Dairy checkoff is ‘negotiating’ your future: Train wreck ahead. Stop the train. Correct the track. (DMI Net Zero – Part One)

Posted on September 26, 2022 by Agmoos

By Sherry Bunting, Farmshine, Sept. 16, 2022

Dairy farmers are being used without regard. Their future ability to operate is right now being negotiated, and they are paying those negotiators through their 15-cents-per-hundredweight mandatory checkoff with no idea how the negotiations will ultimately affect their businesses and way of life.

Inflated baselines and an inflated methane CO2 equivalent assigned to cows is setting the stage for a head-on collision, a train wreck on the misaligned track laid by DMI’s Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy.

In fact, the Net Zero Initiative has been designed to help everyone but the dairy farmer. It sets up a methane money game for carbon traders at the expense of those dairy farms that have long been environmentally conscious with no-till, cover crops, grazing, and other practices already on their farms.

Such farms will be of no use in what is shaping up to be a focus on harvesting reductions, not attaining neutrality, in DMI’s Net Zero Initiative (NZI).

Small and mid-sized dairy farms that are already at or near carbon-neutral could show smaller reductions for the industry to harvest.

Conversely, the largest dairies installing the newest biogas systems are realizing even this route could become a dead-end because the credits are signed over and sold for big bucks, a few bucks get kicked back to the dairy, but the methane capture becomes the property of other industries outside of the dairy supply chain.

If the industry does not act now to stop the NZI train for a period of re-examination, adjustment and correction, then the current trajectory may actually move food companies clamoring for reductions ever closer to alternatives and analogs that boast their climate claims solely on the fact that they are produced without cows.

This is a big money game that is operating off the backs of our cows, and the checkoff has been at best complicit as a driver.

RNG (renewable natural gas) operators are signing up large (3000+ cows) dairies left and right for digesters and covered lagoons to capture methane piped to clustered scrubbing facilities to be turned into renewable fuel for vehicles or electricity generation. Meanwhile dairy protein analogs are being created without cows by ‘precision fermentation’ startups partnering with the largest global dairy companies.

In turn, millions if not billions of dollars in carbon credits are generated while farmers and their milk buyers will be left figuring out how to show their reductions when they are left holding the inflated methane bag.

Six organizations, four of them non-profits under the DMI umbrella, officially launched the Net Zero Intitiative (NZI) in the fall of 2019, five months after Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack made headlines talking about it in a Senate hearing while he was pulling down a million-dollar salary as a DMI executive in 2018.

NZI is the proclaimed vehicle for negotiating the terms for U.S. Dairy to continue, terms based on showing carbon reductions that many family farms may find difficult to meet — especially if the farm is already at or close to carbon neutral.

As DMI’s sustainability negotiators data-collect all previous reductions into farm-by-farm comprehensive baseline estimates, where will those farms find new reductions?

According to DMI staff, over 2000 dairy farms have already gone through their environmental stewardship review via the FARM program to establish their “comprehensive estimates.”

The six organizations, four of them filing IRS 990s under the national dairy checkoff, that launched NZI are: Dairy Management Inc. (DMI), Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy, U.S. Dairy Export Council (USDEC) and Newtrient, along with the other two organizations being National Milk Producers Federation (NMPF), and International Dairy Foods Association (IDFA).

They have collectively bought-into the global definition that inflates the CO2 equivalent used for methane, effectively committing the cow to perpetual GHG purgatory.

Because the NZI structure is based on continually showing GHG reductions, no farm is insulated with a get-out-of-jail-free-key — not even the largest farms with the most advanced biogas systems.

Why haven’t checkoff funds been used to defend the cow – to get the numbers right, to get the current practices farmers have invested in counted toward reductions not baselines, and to get the methane CO2 equivalent correct — instead of giving in to this notion that feels an awful lot like ‘cows are bad and we are committed to making them better?’

Perhaps it was ignored or embraced because this inflated methane CO2 equivalent gives the suite of tech tools being assembled by DMI’s Newtrient a bigger runway to show reductions — a money maker for the RNG biogas companies and others that will in many cases end up owning the carbon credits after paying the farmer a nominal fee.

Carbon trading rose 164% last year to $851 billion, according to a Reuters January 2022 report. A big chunk of this is coming from the methane capture and fossil fuel replacement of RNG biogas projects, mostly in California but popping up elsewhere at a rapid rate and mostly traded on the California exchange.

Farmers are getting some money for these projects, but they don’t own the carbon credits once they are sold or signed over. When they are sold outside of the dairy supply chain, this reduction becomes someone else’s property, so it is no longer part of the dairy farm’s footprint nor the footprint of their milk buyer.

Likewise, this inflated methane equivalent — along with the emphasis on reductions, not neutrality — has some processors wondering if they’ll be able to come up with the Scope 3 reductions they need in ESG scoring.

They are facing upstream pressure from retailers and consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies as well as asset managers to show reductions, and they have counted on big numbers from their Scope 3 suppliers, the dairy farms.

The problem for dairy processors and dairy farmers comes down to the central definitions of methane equivalent and carbon asset ownership — the rights of farmers to own their past, present and future reductions, whether or not they’ve signed them over as offsets to a milk buyer or a project investor and whether or not they’ve sold the resulting credits on a carbon exchange, and whether or not they’ve installed new practices that are now part of a baseline but represent a new investment every year as they operate their businesses.

Back in June, the American Dairy Coalition added this concern to their list of federal milk pricing priorities because of the impact this climate and carbon tracking will have on milk buying and selling relationships and contracts — and the lack of clarity or fairness in this deal for essential food producers at the origination point that is closest to nature, the farm.

ADC worded their “carbon asset ownership” priority this way: “No matter where a dairy farm’s milk is processed, that farm should be able to retain 100% ownership at all times of its earned and achieved carbon assets, even if this information is shared with milk buyers to describe the resulting products that are made from the milk.”

For its part, IDFA took a swing last Friday, going one step farther to recommend global accounting methods that would allow the dairy supply chain (farmers and processors) to retain carbon credits even if they are sold on a carbon exchange or signed over to an asset company that invested in an on-farm technology.

IDFA executives penned the Sept. 9 opinion piece in Agri-Pulse laying out the concerns of their members who are starting to realize the future consequences of the rapid and inflated monetization of methane — and the race to sell carbon credits — leaving dairy processors unable to get those credits they were counting on from the farms that supply them with milk, while at the same time being stuck facing the cow’s inflated methane CO2 equivalent in their downstream Scope 3 even while they try to get reductions in their own controlled areas of Scopes 1 and 2.

When dairy farms no longer own their reduction or cannot show a large reduction because they are already virtually neutral, processors become concerned about how they will gain the Scope 3 reductions that are part of the ESG scoring the large retailers and global food companies are pushing.

All of this has come down through the non-governmental organizations like World Wildlife Fund (WWF), investment and asset management sector via the World Economic Forum (WEF), the global corporate structures through the Sustainability Roundtable and through government entities via the United Nations Agenda 2030. DMI has been at those tables for at least 14 years.

“It is becoming clearer every day that the global accounting standards underpinning GHG measurement and reporting are biased against the very people making the (GHG) reductions,” the IDFA executives wrote in their opinion.

