Chair offered their data-driven bills last session and will offer them again, because, of course, they are paralyzed by still needing that data they’ve been needing for 15 years!

Now, as the fluid milk market is in steep decline over the past 15 years (ironically the same 15 years in which whole milk and 2% milk have been federally prohibited as choices in schools and daycares)…

Now as most of the milk bottling assets, nationally, are owned by cooperatives and most of the rest by retailers…

Now as fluid milk plants are closing to the south and the west, while Pennsylvania has managed to hold on to a core of independent bottlers…

Now as the state courts the favor of Coca-Cola / fairlife or other new processors to invest in Pennsylvania … (Coca-Cola announced May 9 that New York will get the new plant).

Now as everyone is sitting up noticing that the tens of millions of Pennsylvania-paid ‘stranded’ OOP annually over the past 15-plus years may have been fueling growth beyond Pennsylvania’s borders while Pennsylvania’s own farms have been stagnated by more stringent supply management programs due to lack of processing capacity…

Here we are, back to the question of needing the data. Senators were interested in doing something, but Chairman Elder Vogel, said threading the needle will be difficult, and Minority Chair Schwank said “we have to have the data.”

Pennsylvania is enduring erosion on one hand in part because of the OOP and/or the minimum pricing, while on the other hand, these structures are believed by some to provide a stabilizing effect for the Class I bottlers that remain.

And so, the cats keep chasing their tails around the milk bowl!

Meanwhile, more producers have strived to get some of their milk outside of this game by selling it raw – an entirely separate market. The PMMB reached out to a number of them last year telling them they had to be licensed and do monthly reports, then backed off a bit for the time being. They are not the problem. Their milk is not pasteurized, and it is not part of the system in Federal Milk Marketing Orders either.

My biggest questions after the recent hearing, after 15 years of following this and for a time helping farmers who were involved in seeking changes more than a decade ago: Where would we be today if in any of the prior legislative bills, meetings, hearings, plans, would have moved forward in some fashion? 

And yes, this too is related: Where would we be today if whole milk had not been removed from schools?

One thing is clear on the first question, we would by now have solved the math equation of A + B = C instead of estimating, stonewalling, bickering…

On the second question? We might be selling more milk.

Read Part One and Part Two of the PA Senate Ag Hearing about the ABC’s of the OOP here and here

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Part Two: Digging into the PA Senate Ag hearing on the PMMB over-order premium

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By Sherry Bunting, Farmshine, May 5, 2023

HARRISBURG, Pa. — As reported in Part One, published in Farmshine’s April 28th edition, the Pennsylvania Senate Agriculture Committee held a three-hour hearing on April 25 about the state’s mandated Class I milk over-order premium (OOP), which is part of the state’s minimum milk price per gallon set by the Pennsylvania Milk Marketing Board (PMMB).

Agriculture Secretary Russell Redding offered this equation to describe what is known and unknown about the estimated $30 million or more in annual OOP paid by Pennsylvania consumers: A+B=C.

‘A’ was confirmed by PMMB auditor supervisor Gary Golsovich to be $23.6 million collected by processors in 2022. But, he said, only $14.5 million of this collected OOP was documented as paid to Pennsylvania farms for milk that could demonstrate all three criteria: produced, processed and sold in Pennsylvania.

Golsovich gave an example: A processor sourcing 50% of its milk from Pennsylvania farms with 50% of its sales being consummated in Pennsylvania only has the obligation to pay 25% of the OOP to the Pennsylvania farms. This was something the PMMB tried to change 10 years ago, seeking to require processors to pay up to the percentage of in-state sales that matched in-state sources, but a constitutional interstate commerce challenge in the courts caused the state to back down.

‘B’, said Redding, is the additional $5 to $10 million in OOP that is paid by Pennsylvania consumers but is presently unaccounted for. Examples are packaged milk from out-of-state and other cross-border transactions. Legislation such as Senate Bills 840 and 841 from last session would capture this information, and Senate Ag Chairman Elder Vogel Jr. and Minority Chair Judy Schwank said they intend to re-introduce these bills in the current legislative session.

He estimates the total ‘C’ would be around $30 million, or more, but last year less than half that amount was paid to the intended beneficiaries: Pennsylvania farms.

The only way to fix the leakage, said the Secretary, is to “break the chain,” to remove the OOP from the minimum price and make it a fee collected at retail and remitted to the Department of Revenue into a designated fund. This would also require legislation.

“Pennsylvania has a system that is like no other,” said PMMB Chairman Rob Barley, a farmer in Lancaster and York counties. “The system worked well when people were drinking a lot of milk produced by Pennsylvania dairy producers. That’s changing. The system needs an adjustment.”

When the Senate Ag Chairman pressed the PMMB Chairman for specific ideas, Barley said the Secretary’s proposal, “while not ideal, is probably the only way to do it.”

He mentioned the potential for a tiered or scaled system where smaller farms could receive more and larger farms less, much like the federal Dairy Margin Coverage has a tiered program based on annual milk production history. 

“We want to work with the legislature on this — to benefit everyone,” said Barley.

The consumer member of the PMMB board, Kristi Kassimer Harper from Fayette County, noted examples in her area of western Pennsylvania, where the OOP works among a variety of independent bottlers that buy Pennsylvania milk, process it in Pennsylvania and sell most of it in Pennsylvania.

She cited studies by St. Joseph’s University indicating consumers don’t give much thought to where their milk comes from, but a survey of Pennsylvania consumers showed that two-thirds would pay a 10-cent premium if the premium gets back to the farmers. (They are already paying a 13-cent OOP plus fuel adjuster embedded in the milk price, but less than half of it is getting back Pennsylvania farms.)

In his back-and-forth discussion with Vogel, Barley said a formula could be developed that would prioritize producers that are currently serving the Class I fluid milk market, using a graduated scale. This idea turned Chairman Vogel’s head. He said it’s the first time he’s heard this approach mentioned.

Something like this would address the concerns of milk dealers who are currently upholding the spirit of the law and the testimony from the State Grange, urging caution about diluting the meaningful amount of OOP 15 to 20% of Pennsylvania farms currently receive.