In other words, while some farmers are beginning to profit from GHG-reducing practices that are turned into offsets and traded on the carbon markets, the system is tilted against them because it leaves them without the offsets they traded and leaves them in a position of having to continually reduce in order to secure a position in the value chain.

IDFA points out that under the current rules, once the offset is sold outside of the value chain as a carbon credit – it is gone. The current GHG accounting system says only the buyer of that reduction can claim ownership.

Those farms can no longer claim their own reduction, and it means the company buying milk or other commodities from a producer cannot integrate the reduction into the description of their final product.

This weakens U.S. Dairy, the IDFA opinion states, and it makes dairy farmers less competitive sources of pledge-meeting carbon reductions for retailers and manufacturers – setting real dairy up for fake dairy dilution with the inclusion of whey proteins and other pieces of milk that are being produced in fermentation vats by genetically modified yeast, fungi and bacteria, as well as other analogs.

A bigger problem not mentioned in the IDFA opinion may be the inflated baselines that leave farms that have implemented best practices years ago positioned to show smaller reductions.

While the American Farm Bureau earlier this year lobbied against proposed SEC accounting intrusions for quantifying ESG scoring, it has been silent on the issue of carbon asset ownership for food producers. AFBF has also said little about the recently signed climate bill (Inflation Reduction Act).

National Milk Producers Federation, on the other hand, as reported last week, sang its praises for being right in line with where the industry’s Net Zero Initiative is going.

DMI voices its pride to have been leading the way, positioning its Innovation Center as founded by dairy farmers. They have conceded that dairy farms impact the environment and launched NZI as a collective pledge to reduce that impact.

In other words, DMI submitted to the idea that cows impact the environment, but never fear, through NZI, the Innovation Center and Newtrient, farmers will make them better, and turn them into a climate solution.

This is a fool’s errand given the inflated methane equivalent and the movement of carbon reductions to entities outside of the dairy supply chain such as paper mills, bitcoin miners, and the fossil fuel industry.

Did dairy farmers have a say in any of this? Not really. They were kept in the dark as this was developed over the past decade or more, and the boards representing them on the six organizations that launched NZI (four of them under the checkoff umbrella) have been duped.

Farmers are largely unaware of the NZI train, and their silence as it runs down the track becomes a further signal to the industry and to the government that they approve of the track they are on.

As the industry sits at this crossing, the Net Zero train full of dairy farmer passengers is barreling high speed down the track DMI has laid.

This train must be stopped because the future-bound track needs to be re-examined, adjusted and re-aligned so that the passengers are not ejected by the train wreck – the accelerated consolidator — that lies ahead.

Fundamentals must be vigorously revisited. Every passenger on that train, every dairy farm, must be recognized as an essential food producer, get credit for their prior investment in current practices, and be able to retain ownership of their carbon assets as part of their farm’s footprint — even if these assets have been provided, sold or signed over as offsets to milk buyers or project investors or traders on an exchange.

Furthermore, this train – built with farmer dollars – should protect the so-called founding farmers from being denied a market based on the size of their GHG reductions. If a carbon neutral farm can’t show reductions to its milk buyer, will that buyer look for other downstream vendors who can fulfill their Scope 3 reduction needs?

Will those vendors be other farms with larger perceived GHG reductions or will they be alternative analogs created without cows?

Nestle announced this week it is partnering with Perfect Day toward that end. In fact, the proliferation of plant-based, cell cultured, DNA-altered microbe excrement analogs for dairy protein and other elements are entering the market on big GHG reduction claims based on being made without the cow and the inflated methane CO2 equivalent she has been assigned!

The current standard for methane CO2 equivalency is inflated by orders of magnitude. Dr. Frank Mitloehner has addressed this repeatedly and other researchers back his view with efforts to change it.

As Mitloehner and others point out, climate neutrality should be the goal, not net-zero. Furthermore, the current methane CO2 equivalent is calculated based only on the much greater warming effect of methane vs. CO2. However, the current calculation does not account for the fact that methane is short-lived in Earth’s atmosphere — about 10 years compared with 100 to 100 years for CO2 and other GHG. It also does not account for the cow’s role in the biogenic carbon cycle.

Remember, DMI and company have ignored or embraced this definition. At the same time, the Innovation Center’s data collection of progressive accomplishments are included in the baselines from which new reductions (opportunities) must be found.

These two trains run in opposite directions for a future head-on collision on a mis-aligned track.

The bigger the perceived GHG problem, the bigger the reduction through technology, and the bigger the monetization of that reduction outside of the dairy supply chain. At the same time, this creates an even bigger problem for farms that are unable to participate in biogas projects, farms that don’t fit the Innovation Center’s 3500-cow-dairy-as-solution template, farms that may be carbon neutral or close to it already.

DMI and company have played fast and loose with the truth.

Farmshine readers will recall the glaring error reported more than a year ago in the white paper written by WWF for DMI. It showcased these biogas projects and the 3500-cow dairy template it proclaimed could be Net Zero in five years, not 30.

That paper inflated U.S. Dairy’s total GHG footprint by an order of magnitude! A Pennsylvania dairy farmer brought the error to Farmshine’s attention. In turn, the magnitude of the error was confirmed by Dr. Mitloehner who then contacted DMI. A corrected copy of the white paper magically replaced all internet files with no discussion from DMI or WWF. That number was changed, but all of the assumptions in the paper were left as-is.

Put simply: DMI does not appear to be concerned about inflating the size of dairy’s perceived GHG problem. The bigger the perceived problem, the bigger the reduction that can be monetized, but that is now happening outside of the dairy supply chain.

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Dairy identity crisis

Posted on August 27, 2021 by Agmoos

Some blending innovations beg dilution questions… Marketed as “the best of all milks,” and highlighted as offering “enhanced nutrition,” Live Real Farms 50/50 blends entered the second phase of rollout, arriving earlier this year in Northeast and Midatlantic markets. Giant Stores are among the supermarkets carrying the drink, pictured here at a Giant in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where the Dairy + Almond and Dairy + Oat are shelved beside fairlife and sandwiched between plant-based on the right and below and 100% real milk half gallons and gallons on the left. The low-fat ultrafiltered milk as an ingredient in the Live Real Farms 50/50 blend is not Class I in terms of dairy farm-level pricing. Photo by Sherry Bunting

DMI gets more aggressive in launch of ‘blending’ vision

By Sherry Bunting, Farmshine, August 27, 2021

CHICAGO, Ill. – The future of dairy is “blending”, according to recent messaging and product innovation launches supported with dairy checkoff dollars.

In 2019, the Live Real Farms, “purely perfect blends” – Dairy Plus Almond and Dairy Plus Oat beverages – were launched in test markets in Minnesota. Earlier this year, the roll-out arrived in Northeast markets, including Pennsylvania. For example, in Lancaster County, Pa., certain Giant stores are handling the drink.

According to USDA FMMO definitions for Class I fluid milk, the either/or protein or total solids percentage of this “blend” does not meet the Class I standard, and an official from the Pa. Milk Marketing Board also confirmed in a phone interview that the 50/50 blended products are not regulated as Class I under the PMMB.

This is another aspect of the move toward blending in fluid milk products. Some of these new checkoff-funded fluid milk “revitalization” products classify the milk used in them at manufacturing class prices.

But that’s another story. This article focuses on how DMI is positioning future dairy messaging and supply-chain innovation through blending.

First, many farmers will recall the words of Paul Ziemnisky, executive vice president of DMI’s Global Innovation Partnerships when he spoke in a Center for Dairy Excellence call last fall and again in a webinar during the February 2021 Pennsylvania Dairy Summit.

In those settings, Ziemnisky gave a look at the future of dairy beverages, going so far as to say new processing facilities will “need to be built as beverage plants able to handle all kinds of ingredients for the blended products of the future.”

In essence, he said, the future of fluid milk is “dual purpose” processing plants.

“We will see the beverage space set up differently and our manufacturing plants will need to be set up as dual plants to make milk-based beverages because that is where the consumer is going, and it is our job to keep them where dairy is front and center,” Ziemnisky explained, noting that these blends “are shelved with milk. We’re adding plants to dairy, making lactose-free dairy to address gut health. Our partners have led, and we have driven growth by over 1 billion pounds.”

But where is the sales data on the blends? The dairy industry identity shift has been in the making for the past 12 to 13 years, and ramping up in the past five, with the opening, expanding and planned construction of huge dairy ingredient facilities, processing cheese and “nutritionals”.

Ultrafiltration and low-fat or fat-free milk figure prominently in these blends.

‘Best of all milks?’

So, how is DFA / DMI marketing the checkoff-partnered fluid milk innovation that is Live Real Farms “purely perfect blends”? The evolving liverealfarms.com website, as well as social media platforms, tell the story.

These “blends” of milk plus plant-based beverages, these 50/50 blends, are touted as “the best of all milks,” and “the milk for modern tastes.”

Captured screenshot at
https://liverealfarms.com/about-us/

Interestingly, the Live Real Farms “about us” page demonstrates that its marketers may be even more confused about whose farm products they are promoting because the photo is clearly that of a farmer standing in a field with BEEF cows – Hereford and Charolais. There’s not a dairy breed in the bunch on the full screen photo at DFA’s Live Real Farms “about us” page.

Across the beef cow and farmer photo are the words “Keeping it real.” (We have to wonder how the photo of beef cows and a blended product keep it real, but that’s a question for another day.)

Moving down through the verbiage, beneath the photo are the words: “Live Real Farms is owned by a co-op of real farmers (DFA) with one really tasty goal: to create deliciously modern dairy products bursting with goodness. Nothing fancy. Nothing artificial. Nothing we wouldn’t put on our own tables.”

Underneath this verbiage, we finally do see a Holstein, and below that picture are these words: “Love Milk Like Never Before: Something so delicious happens when you blend real milk with real almond or oat drink. We love the luscious texture. We love the subtle sweetness and nutty flavors. We love the health benefits too. And so will you.”

Various consumer spots are included touting this blended drink as healthier because you can “sneak more plants into your diet,” or because the blending with oat drink make it better in coffee, and on and on.

The instagram account even urged putting 50/50 Dairy + Almond blend out for Santa last Christmas Eve. (Sorry, but Santa prefers 100% real milk).

A milk identity crisis?

The chocolate dairy plus almond product was recently reviewed by Afoolzerrand.com – the saga of a man traveling the world tasting and reviewing brands of chocolate milk – over 1500 of them to-date.

Even he was confused about the ‘blend’, stating in his video review that he was “curious about who this (blended) product is for…

“Is there crossover between people who buy almond milk and people who buy regular milk? Maybe? Is it some sort of a compromise? I don’t know. I’m sure they did research to back up putting out the product, but I find it strange who the target market is,” he said.

“It is amusing that at the website for Live Real Farms, about us, it talks about ‘keeping it simple’ and ‘we believe in eating food the way nature intended. It’s funny for me to think about nature intending on a 50/50 almond milk / cow milk blend, let alone a chocolate flavored one. To consider that to be the way nature intended has some comedy value for me,” the chocolate milk connoisseur said in his video review of the product.

He noted that, “It sort of tastes like you would expect sun block to taste,” observing a “dusty” flavor that’s “more sweet than chocolatey”.

He talked about the other 50/50 blends in the line-up, saying “I’m baffled a bit. I’ve certainly tried worse things, it’s less creamy, which you would expect with half low-fat milk, half almond milk… texture-wise it doesn’t do any favors.”

Rating it a 3 out of 10 (Poor), Afoolzerrand went on to note that it offers a lactose-free claim, but he was quick to point out (and show pictures of) the many other lactose free chocolate milks on the market that are made with 100% real milk, that he said are really good.

Whose healthy halo?

So, what does DMI – the purveyor of the blending vision for dairy farmer checkoff dollars – say?

A recently posted “Undeniably Dairy” video at the USdairy.com website sought to explain the blending direction of dairy “to answer questions raised by recent headlines.”

Undeniably, dairy is moving toward blending-in. That’s the word in a recent DMI blog post and video explaining dairy checkoff’s aggressive “overarching framework” of where “milk-based” beverage innovations are headed — to blending-in. Captured screenshot at
https://www.usdairy.com/for-farmers/blog/value-of-dairy-blending-in

In the video moderated by Scott Wallin, DMI’s communications director, Kristiana Alexander, director of DMI’s Knowledge and Insights, discusses how “consumer desires are influencing the beverage category and how dairy innovation can encourage more fluid milk use. One of the newest innovations are blended products, which combine the goodness of dairy with other ingredients,” she said.

Alexander is asked to give a definition for ‘blended dairy’ in the DMI video entitled ‘Why Fluid Milk Innovation is Important.’

“We are talking about products that are combining dairy with other ingredients or foods that is then made into a single product,” she said.

Wallin notes that Alexander’s team is “constantly monitoring consumer trends” and asks what they are finding when it comes to blended dairy. “What is it that they are looking for?” he asked.

“Today, people are focused on living a ‘holistic lifestyle,” said Alexander explaining what she called DMI’s “overarching framework.”

The holistic lifestyle is “a lifestyle that emphasizes the connection of the mind, body and planet. It encompasses the well-being of the individual, the family, and everything around them. People want to know, is this good for my body? Will I enjoy it? Will I feel good about buying it?,” Alexander says.

She talked about how blended products are showing up in the marketplace, saying: “It’s all about nutrition and flavor experience. It’s about bringing the foods and ingredients that people want more of … and bringing them into dairy. This can include fruits and vegetables for vitamins and antioxidants, functional foods that boost immunity, healthy grains – think like oats and quinoa, nuts, and ‘super powders’ like matcha and turmeric that have a perceived ‘health halo’ around them. And beyond nutrition, it’s flavor experience. Consumers are looking to step out of their comfort zones,” said Alexander.

(Author’s note: Who is promoting milk’s natural healthy halo? The vitamins, minerals, high quality protein, hydrating water, electrolytes, healthy matrix of fats, important fatty acids, essential nutrients of concern in today’s diets, and more? Does dairy suddenly need other ingredients to improve its health halo, according to DMI consumer research? Because consumers do not know much about the health and nutrition of real milk and dairy, blending is the answer?)