“Consumers are already paying this, it’s not a tax, but if we collected it from Pennsylvania retailers as a fee and put it in a restricted fund, we can avoid the constitutional issues with interstate commerce,” said Senator Gene Yaw. “We do this all the time, collect funds and put it toward programs we want to support. In this case, the people are already paying it, and if the money is in one place, we can audit it.”

The “mechanics” of how to distribute it, he said, can be worked out with the Board and the industry. But at the same time, Yaw and other Senators said they want to help more of the state’s farmers access what was intended for them, without harming those already receiving some.

Meanwhile, the Department of Agriculture’s plan mentions ‘uniform distribution,’ as do the policy points endorsed by Pennsylvania Farm Bureau.

PMMB board member Jim Van Blarcom, a farmer from Bradford County, stated that in his nine years on the Board, he has heard the concerns of producers across the state. He noted the geographic and generational diversity of the PMMB Board, and their ability to understand how different parts of the state have different experiences with the OOP. 

“The OOP was put in place to help dairymen recoup some costs,” said Van Blarcom, explaining to lawmakers that the Milk Marketing Law already has built into it a 2.5 to 3.5% profit margin for bottlers and retailers. “Since then, the industry has changed, making it outdated and less effective. As a board member, it is getting more difficult to weigh the benefits for the farmers who receive a useful OOP vs. farmers who receive very little to none. When consumers pay a mandated 8 to 12 cents on every gallon of milk sold, this becomes a large sum of money, of which some is unaccounted for.

“During my time on the Board, I have heard over and over about the tanker loads of New York milk coming in and displacing Pennsylvania farmers’ milk. The primary reason these companies do this is they can take advantage of the OOP… We are essentially encouraging this to happen,” he explained.

Recounting testimony at a Board hearing from a dairy farmer milking 90 cows, he said the amount of OOP that farm received wass equivalent to one bag of milk replacer a month.

“I don’t believe one bag of calf feed keeps that farmer in business, but rather his tenacity and commitment to the family farm,” said Van Blarcom.

He also recounted testimony at a Board hearing from Pennsylvania Representative John Lawrence, who cited the accurate accounting on mandated fees for alcohol and fuel.

“This is not happening with the mandated milk OOP. It will continue to become more difficult to defend as a program with funds that are not accurately accounted for and not fairly distributed,” Van Blarcom asserted, adding that consumers will also “become more aware of the unfairness to themselves.”

Meanwhile, when laying out the Department of Agriculture’s plan, the Secretary talked about “a collective investment in PA Dairy,” such as using some of these funds to invest in processing.

Andy Bollinger, a Lancaster County dairy farmer testifying for PDMP said the organization has not taken a position on reforming the OOP because they want to see the facts and the results of a study they are working on with a third-party economist.

Zach Myers from the Center for Dairy Excellence also mentioned a study CDE is involved in to understand the obstacles to processing investment within the state. He cited the impact on farms from supply management programs placed on them based on processing capacity.

“We come to you and ask for investments,” Secretary Redding told lawmakers. “Here’s one that’s already done in the marketplace, and we’re failing to bring those dollars back specifically to reinvest in PA Dairy.”

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Did we just see the tip of the iceberg designed in Davos?

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Wealth from the tech sector led Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) to be central to venture capital investments in food and energy tech startups, including plant-based and cell-based fake-meat and fake-dairy. Beyond Meat is one high-profile example in SVB’s ‘Clean Tech’ portfolio amid the rampant climate/ESG-focused investment that has occurred throughout the financial sector when interest rates were low and the economy was being pumped full of capital. Now, after eight interest rate hikes by the Federal Reserve in response to record inflation, the SVB collapse is the second largest bank failure in history. Did we see a ‘bubble’ or the tip of an iceberg designed in Davos.
  Istock photo collage by Sherry Bunting

Looking back and ahead, there’s more than meets the eye

By Sherry Bunting, Farmshine March 31, 2023

The Federal Reserve policy shift to raise interest rates and restrict the money supply after more than a decade of ultra-low rates and two years of pumping money into the economy opening a Pandora’s box of unrealized losses and liquidity problems in areas of the banking system as consumers and businesses rifle through savings in the face of record inflation, and now rising interest rates.

Ongoing global banking stress, central bank interest rate hikes, tightening credit conditions, and continued inflation are affecting both the U.S. and Europe against the backdrop of two important geopolitical developments in late March.

First, the UN Secretary General accelerated ‘net-zero’ climate commitments for the U.S. and EU to 2040 instead of 2050, while China and India have until 2060 and 2070. Second, leaders of authoritarian regimes in China and Russia made a pact to “shape the new world era by cooperating on a range of economic and business areas.”

At the same time, the second largest bank failure in U.S. history — then backstopped by the federal government and run by federal regulators — re-opened as Silicon Valley Bridge Bank. Within days, it had regained its status as the darling of the tech-elite. Venture capital startups came back to it “in droves,” according to several business news reports. 

Looking back two years in my reporter’s notebook, I found harbingers of these current events from the World Economic Forum’s 2021 meeting in Davos, and the global transformation — the Great Reset — that underlies it.

Let’s review, and look ahead:

At the leading edge of the ‘banking crisis’ that emerged in March 2023 was the Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) collapse and subsequent Biden backstop for all of its deposits over and above FDIC-insured levels.

Known as the venture capital bank for the tech sector, SVB doubled its deposits from $115 billion to $225 billion from 2021 to 2022, according to a lengthy Feb. 2023 report in Forbes that eerily discussed the ramp up in ESG-investing in 2021 facing off with 20 states moving to restrict it in 2022.

In 2021, there were huge venture capital investments, and high-profile public offerings for climate-focused startups such as those in SVB’s ‘Clean Tech’ division for alternative energy, food, and biotech.

As interest rates rose in 2022, venture capital investment slowed, and these startups started eating into their deposits backed by long-term securities, leaving insufficient upfront liquidity. Many of the food tech startups banked by SVB are pre-market, others are plant-based imitations with lackluster sales and bottom line losses.

Food Dive reporters described the scene at a food tech expo when a tweet about SVB broke the news. Startup owners went into a bit of a panic, transferring, or attempting to transfer, funds from their phone apps. 

They say the Biden backstop makes these depositors whole, but not the investors. That is misleading. The deposits consist mostly of investor funds now being used for payroll and cost of business.