Everyone’s doing it?

Alexander went on to say this “blending” trend is not just happening in dairy.

“We see it in meat and poultry,” she said, flashing brands of blended products always using the word “plus” on the screen (like the Live Real Farms does with dairy) and touting chicken-plus-grains blends and beef blended with pea-protein as “great new products” that meet consumer desires.

“We are tapping into consumers’ desires for enhanced nutrition and flavor exploration,” Alexander explained.

“The big question for farmers is, ‘what does it mean for the dairy industry?’” asked Wallin.

Alexander responded to say: “Bringing it home, what it means for dairy and looking at blended dairy… first, we know people are always looking to consume more vegetables, and we are seeing this take place in meat and poultry, and now in dairy.

“It’s not about eliminating foods,” said DMI’s Alexander. “It’s having different options available, and these hybrid foods that provide dairy and vegetables, they do that. There’s ice cream, cheese crackers, dairy beverages that all let consumers get more vegetables in their diets. And then there’s dairy blends that incorporate grains and nuts, meeting different consumer needs.”

She noted that Live Real Farms milk plus almond and oat, in particular, “provide that blended enhanced nutrition.”

(Author’s note: Enhanced nutrition? Over real dairy milk? Really?)

She also noted the “indulgent” blends, such as Shamrock’s milk swirled with almond drink and chocolate as being a new “comfort food” for people looking to indulge and “be comforted” after a stressful year.

Alexander also noted the blended cheeses with lentils and chickpeas providing new textures and … you guessed it… “enhanced nutrition.”

This ‘blending’ discussion has not even publicly touched upon the bioengineered yeast-excrement makers already talking with the largest global makers of ice cream, yogurt and cheese to blend their dairy protein analogs at a starter rate of 5%.

As Alexander noted in the DMI video, it’s happening in meat and poultry also.

Bottom line, dairy farmer checkoff dollars are using the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) supply chain leverage model to move consumers and producers in a direction that certainly appears to be one that transforms food by diluting animal-sourced foods like real milk and dairy.

The World Wildlife Fund in its 2012 Report “Better Production for a Living Planet” identifies the strategy it uses to accomplish its priorities for 15 identified commodities, including dairy and beef, related to biodiversity, water and climate. Instead of trying to change the habits of 7 billion consumers or working directly with 1.5 billion producers, worldwide, WWF stated that their research identified a “practical solution” to leverage about 300 to 500 companies that control 70% of food choices. By partnering with DMI’s Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy with a Memorandum of Understanding for 10 years — 2009 through 2019 — this “supply-chain” leverage strategy is now embedded. Effectively, WWF has used producer checkoff funds to implement their message and priorities to consumers through supply chain decisions and to producers through checkoff-funded programs validating farm practices. 2012 WWF Report image

Business will do what business will do, but should dairy farmers be paying to promote, launch, create, and foster the blending and dilution of their milk and dairy products, including the reclassification of the milk in these beverages at manufacturing class prices? Are they funding their own demise? Should they be funding the education and promotion of dairy’s own superior healthy halo so that consumers know what 100% real dairy provides and can make informed decisions as the lines get blurred?

Who is really benefitting?

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DMI’s DS4G sees dairy feed, cropping, cow care as ‘big hammers’ for net-zero

Posted on June 8, 2021 by Agmoos

‘Grant’ will start ‘measuring’ air, soil around dairy cropping practices in nine U.S. regions

This is the third and final part of the multi-part series about DMI’s Net Zero Initiative and Dairy Scale for Good implementation. Parts one and two in Farmshine covered some of the 12- to 13-year history, the ‘scale’ approach for getting the industry to net zero faster, and the impact of manure processing, digester models, and renewable energy policies and technologies in the NZI scheme.

By Sherry Bunting, Farmshine, May 7, 2021

ROSEMONT, Ill. — How dairy feed and forage are produced are the “biggest hammers” that are “ripe for innovation in dairy emissions reduction,” said Caleb Harper, executive director of DMI’s Net Zero Initiative (NZI) Dairy Scale for Good (DS4G) implementation.

He and Dr. Mike McCloskey, chairman of the DMI Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy’s Sustainability Initiative, presented information about the Net Zero Initiative (NZI) and ‘implementation on the farm’ during last month’s Balchem real science lecture series.

Much of the presentation used the ‘spreadsheet exercise’ of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) white paper laying out the “business case for getting to net zero faster”, based on a 3500 cow dairy (a Fair Oaks site with 3000 milking and 500 dry). In fact, Harper’s DS4G work will exclusively pilot and model on dairies about this size.

After explaining that the DS4G goal is to make maximum impact on the entire supply of milk in the short-term using “the consolidation going on in the industry” and the idea of “scale to drive down the risk … and spread the benefit across the industry,” Harper dug into each area and showed how the models tend to work best when multiple areas are combined.

Harper said no till farming, cover crops, innovative crop rotations, renewable fertilizer, precision agriculture all fall into this feed production area of emissions.

“It all boils down to measuring the emissions,” he said, showing a slide of boxes in potato fields in Idaho, where USDA ARS has a project that monitors the air around the crop to show the emissions from a field and mitigation that can be attributed to cropping practices. He said DMI has a grant to do the same thing with dairy cropping practices beginning this year.

The key, according to Harper, is to show that the emissions are being reduced. In addition to boxes in fields measuring emissions around crops, Harper said soil core samples will be taken to determine carbon sequestration of dairy feed cropping strategies.

“This is open science, (meaning still in the proving stage),” said Harper, known for his Open Ag science project growing food in computer controlled boxes at M.I.T. That project ended amid controversy last April a few weeks before Harper was hired by DMI to lead its NZI DS4G.

During the real science lecture in April, Harper said DMI has a grant program starting this year, along with Foundation for Food and Agriculture, to do this type of field box emissions monitoring and soil core sequestration monitoring across nine different U.S. geographies to test conservation tillage practices in terms of carbon emissions and sequestration over the next five years.

Harper said he sees this area as “huge” for innovation and for generating carbon credits that are valued by markets and for reducing one-third of dairy’s ‘field to farm’ emissions while improving soil health and the ability of soil to hold water.

He projects the bottom line potential annual farm revenue on this at $70,000, saying the industry will have to combine this with other strategies, like manure processing, renewable energy generation and such to get the combination of environmental impact toward ‘net-zero’ GHG and the economic revenue stream impact for the dairies.

“Some strategies are more impactful than others,” he said about the WWF models.

In this diagram, which was also shared by DMI leaders in a Pa. Dairy Summit breakout session about what dairy checkoff has done for producers lately, Harper illustrated how WWF models show farms will have to combine areas to merge emissions reduction potential with revenue potential. This shows feed production represents 26% of field to farm emissions reduction potential but just 3% of farm revenue potential; Cow care encompassing feed additives, efficient rations and genetics represents 33% of emissions reduction potential and just 5% of farm revenue potential; but conversely, renewable energy production on the farm represents just 5% of emissions reduction potential and 23% of farm revenue potential.

The ‘hammers’ on the emissions side do not line up with hammers on the revenue side, and the question remains, where will individual dairy farms sit in terms of decision-making as supply chains scale these combinations.