Why was SVB deemed ‘systemic’ enough to elicit a rapid and complete federal backstop? It’s the epitome of ESG / climate investment funding models.

In fact, one of the executive orders signed by President Biden in Jan. 2021 repealed the Trump rule that had previously restricted retirement fund managers from using ESG (Environmental, Social Governance) factors. Then, just this week on Monday (March 20), Biden vetoed legislation passed by Congress to undo his Jan. 2021 executive order, seeking to restore those restrictions.

It’s worth noting that the climate agenda focus on ESG-investing-on-steroids over the past two years may have distracted the financial sector from minding the books.

Is it a ‘bubble’? Is it the tip of the iceberg? Will there be fallout for agriculture? 

The good news, wrote American Farm Bureau chief economist Roger Cryan on March 17 is that regional banks are in a strong position, and farmers – mostly – have strong balance sheets coming out of 2022.

An article about the SVB and Signature Bank failures was shared with farmers during a Lancaster County, Pa. meeting Thursday (March 16), noting that, “As of now, these issues don’t appear to be systemic.” 

The author, Matthew Brennan, senior investment strategist and portfolio advisor for Fulton Bank, wrote: “These aren’t questions of solvency, these are questions of liquidity. While we expect the measures put in place by the government should go a long way towards providing stability to a sector that was beleaguered last week, volatility is expected to remain high.”

Meanwhile, the entire financial sector braced for the Federal Reserve meeting March 22, anticipating a 0.25% rise in interest rates as the consumer price index announced March 14 for February showed inflation was 6% higher than a year ago with core inflation on a month-to-month basis the highest of the past four months.

So, how did we get here, and is there more than meets the eye?

As mentioned, venture capital investment for climate-tech startups in energy, food and cellular ag ramped up in 2021 amid low interest rates, expansion of the monetary supply, and government incentives. 

Inflation, which followed, actually helps these alternative sectors by making their higher-cost products align better with the cost of conventional fossil energy and traditional ‘real’ foods in the meat and dairy sectors that experienced the highest inflationary surges.

As the Biden Administration and the Federal Reserve were both late to react to rising inflation, all of this money pumped into the economy created an ESG investment runway. But as startups now eat into those deposited investments, while consumers go through prior government funds and are now borrowing to keep up with inflation, reality hits home.

Analysis by experts across the financial spectrum vary from blaming ‘woke’ ESG-investing, to calling the bank failures ‘unique’ and not likely to spread, to describing these failures as ‘tips of an iceberg’, to suggesting a designed consolidation to globalized central banking.

A Stanford University report on March 20, pegs the banking sector’s ‘unrealized losses’ as high as a collective $2.2 trillion. Therefore, as Fed monetary policy has tightened, the ‘paper’ losses become real losses if depositors use or move even 10 to 20% of their funds.

Parallel to these financial unravelings, a United Nations report March 20 from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) shortened the climate ‘crisis’ timetable in dramatic style.

Calling the report “a guide for defusing the climate time-bomb,” the UN Secretary-General promptly announced for September’s Climate Summit an “acceleration agenda for first-movers”, specifically calling upon the U.S. and EU to shave 10 years off their commitments to reach net-zero by 2040 instead of 2050, while China and India meet their commitments by 2060 and 2070.

That’s a 20- to 30- year difference, and China is already positioned to be a prime supplier for digital transformation of energy and food for us all to become dependent upon. Recent agreements made by China and Iran and by China and Russia this week make these stark climate-commitment differences even more geopolitically important.

China already has significant investments in U.S. food and agriculture, including food and energy tech startups that were just bailed-out with U.S. funds in the collapsed SVB.

Beyond EV batteries, wind turbines and solar panels, largely made in China, China is investing heavily in lab-created protein alternatives and is already the world’s largest concentrator of soy, pea, oat, and other proteins that are the mainstay of plant-based imitation meat and dairy.

China and Russia have both invested in infrastructure, along with Singapore, to ramp up cellular protein via biotech, DNA-altered fermentation products as dairy analogs and gene-edited stem-cells with no growth endpoint as cell-cultured meat analogs.

To be clear, a recent Bloomberg business report confirmed alternative cellular protein to be based on ‘immortal cells’ in the same way as cancer cells have no growth endpoint, but somehow scientists reassure us — without proof — that this will not harm us when we are expected to dutifully consume climate-saving cancer-like blobs of immortal cells, made in China. (No, I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but I am a realist. It’s looking more and more like China is attempting to call the shots for the American consumer. I’m not the only one pointing out the need to return to ‘reality.’)

In a CNBC interview over the weekend, one business analyst said what is needed in the face of disruptor-tech-gone-wild is investment in real companies making real products for real people.” (Sound familiar?)

True to form, however, what sector of the stock market is rallying this week? The tech sector and artificial intelligence. Which sectors are seeing their values fall? The staples, the real essentials. This is counterintuitive unless we recall that it’s a page directly out of the World Economic Forum (WEF) playbook that has been written in Davos for decades.

Let’s go back to the WEF-Davos meeting two years ago and have a look…

It was January 2021 when the World Economic Forum (WEF) launched its annual meeting ‘virtually’ in Davos with a transformation agenda centered on the post-Covid ‘reset.’ During that week, two things caught my eye and ears. 

First, China’s president Xi Jinping was given the status of opening the Davos 2021 ‘reset,’ talking about four global governance ‘tasks’: digital, health, climate and economic. He spoke of China’s ‘superior’ role in global digital governance and global health governance. Then he stated: “China will get more engaged in global economic governance.”

Xi had the audacity to scold any nation or region that may try to reverse globalization or to decouple supply chains. He described such moves as “arrogant.”

Never mind the fact that Covid supply chain disruptions made the world keenly aware of the dangers in over-reliance on made-in-China medical essentials or centralized, globalized food systems.

Also in my notes are comments from business news analysts, admitting Environmental, Social, Governance benchmarks for investing (ESGs) and the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are “not well-defined” and could be “a bubble”. Some even warned ESG venture-capital in tech startups (food and energy) “will fail.”

Nevertheless, more than 60 corporations covering tech, food, pharma, energy, finance, and accounting signed the ESG agreement in Jan. 2021 to outline what is measurable and pledging to “implement and enforce ESG and SDG at the supply chain and stakeholder level to drive consumers to a ‘net-zero’ consumption level.”