Yet again, the question arises around selling or monetizing the carbon credits generated by the farm once these cropping practices are “measured” and added to models. How does the sale of these credits, or bundling with sales of milk, then change the carbon profile of the farm selling the credits vs. the buyer in the dairy supply chain. Again, as mentioned in Part II on manure technologies and energy generation, this is an important detail that the WWF, NZI and DS4G modeling has not dealt with or worked through.

So, while discussions have already progressed to model how carbon credits and milk could be bundled to milk buyers, with pilots funded by supply chain grants to model how scale can spread impact over the industry and the entire milk supply, the holes in the value proposition are more obvious in this area where farms are already doing great things for land, air and water, by keeping something green and growing on the land as part of dairy feed production: How do farmers get credit for what they are already doing?

Harper also said “amazing things” are happening in the feed additive aspect of reducing enteric emissions, but he acknowledged “it’s early” on the carbon credit side for that.

This area of feed production and feed additives in the DS4G ‘value proposition’ has been spreadsheet-modeled to account for one-third of dairy’s field to farm CO2 equivalent emissions, and yet, at the same time, carbon credits based on this area are still in the research and measurement stage, needing documentation to be ‘monetized.’

Harper cited an example paper from University of California-Davis showing significant reductions in enteric emissions in beef cattle with certain feed additives.

As this work in the area of feed production and feed additives continues, said Harper: “Continuing to optimize rations (for production efficiency) remains important, while feed additives and selecting genetics for lower emissions will become important.”

Author’s Notebook:

The WWF Markets Institute released the dairy business ‘case study’ for scaling to net-zero faster on Jan. 27, 2021. A mid-February Farmshine report revealed the WWF mathematical error that had inflated the magnitude of CO2 equivalent pounds contributed by all U.S. milk production. WWF on Feb. 25, 2021, corrected its baseline to show the much smaller collective impact of 268 billion pounds CO2 equivalent (not 2.3 trillion pounds).

Both Harper and McCloskey serve on the WWF Market Institute’s Thought Leadership Group.

DMI confirms that dairy checkoff had a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with WWF from the inception of the Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy around 2008 through 2019. McCloskey has chaired the Innovation Center’s Sustainability Initiative since 2008.

In 2008-09, two MOU’s were signed between DMI and USDA via former U.S. Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack — the Sustainability Initiative and GENYOUth. At the end of the Obama administration, Sec. Vilsack was hired by DMI dairy checkoff to serve as president and CEO of USDEC 2016-2021, and earlier this year he became Secretary of Agriculture again after President Joe Biden said Vilsack ‘practically wrote his rural platform and now he can implement it.”

Aside from both serving on the WWF Market Institute’s Thought Leadership Group, McCloskey and Harper have another connection. According to the Sept. 2019 Chronicles of Higher Education, Caleb Harper’s father, Steve Harper, was a grocery executive. He was senior vice-president of marketing and fresh product development, procurement and merchandising from 1993 to 2010 for the H-E-B supermarket chain based in Texas. According to a 2020 presentation by Sue McCloskey, H-E-B was their first partner in the fluid milk business in the 1990s, followed by Kroger. According to the Houston Chronicle, the McCloskeys also partnered with H-E-B in 1996 during Steve Harper’s tenure to produce Mootopia ultrafiltered milk, an H-E-B brand. This was the pre-cursor to fairlife, the ultrafiltered milk beverage line in which DMI invested tens of millions of dollars in checkoff funds through the Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy partnering with the McCloskeys, Select, and Coca Cola.

Harper also previously served as a member of the Board of Directors for New Harvest for at least three years (2017-19). New Harvest is a global nonprofit building the field of cellular agriculture, funding startups to make milk, meat and eggs without animals.

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How data analytics, supply chain ‘ecosystems’ fit DMI’s global strategy for U.S. Dairy

Posted on August 28, 2020 by Agmoos

DMI CEO Tom Gallagher shared this slide with August ‘open mic’ call participants as consumer data confirm a current focuse on health and economics — even though global supply chain transformation is pursued on an accelerating scale.

By Sherry Bunting, excerpts summarized from Farmshine, August 21 and 28, 2020

CHICAGO, Ill. — Early in the pandemic, consumers were initially focused on health drivers in food purchases and then began moving toward economics. But with the resurgence of Covid cases across the country, data insights show “consumers are now back to a focus on health again,” said Tom Gallagher, CEO of Dairy Management Inc. (DMI).

Consumer insights and purchasing patterns pre- and post-Covid were discussed in an early August DMI ‘open mic’ call with Gallagher, as well as DMI president Barb O’Brien, board chair Marilyn Hershey and Inmar Intelligence CEO David Mounts.

Health and value were expressed as big opportunities for dairy. But the underlying message of food transformation was also clear in the discussion of how consumer data analytics and supply chain ‘ecosystems’ are integrated and streamlined to fit the dairy checkoff’s global strategy for the future of ‘U.S. Dairy’ — including new product innovation and the relationship DMI now has as Amazon’s dairy ‘category captain’.

Gallagher sent graphs indicating the percentage of change in fluid milk sales rising during the Coronavirus pandemic corresponds with increased sales of cereal.

“We think this is important, showing there are multiple reasons — no one reason why — during ‘panic buying’ consumers bought what they bought,” he said. “Cereal and milk have historically been tied. Cereal has been on a decline for years.”

Gallagher noted that as more people eat breakfast at home, new opportunities are presented beyond cereal and milk.

“This is an opportunity for us for innovation and marketing,” said Gallagher. “One of the reasons we lost fluid milk consumers is that their spending away from home was a big percentage on breakfast, and the white gallon is not suited to that.”

He said new breakfast ideas are coming out. For example, Kraft is getting into the breakfast game with new “breakfast mac and cheese.”

Gallagher also stressed a statistic he looks at, which is the “velocity” of money.

“This is simply the rate of spending and saving. Americans are at the lowest rate of spending since the 1950s and 60s,” he said, explaining that savings rates show a second reason for opportunity as Americans are on more of a savings trend since the pandemic.

“If we can get into the ‘right product’ and the ‘right positioning’ and the ‘right marketing’, people will want our product, and we’ve got that, but innovation needs to be done too,” said Gallagher. “As the unemployment rates ease, the money will be there for people to pay a little more (for innovative products).”

Dairy positioning for in-home meals is something the industry has not seen for decades, said Gallagher. He explained that before Covid, 10% of consumers were eating at home 90% of the time. After Covid, 50% of consumers were eating at home 90% of the time. More people eating at home — even after Covid — presents “huge new opportunities for us,” he said.

E-commerce was highlighted as one of those opportunities.

“Change is happening in an ‘omnichanneled’ world,” said David Mounts of Inmar Intelligence. He described media networks, digital networks for in-store, curbside, delivery and online, and how Amazon is integrating all of these as not just a retailer, but also a merchant, a media company and data company in the ‘strike zone’ of everyday business.

“We saw this opportunity a few years back and did a program on home delivery that was extremely successful,” Gallagher reported.

O’Brien noted that this gave DMI the experience to work with Amazon.

“E-commerce will change the supply chain,” she said. “As of June 14, internet purchasing surged 70%, so we are pleased we anticipated that growth, and now we see Covid has accelerated it.”

DMI has been working with Amazon for two years. Then, a year ago, Amazon named DMI as dairy “category captain.” Since then, DMI has been helping Amazon “navigate the whole dairy category with dairy 101 for their entire grocery leadership team,” O’Brien explained. “From the beginning, we were able to position ourselves as category experts and brand agnostic. We gave them a deep dive into each sector, and in the end, demonstrated the dairy category as a driver.”

As category captain, DMI will work deeper into Amazon’s e-commerce business across 31 sales regions to identify sources and tie consumer shopping experiences online through a promotion portal that puts it right at the internet point of purchase and can measure consumer response.

DMI will work with MilkPEP and other partners on this, she said.

“It was important to first prove the size and value of dairy to Amazon, where placing their investments,” said O’Brien. “Because competition is stiff in plant-based allocation, we now have been able to come back with data, with proof of what dairy can do for their business, so we think opportunities will continue.”

Mounts also highlighted e-commerce.

“This is a time for digital transformation to accelerate in the retail environment,” he said. “The entire retail industry got caught under-invested in digital readiness for what happened in this pandemic. Now massive resources across the retail industry are in catch-up mode.”

‘Real time’ consumer shopping data during the pandemic was also shared by David Mounts of InMar Analytics during the recent ‘open mic’ call. Slide from presentation

Inmar’s analytics show consumer behavior has changed to fewer trips to the store, buying more at each trip with total retail sales up 10% over year ago and some dairy categories up by more than that. Retail sales of fluid milk have settled in at 4 to 5% over year ago and butter up 46%, for example.

Total supermarket baskets are up 15% per trip, and the number of trips are down 6% right through end of July, “so this is real time data,” said Mounts.

Online shopping spiked 6 times higher than year ago in March and is up 2 to 3 times over year ago for the year to date.

Mounts said the number of people who have registered to be online grocery shoppers is increasing at rates of 100%, with the majority seeking value and savings as priorities.

“Consumers are also thinking about in-home health and wellness, ways to boost immunity and stay healthy,” said Mounts.

“Dairy is such a positive for consumers in retail. It is a core part of strong at-home food sales,” Mounts observed. “Dairy is an anchor for at-home meal planning and stock-up trips, and its always part of every shopping list.

“That’s where we think the opportunity exists — right now — as consumers shift from list-buying to ‘solutioning,’ and the occasion now is one that requires planning and thoughtfulness to have more value,” he explained.

Meanwhile, as retailers have been transitioning through their supply issues, “they are understanding new in-home categories and assortments to be more dynamic,” he said. They are being more data-driven to be more agile.”

At the same time, he said “manufacturers are focusing on their core — their most productive products — and are streamlining and trimming.”

These trends set the stage for a more centralized, streamlined and globalized dairy supply chain at a time when consumers are showing they want to be more – not less – connected to where their food comes from and to know more about the nutritional benefits.

“Consumers will deal with fewer players,” said Mounts, emphasizing the point that, “The mindset of the consumer, retailer and manufacturer must adapt to set the right priorities.”

Those priorities are being set within the tools of technology. According to Mounts, investment in technology and data tools support the strategic pillars of DMI and its partners, which Gallagher said are geared for dairy to be “viewed as an industry leader setting the gold standard on environment and animal treatment, and fitting into the efficient and healthy lifestyles of consumers.”

Searchable apps for phones, in-home voice activation systems tied to marketing outlets, namely Amazon, these tools “bring consumer preferences and marketing targets together for effective campaigns that demonstrate super strong value to consumers,” Mounts explained. “By connecting data into such platforms, the advantage for advertisers is they see it generate sales.”

But the conversations will change, and the level of personalization will increase in the food sector around the data, according to Mounts. “The digital assets are more efficient, and you talk directly to people you want to speak with and are going where the buying audience is to capture them.”

“That’s where we need to be,” said Gallagher. “This is the information the industry looks to DMI to share and will be used to create partnerships with industry.

“We won’t get the drinker or eater back if we do not do these things,” he asserts. “Farmers are great and we have a great product, but it still requires innovation. Until whole milk is recommended for kids, and even when it is, we still need innovation to get it to the kids in a style that they like.”

Mounts said innovation is a “team sport, and the key to speeding it up is to create the ecosystem, the environment, that inspires others to come in and bring solutions.”

Where dairy farmers are most familiar with the production playing field, Gallagher sees DMI as the entity that expands the dairy supply chain ecosystem to bring in other resources globally. In short, DMI has identified itself as U.S. Dairy’s supply-chain integrator and expander. Gallagher said checkoff partnerships are regional, national and international — along with the industry and National Milk Producers Federation.

“Working together as one is our hope for the future,” Gallagher insisted. “If we do not have that unity, then we are small players in a big marketplace.”

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DMI circles wagons around new ‘Net-Zero’ hire

Posted on August 7, 2020 by Agmoos

By Sherry Bunting, Farmshine, Friday, August 7, 2020

BROWNSTOWN, Pa. – After last week’s Farmshine cover story, dairy producers across the country have been reaching out to DMI board members and staff seeking answers to questions posed about the Net Zero Initiative, direction of sustainability goals, and the newly hired Executive Director of Dairy Scale for Good, Caleb Harper. He was tapped in May to lead the effort to ‘scale up’ technologies for “U.S. Dairy” to meet its commitment, despite his history of involvement in cellular agriculture and other concerns.

DMI has not yet responded to the questions posed by Farmshine. However, producers are getting some responses. During Wednesday’s “open mic” call with DMI CEO Tom Gallagher, the topic was addressed at the top of the hour to indicate a future “open mic” would be devoted to this topic.

“We’ve been getting questions,” said DMI chairwoman Marilyn Hershey as she opened the call Wednesday. She referred the 350 people on the line — including 50 board members, 80 dairy farmers, along with media and staff — to her blog post at usdairy.com.

“The Net Zero Initiative has pathways for all size farms to be able to stand behind our sustainability goals,” she said.

“Our next ‘open mic’ will focus on sustainability because there is a lot going on in that arena. There is misinformation and good information, and we want to get the details and have National Milk and Newtrient — a company of dairy co-ops and people from the Innovation Center — on where we are going and why,” said Gallagher.

“The industry is focused on being net-zero, but profitable net-zero. That is something that will take time and hard work to get to. We are focused on all size farms — not just large, medium, or small — and on all regions,” he stated. “We know each region has different challenges.

“Most of the small farms are probably net-zero already,” he said.

Gallagher explained that DMI recently added several people in different parts of the organization. “One (new person) is Caleb Harper, and we are really glad to be able to attract him,” said Gallagher.

“We know Caleb is completely a dairy guy. Let’s face it,” said Gallagher. “Cell ag and other competitors are getting well-funded. Caleb is a smart guy, a guy who is pro dairy. He understands the playbook of the other team, so we are miles ahead.”

In the blog post callers were asked to read for answers, Hershey writes: “Caleb Harper joined our team in May to lead Dairy Scale for Good. Caleb is a former principal research scientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and director of the Open Agriculture Initiative at the MIT Media Lab. He has a tremendous background of leading engineers, scientists and educators in the exploration and development of future food systems and technology.”