Think of this as the high-speed high-occupancy lane for pass-holders on the beltway — bypassing the methodical traffic of regular folk into and out of, well, Washington D.C., for example. Move all the climate-tech startups into that bypass lane, infuse them with trillions of dollars in capital — while the steady-eddy slow-going lanes are the shunned real asset essentials.

Also in my Jan. 2021 notes, are recorded comments by BlackRock and Bank of America CEOs who led the 60-plus global corporations in signing that ESG agreement in Davos. They talked about “following and auditing” the ESG and UN Net Zero SDG “decarbonization” investments.

A week later, President Biden took office and signed a stack of executive orders, followed by congressional spending packages that, together, created a cascade of ‘green new deals’ per the WEF ESG agreement signed in Davos.

Reading the next lines in my notes from the 2021 WEF-Davos, I had to catch my breath. In quotes are the words of Bank of America CEO Moynihan at the time. He said: “It will take $6 trillion per year investment for world consumption to be Net Zero by 2050. Governments and charities cannot do it without the corporate finance sector shepherding loans and investment funds in that direction with carbon performance measurement.”

Chilling to think that two years later, we could now be witnessing a cascade of government, corporate and monetary policies aimed at essentially achieving this investment infusion like a snowball rolling downhill. 

We could be seeing the first fallout, the first sign of the ESG ‘bubble’ bursting, but right on cue, these huge investments over the past two years are now being backstopped by policies to keep the infusion of capital flowing in that special bypass lane on the climate beltway.

The structure is being set for capital to flow to the now “accelerated climate agenda”, the carbon-control agenda, whether by hook or by crook, by corporation or by government — one way or the other the push to accelerate this agenda is already occurring.

Did we just see Act 1? Did we just witness a Trojan Horse carrying tech venture capital out of Silicon Valley Bank, et. al., while the government performs a backstop flow of capital to refill it? 

Will we see more federal spending packages, and additional tools unveiled to meet the combined global government-corporation-charity investments of $6 trillion that the BlackRock and Bank of America CEOs said will be necessary annually on a global scale to “bring consumption to ‘net zero’ by 2050?”

One of the now-infamous quotes to come out of that 2021 World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting held virtually in Davos in January 2021 was Klaus Schwab predicting: “You will own nothing, and you be happy.” In 2022, the same crew talked of tracking what we eat, where we go, and how we get there.

What the Davos crowd may not have factored-into the equation is the skepticism of freedom-loving American consumers who are not keen to be globally digitized via artificial intelligence that could control the very essence of life – carbon — by consolidating the flow of capital and information to an accelerated decarbonization of essential food, health and energy.

The Davos crowd and cohort China may not realize freedom-loving Americans will resist this bitter pill. 

They certainly did not foresee American legislators and Governors standing up against out-of-control ESG-investing. 

And, they didn’t foresee the victory for Dutch farmers and their pro-farmer political party that shocked the world in last week’s elections. 

(By the way, Dutch dairy farmer Ad Baltus, whom I interviewed in the 2022 Farmshine series about the farmers’ plight and protests in The Netherlands is now among the six people helping to form Holland’s new national administration and working on the coalition parliament there. Look for a follow up interview with him in the future.)

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NJ-based Cream-O-Land to acquire Clover Farms, Reading, Pa.

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Companies say: ‘Transaction will secure operations into future’

By Sherry Bunting, previously published in Farmshine, February 3, 2023

READING, Pa. — For over a year, the dairy industry has been aware that the iconic Clover Farms Dairy in Reading, Berks County, Pennsylvania was up for sale, and something was in the works, as its owners and officers near retirement.

On January 23, a joint statement by Clover Farms Dairy and Florence, New Jersey-based Cream-O-Land Dairy confirmed what had been rumored, that the two companies are working together to close a deal that will keep the Berks County plant operational. The recent official statement announces that a subsidiary of Cream-O-Land will purchase Clover Farms, but no details are being revealed.

Clover’s milk shippers received letters dated Jan. 18, stating “Clover Farms Management is pleased to announce that an asset purchase agreement has been executed between Clover Farms Dairy and Cream-O-Land Dairy” and that “both parties are working diligently to close the transaction, likely to occur within two months.”

“I hope this is a seamless transition,” observed Pennsylvania Senator Judy Schwank in a public statement the next day, January 24. Schwank represents Pennsylvania’s 11th district in which the Clover Farms plant and a large number of its patron dairy farms reside.

“I understand independent dairy farmers who have been shipping their milk to Clover Farms have a commitment from Cream-O-Land Dairy to continue that arrangement, and the plant in Berks County will remain operational,” she said. “Milk processors are a key component of the dairy industry infrastructure in Pennsylvania; so it’s important that we maintain existing processing plants. Clover Farms is an iconic brand, and is known as a premium local product, my hope is it will continue to be while under new ownership.”

Specifically, the Clover Farms letter states that, “This transaction will secure operations into the future as a strong regional dairy processor, which provides hundreds of jobs in eastern Pennsylvania and a stable market for the independent producer network.”

According to its website, Clover Farms employs 300 people, and is supplied by 170 independent dairy farms. These farms are located in Berks, Lancaster, Lebanon and Lehigh counties. According to additional sources close to the situation, milk supplies are often balanced via cooperatives.

Clover Farms milk and dairy products are sold throughout eastern Pennsylvania as well as in New Jersey, New York, Delaware and Maryland. Clover Farms also bottles private label store brands, including the Redner’s Warehouse Markets whole milk. The two companies have had a longstanding business relationship.

With the tagline “fresh taste, local farms,” Clover Farms Dairy has focused on connecting consumers to farmers, being among the first to put a simple QR code on packaging that can be scanned with a cell phone to go to links on the internet with stories and videos about some of the farms supplying the milk, and to understand how milk goes “from cow to carton.”

Sources close to the situation indicate Clover Farms and Cream-O-Land have had an existing co-packing and distribution business relationship for a number of years.

Clover Farms Dairy was established in 1937 by the Rothenberger family, with John B. Rothenberger still listed as treasurer at Dun and Bradstreet; however, digital entries at OpenCorporates indicate he and president Rick Hartman were removed as officers in April 2022 in anticipation of a transition in ownership.