Hershey goes on to describe his responsibilities as “directing best practice and technology adoption and implementation on a handful of pilot farms. Harper will also develop third-party strategies to generate investments, partners and technologies that will keep farmers from bearing the entire commitment of this endeavor.”

Harper has already been visiting dairy farms in the Southwest and Upper Midwest after his first-ever dairy farm visit to Fair Oaks Farm.

Both in the blog post, and in other responses made in writing to producers from DMI staff, Harper is described as “coming from a family that raises horses and goats on a small ranch in Texas and crops and cows on a fifth-generation homestead in Kansas.”

What isn’t mentioned is that, according to a Sept. 2019 Chronicles of Higher Education story, Harper’s father, Steve Harper, was a grocery executive, actually Senior Vice-President of Marketing and Fresh Product Development, Procurement and Merchandising from 1993 to 2010 for the H-E-B supermarket chain in Texas and northern Mexico, among the largest supermarket chains in the U.S. in sales. He stayed on part-time through 2012 before retiring in 2015.

H-E-B was the first and longstanding partner of Mike and Sue McCloskey, when they were dairying in New Mexico and founded Select Milk Producers. They were working to get closer to the consumer, and the H-E-B alliance was instrumental, Sue explained in her presentation at the Pennsylvania Dairy Summit in February 2020, where she painted a picture of dairy’s future as seen by DMI’s Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy, and its food industry partners.

In fact, according to the Houston Chronicle, the McCloskeys worked with H-E-B, supplying their milk and in 1996 to produce Mootopia ultrafiltered milk, an H-E-B brand. This was the pre-cursor to fairlife, the ultrafiltered milk beverage line in which DMI partnered with the McCloskeys, Select, and Coca Cola to market and R&D. (On Jan. 3, 2020, the Coca-Cola Company announced it was sole owner of fairlife LLC after acquiring the remaining stake from its joint venture partner Select Milk Producers.)

Both Caleb Harper and Mike McCloskey currently serve on WWF’s “Markets Institute” Thought Leadership Group.

Hershey writes of Caleb Harper’s involvement in several non-profit organizations, including World Wildlife Fund (WWF), World Economic Forum, as an explorer for National Geographic, and at New Harvest (www.new-harvest.org), a cellular agriculture research institute, which has provided research funding to such startups as Perfect Day.

Meanwhile WWF — the DMI sustainability partner — will stop at nothing in its quest for food transformation away from animal use. WWF is currently using the Coronavirus pandemic and “threat of zoonotic diseases jumping from animals to humans” as the angle for pushing food transformation, with a “stop the next pandemic” campaign at the WWF website stating: “The conversion of land for unsustainable agricultural and livestock use drives wildlife, domestic animals, and humans in closer contact.”

Both New Harvest and WWF support and advocate for rewilding of lands as farms and ranches fold under the pressure of low prices, rapid consolidation, misinformation used to position new plant-based and cellular ag products as future of food replacements for meat, eggs and dairy, using climate change, sustainability and now pandemic fears to prepare people to accept these bio-engineered versions grown in fermentation vats and bio-reactors instead of farms and ranches.

“While (New Harvest) goes against the essence of who we are as farmers, and Caleb no longer serves on its board, his knowledge and insights in this area will be an asset,” writes Hershey. “I am very excited about Caleb’s ability to open new doors for dairy. He brings an astounding depth of relationships with other scientists, organizations and companies.”

New Harvest is more than a “cellular agriculture research institute.” It’s mission is to replace cattle and other livestock by growing portions of animals, separating protein excrement from yeast, and other ‘genetically altered and digitized” methods of displacing farmers and ranchers from the land. In 2017 and 2018, Harper was one of five board members for New Harvest. In fact, though canceled due to Covid, the New Harvest 2020 Conference was scheduled for the M.I.T. Lab in Cambridge, Mass., where Harper was a lead researcher until April 30, 2020.

In her blog post, Hershey writes that, “Earlier this year, the Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy set new environmental stewardship goals to further the progress and commitment that dairy farmers and the broader dairy community have to responsible production.”

She describes it as a “collective effort” expected to benefit all farms with a pathway for farms to voluntarily contribute. She writes that it will not be mandatory. Instead, she notes that it will provide opportunities for farms of all sizes to adopt technologies and practices and create revenue streams.

Stay tuned.

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New face, new position, ties ‘Undeniably Dairy’ to ‘milk without cows’

Posted on July 30, 2020 by Agmoos

By Sherry Bunting, Farmshine, July 31, 2020

CHICAGO, Ill. – A new face has “joined” Undeniably Dairy with direct ties to the effort to produce milk without cows.

Caleb Harper is the new hire for a new position via Dairy Checkoff. It was created within the DMI Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy’s Net-Zero project. His title as of May 1, 2020 is executive director of Dairy Scale for Good (DS4G).

On April 30, 2020, as reported last week in Farmshine, Harper left his position as the principle researcher at the M.I.T. Media Lab where he spearheaded the Open Agriculture Initiative, described as a “food computer” project. The lab came under scrutiny last fall for certain financial ties.

According to the May 13 New York Times, Harper’s OpenAg project “was quietly closed amid allegations that its results were exaggerated to sponsors and the public, the university confirmed. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology also announced that it would pay a $15,000 fine to the State Department of Environmental Protection because the project… improperly disposed chemicals into a well at a research center outside Boston where it conducted some experiments.”

For dairy farmers, that’s not even the worst of it. Harper has been a prolific writer and speaker touting cellular agriculture – milk, eggs and meat without animals.

According to the most recent IRS 990s (2017 and 2018) for New Harvest Inc., Harper was a New Harvest board member during those two years.

This new DMI executive will head the work of scaling up the ‘climate-friendly’ practices dairy farms will implement in the future, when his past is rooted in cell ag to replace them. His direct association with New Harvest as part of their 5-member board is troubling.

New Harvest describes its purpose as “support for education and scientific research that advance technologies that make animal products (meat, eggs, milk, etc.) without the animals in order to reduce animal suffering, improve human health, and protect the environment.”

We reached out to DMI through Scott Wallin, vice president of industry media relations and issues management. We also sent questions to the DMI chair.

— We asked whether this newly created position filled by Harper had been advertised and if other candidates had been interviewed.

— We asked what are the responsibilities and qualifications for this “executive director of Dairy Scale for Good (DS4G)”? (For his part, Mr. Harper has the following description listed on his resume at Linked-In, that he is “part of an initiative working to help U.S. Dairies pilot and integrate new technology and management practices to reach net zero emissions or better while increasing farmer livelihood.”)

— We asked whether Harper had prior connections to DMI or any member of staff or leadership before getting this position.

— We asked for confirmation of how Mr. Harper’s salary is paid, through what sub-agency of DMI or partnership?

— We asked to know his starting salary, given his listing with a speakers agency showing he charges between $30,000 to $50,000 as a speaker – a speaker who frequents events side-by-side with the executive director of New Harvest, such conferences sponsored by the United Nations, World Government Summit, EAT Forum and other entities on planetary diets, “future of food” and cellular agriculture – milk without cows, eggs without hens, beef without cows.