Cream-O-Land Dairy was established in 1943 by Samuel Schneier. According to its website, the company is run today by grandsons Jay and Robert.

Cream-O-Land’s logistical footprint, according to its website, includes a network of warehouses and truck fleets that service grocery stores, supermarkets, schools and colleges throughout New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Connecticut, Florida, and The Bahamas.

In addition to its Cream-O-Land brand of milk, cream and cultured dairy products, the company distributes specialty milks such as lactose-free, fortified, organic, flavored and seasonal; as well as New York brands Five Acre Farms and Ronny Brook; several brands of teas, waters and juices; eggs, salad and bakery items; and non-dairy alternative almond, soy and pea beverages under brands like Ardmore Farms, Pacific and Ripple, as well as the Elmhurst ‘Milked’ brand of plant-based alternative beverages bottled in Steuben, New York.

Calls to Clover Farms and Cream-O-Land were not immediately returned.

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Federal Farm Bill hearing: ‘We need all of you involved in this process”

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By Sherry Bunting, previously published in Farmshine

HARRISBURG, Pa. – “It’s crunch time and we are obligated to get this done on time and get it done right,” the new U.S. House Ag Committee Chaiman G.T. Thompson (15th-Penna.) told a packed room attending his first listening session for the 2023 Farm Bill on Jan. 13 during the Pennsylvania Farm Show in Harrisburg.

Thompson is the first Congressman from the Keystone State to chair the Ag Committee since 1855.

“We’re a little overdue,” he said, indicating he is proud and humbled to serve as he introduced eight of his colleagues joining him for the listening session, where 20 people from a diverse spectrum of agriculture and nutrition testified.

Thompson encouraged more feedback by scanning the QR code on signage posted around the room (or click here).

“We want to hear from rural America and the farmers who touch the lives of every American more times a day than any other industry,” said Thompson.

Joining him from Washington were several Ag Committee members who were officially named four days later on January 17: Austin Scott (8th-Ga.), Doug LaMalfa (1st-Calif.), Mark Alford (4th-Mo.), Chellie Pingree (1st-Maine), Mary Miller (15th-Ill.) and Derrick Van Orden (3rd-Wis.). Also joining the panel of lawmakers were Dwight Evans (3rd-Pa.), who formerly served on the House Ag Committee but is now on the Ways and Means Committee as well as Dan Meuser (9th-Penna.) serving on the Finance Committee.

Pennsylvania Ag Secretary Russell Redding (above left) also participated, and it was announced that Redding has agreed to stay on as the Commonwealth’s Ag Secretary under incoming Governor Josh Shapiro. Chairman Thompson (above right) noted that Pennsylvania is the first to also have a state farm bill, which Redding said would not be possible without a federal farm bill.

On the importance of research, Dean Roush represented the Penn State College of Ag Sciences, stressing the need for more investment in land grant universities. 

“A nation that controls its food controls its destiny. We are being outspent by China and others,” he said.

Crop insurance was deemed critical by many who testified, and suggestions were given to make good programs better and to make them easier for diverse farmers to participate.

On dairy, representing the Pennsylvania Dairymen’s Association, executive director Dave Smith, a dairy farmer in Lebanon County, said having a reliable workforce is essential, and he highlighted crop insurance and the Dairy Margin Coverage (DMC) program. 

Smith said the Supplemental DMC was helpful in 2021, but that dairy farmers should have the opportunity to bring their production history more current. He also said the coverage cap for tier one should be raised to more adequately reflect the average U.S. herd size of 316 cows as of 2021.

Smith called for Congress to “make a good program better” by raising the highest coverage level above the current margin of $9.50 per hundredweight as other farm costs are going up that are not included in the milk over feed cost margin.

On milk pricing, Smith said real reforms are needed, but should be accomplished through federal order hearings, not through legislation.

“That process allows industry professionals to examine proposals more thoroughly,” said Smith as he touched on the Class I pricing change made in the last Farm Bill that was exacerbated by the pandemic and led to disorderly marketing.

“The Federal Milk Marketing Orders were established to ensure orderly marketing,” said Smith. “It’s failing and has led to a significant loss of dairy farmers. The Class I change was made with the best of intentions but has led to lost revenue.”

Smith concluded by stressing the need to get legislation over the finish line that restores whole milk in schools and allows whole milk to be offered throughout the government’s charitable feeding programs.

(Representing the Grassroots PA Dairy Advisory Committee was yours truly. In my testimony, I thanked G.T. Thompson for his sponsorship of the legislation seeking to bring whole milk choice back to schools, and that even though this doesn’t fall under the Farm Bill, the Nutrition Title should exempt nutrient-dense foods, like whole milk, from the out-dated and arbitrary fat limits of the Dietary Guidelines. I noted the poor performance of the Class I change made in the last Farm Bill and expressed farmer concerns on emissions tracking and how methane is calculated. See my full written testimony here.)

Frank Stoltzfus, a Lancaster County beef producer representing the Pennsylvania Cattlemen’s Association and NCBA (recently elected to the executive board), said a livestock title is “not necessary in the farm bill. We don’t want one. We don’t want to open the door to unnecessary regulations and mandates.”

However, he did cite the importance of strengthening risk management tools, disaster recovery, animal health and conservation programs to remain voluntary and incentive-based, where farmers are recognized for what they have already done for the environment.

“We are pretty good at this,” said Stoltzfus. “We can do it with your help.”

He also stressed that farm policy and climate policy should recognize cattle as a solution, not a problem — that beef cows efficiently use land not suited to crops to produce protein, nutrient dense food, that is “necessary for the sustaining of America and its people.” He applauded Chairman Thompson for adopting this position.

“Cattle take land that is too-something — too steep, too wet, too rocky, too-something — and they naturally turn that into a valuable food product,” said Stoltzfus, a past environmental stewardship award winner.

“Cattlemen and take blue sky and green grass and make red meat — a protein that really feeds the world,” he said.

A full house of farmers and ag-interested people attended House Ag Committee Chairman G.T. Thompson’s 2023 Farm Bill listening session at the Pennsylvania Farm Show last week.

Rep. Doug LaMalfa, chair of the Conservation and Forestry subcommittee, picked up on this. His family grows rice in northern California, and he was blunt.

“I would caution folks with cattle, that when cows are vilified on methane, stay strong. Don’t be pulled into that. Don’t be railroaded into doing all of this climate stuff,” said LaMalfa.

He went on to note his concern about the electric conversion of everything, mentioning the talk recently about banning gas-powered stoves and generators.

“We need to take a lot of this with a grain of salt and apply commonsense. We have a lot of commonsense in Rural America,” said LaMalfa.

Earlier in the listening session, Shawn Wolfinger of Horizon Farm Credit touched on climate, noting that “Agriculture is part of the solution for mitigating the impact, but our ask is that the farm bill provide voluntary, incentive-based assistance and that private sector and ag lending not be required to be conditioned on adoption of certain ag practices,” he said.

Conservation programs were highlighted as critical to agriculture and ecosystems, but testifiers noted these programs are 50% oversubscribed and need more funding to provide voluntary, incentive-based assistance to more farms.

Rep. Pingree of Maine said streamlining conservation programs so they are easier to use by small and specialty crop farms and dealing with food waste are important for the future. “We want to treat farmers as partners – our best partners – in renewable energy, innovation and research. We have to work hand-in-hand,” she said.

National Farmers Union president Michael Kovach highlighted the need for “decentralization of our food system” and “renewal of our soils.”  

Representatives for Pennsylvania Farm Bureau and Pennsylvania Corn Growers both stressed the need for robust crop insurance programs to manage risk.

Among the panel of lawmakers, Rep. Austin Scott from Georgia, chairman of the subcommittee on General Commodities and Risk Management, made it clear these tools “are there to reduce risk, not guarantee profit.”

He said reference prices have not been updated since 2004, so that’s on tap for re-evaluation in this round, along with loan rates.

Rep. Mark Alford of the ‘show me’ state, said he comes from the media world with a career in television news and a desire to get the important farm bill messages out there.

“Our food security is our national security,” he said, noting his goals for a Farm Bill in which “farmers are protected, the nation is fed, children are healthy and we are good stewards of God’s resources.”

Rep. Mary Miller of Illinois, took the opportunity to state her support for whole milk for healthy kids. “We raise corn, cattle and kids,” she said. “Our seven children are all trim and healthy adults and they grew up on whole milk.”

Rep. Derrick Van Orden of Wisconsin said he looks forward to being a new member on the Ag Committee and is a firm believer that “milk comes from cows, not from nuts.” 

He also touched on the need to reset baselines, look at the Federal Milk Marketing Orders and to reinforce nutrition in programs like SNAP.

There is no time like the present to get nutrition right. That was a central message pointed out by Joe Arthur, testifying as director of the Central Penn Food Bank, part of the Feeding America network.

“The food crisis is not over and we fear it might be deepening,” he said.

Stating the importance of the SNAP, WIC and TEFAP programs as a lifeline for food and nutrition, Arthur said one goal should be to strengthen the partnership with local farms when their markets face disruptions.

“We are now well beyond the pandemic, and the crisis of inflation and food system supply chain challenges are almost as impactful as the height of the pandemic,” he said. “We saw 20% more food bank distribution in 2022 than in 2019.”

Rep. Evans from Pennsylvania noted the importance of bridging the language gap between urban and rural for better understanding. “We are all in this together,” he said.

For his part, Pennsylvania’s continuing Ag Secretary Redding thanked Chairman Thompson for bringing the Farm Bill information-gathering process to Pennsylvania. He stressed that farm policy at the federal and state levels is critical to “food, jobs and quality of life. It’s rural and urban, west and east, north and south, and the pieces need to fit together and find that equilibrium.”

“We need all of you involved in this process,” said Thompson. “The only way to get it right, to restore a robust rural economy and grow it, is for farmers to be at the table and stay at the table.”

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Pennsylvania dairy farmers Dale Hoffman (left) of Potter County and Nelson Troutman of Berks County are both members of the Grassroots PA Dairy Advisory Committee and attended the 2023 Farm Bill listening session Jan. 13 at the Pennsylvania Farm Show.

Berks County dairy farmer Nelson Troutman attended the Farm Bill listening session wearing his Drink Whole Milk – 97milk.com hat. In fact, he reports that Congresswoman Mary Miller of Illinois, who was recently named to the House Ag Committee, noticed his cap and came right over to him before the Farm Bill listening session began. She told him how much she loves whole milk and appreciates this education effort. He is pictured after the listening session with grandchildren (l-r) Emma, Madalyn, Jace, and Nolan. 

My testimony at the Chairman’s Farm Bill listening session in January

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Good afternoon honorable Chairman, members of Congress, farmers, colleagues and friends. Thank you for this opportunity to make comments on the importance of the federal farm bill.

My name is Sherry Bunting. For 40 years, I have served as an ag journalist. Before that I milked cows. I am a volunteer resource person with the Grassroots PA Dairy Advisory Committee, which I am representing today. The grassroots committee works with the separate volunteer 97 Milk education effort that began when Berks County dairy farmer Nelson Troutman painted a round bale ‘Drink Whole Milk 97% Fat Free.’

Our main effort is to educate policymakers about the importance of children having the simple choice of whole milk in schools. We thank Congressman GT Thompson and the cosponsors of The Whole Milk for Healthy Kids Act in the last legislative session and hope to see it become reality in the next session.

We understand this does not fall within the farm bill; however, there are some intersections.

Bottomline:

We believe children should be able to choose nutrient dense whole milk that they will enjoy and therefore actually consume in school meals and other USDA-funded nutrition programs.

We believe farmers should be free to offer children the quality product they actually produce and be free to use their own mandatory promotion checkoff funds to promote what they produce: That would be the nutrient dense whole milk that is naturally 3.25 to 4.5% fat, mostly standardized at 3.25% fat – or virtually 97% fat free.

Under the Nutrition Education part of the Nutrition Title, we support language to exempt nutrient dense foods, like whole milk, from the arbitrary and outdated fat-limits imposed by the Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA).

We support a farm bill provision to untie the hands of the dairy checkoff program to come out from under these arbitrary fat-limits so farmers can promote the nutrient dense whole milk they produce.

The cafeteria where Pennsylvania state lawmakers and staff have lunch offers the choice of whole milk, whereas our children are federally prohibited from choosing whole or 2% milk at school where they have two meals a day, five days a week for three-quarters of the year.

Nutrition title

The nutrition title of the farm bill sends mixed messages. Are we nutritionally supporting families in need when the arbitrary fat-limits unfairly keep nutrient dense foods like whole and 2% milk out of schools and other programs like WIC for children over age 2?

Worse, USDA has proposed a new rule to reduce the amount of milk a mom can buy under WIC.

The administration’s new Hunger, Health and Nutrition Strategy goes even farther, using FDA authority to – as President Biden and Secretary Vilsack put it — “tell us what we should eat”. This is a chilling thought.

Under the proposed FDA Healthy Labeling rule, whole milk will qualify as nutrient dense but may not qualify for a healthy label because of these outdated fat-limits.

Meanwhile, we see the SNAP program puts few if any limits on sugary snacks and sodas with zero nutrients. We hear from our own school nurse committee member that it’s normal to see donuts with sugary sprinkles and fat-free flavored milk for school breakfast while nutrient dense whole milk is forbidden. How does this make sense?

Dairy policy

After more than 10 years of allowing only fat-free and 1% milk at schools, a generation of milk drinkers has been lost and milk consumption declined more rapidly.

The Class I pricing change in the 2018 farm bill was supposed to help fluid milk innovation while being farmer-neutral, but it made these trends worse. Over the past 4 years, we have seen the following:

1)    More price risk put onto dairy farmers with a net loss of $941 million in Class I value over 4 years comparing the new Class I pricing formula to the old one, including $264 million in losses for 2022 losses, alone; (Backgrounder submitted)

2)    Disruption in how risk management tools work so farmers have less confidence in using them;

3)    More processors de-pooling milk, so just 60% of U.S. milk production participated in federal milk marketing orders in 2021,

4)    Rapid increases in the number of competing highly processed ‘fake-milks’, and

5)    A large number of fluid milk plant closures and rapid consolidation of the industry toward cow islands and milk deserts. (Some analysis from 2021 and 2022 can be found at these two links: 

https://wp.me/p329u72Cq and 

https://agrite.files.wordpress.com/2021/07/dairy_situation_analysis_bunting_july_2021_final-1.pdf

6) Industry consensus for reverting to ‘higher of’ (AFBF stakeholder meeting in Kansas City in October 2022 – coverage at these two links: 

https://wp.me/p329u7-2Ee and https://wp.me/p329u7-2Ez

The Class I ‘mover’ formula should revert back to the ‘higher of’ at least until national hearings can explore the future of the milk pricing system and figure out what to do about farmer payment protections if more processors stop participating in federal orders. Only Class I fluid milk processors are required to be regulated under federal orders.

Dairy farmers appreciate and rely on farm bill programs like Dairy Margin Coverage, Dairy Revenue Protection and Livestock Gross Margin. However, these programs don’t make up for, nor do they function properly, if we don’t have transparent pricing and competitive markets.

Also, these margin programs do not consider rising fuel costs. Farmers pay transportation to bring inputs on the farm and to ship milk off the farm.

Sustainability

Moving ahead, we see sustainability targets as the next big consolidator. We have concerns about how methane is calculated and see an anti-cow bias that started with the anti-fat Dietary Guidelines, now moving into the way climate targets are discussed and measured. We encourage you to look at the work of Dr. Frank Mitloehner on how Global Warming Potential is incorrectly calculated for cattle.

We believe the farm bill should remain focused on conservation and innovation research and assistance. It should be voluntary and not tie needed farm programs to climate goals.

We believe farmers should get credit for what they are already doing, such as here in Pennsylvania, where farmers have long used cover cropping and conservation tillage practices.

Thank you for your work on developing a farm bill that recognizes our farmers as the environmental and economic backbone of America and to support farm vitality that will ensure our nation’s food security and freedom.

Respectfully submitted,

Sherry A. Bunting for Grassroots PA Dairy Advisory Committee / 97 Milk

Lifelong resident of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania; freelance writer and columnist, Farmshine; former school board director, Eastern Lancaster County School District; member North American Ag Journalists

717.587.3706 mobile

agrite2011@gmail.com

Address: 1918 Barnett St., East Earl, PA 17519

Is the dairy checkoff getting its methane math right? Nope!

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Study says dairy should aim for climate neutrality, not net-zero carbon. Dr. Frank Mitloehner explains meaningful metric, achievable goal post during webinar

Sherry Bunting, previously published in Farmshine

BROWNSTOWN, Pa. — Net-zero carbon, net-zero GHG, net-zero GHG footprint, carbon neutrality, GHG neutrality… These terms are being used to describe the dairy checkoff’s 2050 commitments via DMI’s Net Zero Initiative.

But do they consider the warming impact of methane from dairy cows over time? 

Bottomline, the so-called “Net-Zero Initiative” of DMI is a set up to be always chasing the cow’s biology without measuring her methane as the flow gas it really is — without considering the short-lived nature of methane and the biogenic cycle cattle are a part of.

If net-zero carbon is the goal, and if methane is measured on carbon dioxide equivalency without considering its short-lived cycle, then dairy farmers could find themselves in the position of unnecessarily and continually chasing the natural biology of their cows without a meaningful and accurate metric and without an achievable goal post that satisfies what all industries around the world are really being asked to do, and that is to limit additional warming.

A new study by foremost animal scientists and air quality specialists Dr. Frank Mitloehner and Dr. Sara Place is calling for the U.S. dairy industry to aim for climate neutrality (net-zero warming) rather than net-zero carbon or net-zero GHG.

The peer-reviewed study from the University of California-Davis CLEAR Center and Elanco Animal Health was published recently in the Journal of Dairy Science. It outlines a path for the U.S. dairy industry to reach climate neutrality by 2041 with small methane reductions every year, and even sooner with more aggressive reductions.

Dr. Mitloehner brought dairy farmers up to date and took questions during the American Dairy Coalition’s annual meeting by webinar in December.

One important take-home message was for dairy producers to understand that how methane’s global warming potential is quantified (whether GWP100 or GWP*) “has a profound impact on the predicted warming of your industry. The only way you can become climate neutral is by using a metric fit for purpose, one that predicts the warming, and that is GWP*,” said Mitloehner.

He explained how methane is an important and powerful greenhouse gas (GHG), but it is different from other gases because it is the only one that undergoes atmospheric removal in a chemical process that takes about a decade. This does not occur for carbon dioxide or nitrous oxide, which are stock gases that remain in earth’s atmosphere for 1000 and 100 years, respectively.

“Methane is the most important gas for agriculture, so its removal must be included in the calculation also,” he confirmed, noting that GWP* does that. “Methane is fast and furious. It has a good punch that is 28 times more trapping of heat from the sun (vs. carbon dioxide), but it is also fast. It doesn’t stay in the atmosphere for long.”

In a slide showing all global methane sources and sinks, Mitloehner noted that nearly 560 terragrams of methane are produced worldwide annually, and at the same time 550 are destroyed by this natural atmospheric process.

In terms of atmospheric growth, “the net is then 10. This is still a number we want to reduce, but it is not 560,” he said.

As the DMI Innovation Center’s Sustainability goals, Net Zero Initiative and FARM program are on the cusp of calculating these things at the farm level, both the measurement and the goal matter.

A net-zero carbon or GHG commitment poses a problem for dairy farmers. This is compounded by the CO2 equivalency for methane being calculated using GWP100. 

The GWP100 metric has been around since the 1990s, but it describes stock gases, whereas methane is a flow gas.

Using GWP100 with a net-zero carbon commitment is not only unnecessary, it’s problematic.

“It means the belches from your cows are (being calculated) in addition to what they belched last year, and the year before that, and so forth 10 years from now,” said Mitloehner. “In reality, constant herds are a constant source of methane that generates a constant warming, not a new warming. That’s what the Paris Treaty asks all sectors to do – to limit additional warming.”

Aiming for climate neutrality or net-zero warming instead of net-zero carbon would put the focus where it needs to be — on the warming impact of the emitted methane over time. This is important because methane makes up 62% of the estimated total GHG for dairy, according to the CLEAR Center study.

“If we use GWP100 to describe a relatively constant source, to characterize that methane, then we are overblowing its impact by a factor of 3 to 4, and we are overlooking the ability for the U.S. dairy industry to reduce warming when we reduce methane,” said Mitloehner, citing page 173 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2021 Assessment Report 6.

The metric GWP-star (GWP*) is also mentioned on this page of the IPCC report. GWP* was developed by the University of Oxford. It is based on GWP100, but it looks at how methane warms the planet over time. It characterizes methane as the flow gas that it is and calculates it based on CO2 warming equivalents (CO2we), not as accumulating CO2 stock equivalents (CO2e).

A white paper published with the peer-reviewed CLEAR Center study explains it this way:

“Net zero carbon refers to a state where carbon is removed from the atmosphere (through carbon sinks or other offsets) at a rate equal to carbon being emitted into the atmosphere. This balance between carbon emission and removal creates a ‘net-zero’ carbon output. Climate neutrality, on the other hand, focuses on temperature impacts from emission sources, referring to the point in which no additional warming is added to the atmosphere.”

The paper goes on to explain how “climate neutrality is analogous to net-zero carbon when dealing with long-lived greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, but short-lived pollutants like methane do not need to reach net-zero carbon to be climate-neutral.”

“Is it new and additional carbon being added to the atmosphere? Do constant herds add new warming? No, they do not,” said Mitloehner.

“Belched out methane is the number one source in agriculture, but again, it doesn’t stay in the atmosphere for 1000 or even 100 years like carbon dioxide and other GHG,” he explained while also noting the pathway of the carbon in this methane is already present in the atmosphere, is captured by plants, then consumed by cows. Some of this consumed carbon (energy) is converted to carbohydrate and some of it is emitted in the methane by the cow in a continuous cycle. 

Unlike fossil fuel emissions, this is not ancient carbon brought out of the ground and into the atmosphere as a one-way-street, he explained: “Do not fall for the people who are comparing cars to cows. The University of Oxford says this is a mischaracterization, and I agree.”

What is exciting, “is if we reduce methane, we can come to a point where we produce negative warming or a cooling effect. That’s what my work is about (Fig. 4). If we do a couple of things to reach no new warming, and if we then get aggressive to go further, we can sell credits as offsets,” said Mitloehner, referencing the implications, limitations and conclusions of the CLEAR Center study.

As innovations related to managing cattle diets are being developed, the good news is emerging tools show the promise of steering more of that carbon, that energy, toward milk yield and components and less of it to methane that is belched back into the cycle.

In contrast, a net-zero carbon or net-zero GHG goal that measures methane as a stock gas (GWP100) and does not accurately describe its warming impact and flow-gas status in the way GWP-star (GWP*) does, would leave dairy farmers needlessly and continually chasing what under the GWP100 scenario are accumulated and continuing belches from their cows. 

If the industry continues to chart net zero carbon, will dairy farms be forever chasing their belching cows with tech investments and offsets?

“In my opinion, you will never reach net zero carbon. Your cows will always produce methane no matter how aggressive you are. You will over promise and leave stakeholders disappointed. We are dealing with a biological system, the microbial fermentation in the rumen. It is not feasible and I have advised the industry in the past against it, but that is the direction it goes – in general,” said Mitloehner.

As for unintended consequences on the path to ‘net zero,’ Dr. Mitloehner was clear to say: “What matters is climate neutrality. If you tell the world you want to be climate neutral with no new warming and achieve it through annual reductions of 0.3 to 0.5%, you will indeed be climate neutral in less than 20 years. At a 1% per year reduction in methane, you will accelerate that timeline. But you will never achieve it with GWP100. It’s not possible and not necessary to go that way of treating methane as if it were a stock gas. It doesn’t account for the reduction.”

A piece of good news, he said, is that GWP-star (GPW*) can be used parallel to GWP100. The maitrix is a more scientific predictor of what you (dairy) has to do to bend that curve and how strongly.

“The excel spreadsheet calculator in the white paper helps you identify when in the future as a creamery or a statewide association reach the point that you are no longer creating additional warming, and that should be the goal,” Mitloehner explains.

Net zero carbon or net zero GHG is a setup to always be chasing the cow’s biology without acknowledging her gas is a flow gas, not a stock gas. It does not accumulate. Some will say “you can use offsets” for the cow’s biology. But why? They are not necessary as offsets and could be viewed as solutions if the dairy industry gets its math right. (We’ve seen this movie before)