— We also messaged Mr. Harper to ask him how a board member of New Harvest that funds research and supports technology specifically for milk without cows gets a job paid by mandatory checkoff funds from American dairy farmers who feed, care for and milk cows?

— We asked him what are his interests and qualifications in dairy?

— We asked if he was tapped for this position by someone within the DMI organization or one of DMI’s “partners” or did he simply respond to a job posting and interview for the position?

— We asked DMI how it came to be that a person who is an obvious supporter of technology to create milk without cows became the person hired by dairy checkoff — with dairy farmer money — to help develop, scale and implement environmental practices for real dairy farmers?

So far, the only response we have received was a brief general email from DMI’s Wallin, as follows: “Caleb Harper joined on May 1 to support U.S. dairy’s growing commitment to environmental stewardship and the development of new, scalable technologies and practices to support U.S. farmers.”

Harper, who goes by the handle @CalebGrowsFood on Twitter, has deep connections to cellular agriculture, a new sector populated with Silicon Valley “tech food” startups that the largest global dairy and meat integrators and food giants are now investing in to ramp up to scale. They use false science on human health and environment, especially climate change, as the angle to push these new product investments so they take root in retail and foodservice sectors across the nation, the world.

In fact, the continuation of status-quo low-fat and fat-free diets via the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee’s unscientific “Scientific Report,” July 15 is a key in the cell ag arsenal. A primary vegan on the saturated fats subcommittee alluded to “making way for new foods coming” that will deliver the nutrients the government-sanctioned meal patterns leave lacking.

New Harvest has funded and supported research with donations to companies making bovine DNA-altered yeast that excrete “dairy replacement” proteins that companies claim are “interchangeable” with real dairy protein in any food processing application. Companies like Perfect Day tout their B2B model of working with large dairy companies to scale, to provide replacement dairy protein that reduce the need for real dairy protein and thus reduce the need for cows and the “pressure” on the environment.

These “cell ag” companies and non-profits work together to seek from FDA the ability to label their creations as the dairy and meat they replace because they declare them to be biological replicas — achieved through gene-editing and modifying.

They seek the new “healthy” icon FDA is creating with its ongoing development of a Nutrition Innovation Strategy to meet dietary goals, such as low-fat. They say their replacements are superior because they reduce the impact of livestock on the planet and can be genetically customized to meet goals for the low-fat DGA recommendations.

Even the USDA bio-engineered (BE) labeling implemented in January is all set and ready for this, and guess what? Dairy producers helped lobby for it, thinking it applied to the crops they grow. Our industry leaders used producer reactions to non-GMO labeling to get grassroots support for label language that now does not require bio-engineered replacements to be labeled as such unless the engineered DNA is detectable within the final edible food.

A visit to the New Harvest web page at new-harvest.org will make your hair stand on end. Seeing the motto so boldly proclaiming: “Milk without cows. Eggs without Hens. Beef without Cows,” offers the realization that their goal – in concert with World Wildlife Fund (WWF), DMI’s “sustainability partner” — is the end of animal agriculture through cell agriculture.

Don’t get angry and don’t be depressed. Have hope. Be bold.

If every Farmshine reader does some of the suggestions below, maybe the Titanic can be steered away from the iceberg:

1) Send this article to your Congressional representatives with a short note stating that this is just one example of how your rights as an American dairy farmer are being violated by the 15-cent mandatory dairy checkoff. Ask for his or her help in getting you an exemption from paying the checkoff, or in allowing you to assign your checkoff “tax” to another promotion, research and education entity.

2) Call, email, or write to the cooperative director who represents you and ask what your cooperative is doing to protect its members from even more FARM requirements, considering an obvious supporter of “milk without cows” will be implementing the “Undeniably Dairy” environmental piece as executive director of DS4G.

3) Call your state or regional dairy promotion representative or CEO and ask them to keep all of your dime in regional promotion instead of sending those 2.5 to 3 extra cents to DMI’s Unified Marketing Plan. They have the nickel. That’s enough.

4) Watch for opportunities to support a dairy checkoff referendum. The law states that when 10% or more of the dairy producers and importers subject to the checkoff request a referendum, the Secretary of Agriculture must oblige.

At best, DMI did not do its homework on this, and other decisions that have influence over the future of rank-and-file dairy producers footing the bill.

At worst, DMI’s “pre-competitive” alliances with global food giants and WWF are steering efforts toward dilution in order to meet some ethereal environmental goal.

Meanwhile hard working, conscientious dairy farmers have done and are already doing more good for health, climate, water and soil than the combined efforts of billionaire Silicon Valley ‘tech-food’ startup investors, multinational food corporations, gene-altering animal replacers, plant-based imitators, high-paid future food fast-talkers, sly and cunning dietary do-gooders, cows-and-climate catastrophe exaggerators, and so-called ‘sustainability’ WWFers.

In times like these, dairy checkoff unity could mean circling the wagons to protect dairy farmers with a locked-and-loaded promotion, education and research front that keeps the cunning wolves from getting in, but instead it gives them an opening and some leverage to devour.

Business is business. But dairy farmers should not be forced to fund their own dilution and demise.

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Coca-Cola now sole owner of fairlife, beyond the headlines

Posted on January 11, 2020 by Agmoos

By Sherry Bunting, Farmshine, Friday, Jan. 10, 2020

CHICAGO, Ill. — The Coca-Cola Company announced Friday (Jan. 3) that it has acquired the remaining stake in fairlife LLC from its joint venture partner Select Milk Producers, a 99-member cooperative run and founded by Dr. Mike and Sue McCloskey. Mike McCloskey is also co-founder and chairman of the board of Fair Oaks Farms, and he was chairman of the Sustainability Initiative of DMI’s Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy in 2014, when fairlife was officially launched.

As a result of the recent transaction, Coca-Cola now owns 100% of fairlife, up from its previous 42.5% minority stake, according to company statements.

Financial terms were not disclosed.

According to a company statement, fairlife will continue to operate as a standalone business and will continue to be based in Chicago, where the brand got its start as a joint venture of Select Milk Producers and Coca-Cola, and received partnership grants for research and promotion through the Innovation Center of the checkoff-funded Dairy Management Inc. (DMI).

“We are excited for the next chapter of fairlife’s growth and innovation,” said fairlife CEO Tim Doelman in a press release, emphasizing the strength and scale of the Coca-Cola Company.

“It’s important for fairlife to continue to operate as a standalone business based in Chicago,” stated Jim Dinkins, president of Coca-Cola North America in a press release. “This will continue to give Tim and his team the space and running room they need to innovate and build the fairlife brand in a unique and fast-changing category.”

The fairlife LLC launched in 2012 to make use of a patented cold-filtration process known as ultrafiltration, which removes some natural sugars (lactose) while concentrating milk’s protein and calcium. The launch began with a high-protein milkshake called Core Power and has grown to offer a portfolio of products in what Coca-Cola calls “the fast-growing value-added dairy category in North America.”

In addition to Core Power, the line of products includes fairlife ultrafiltered milk with 50% more protein and 50% less sugar, fairlife DHA with DHA Omega-3 fatty acids, fairlife (drinkable) smart snacks, fairlife nutrition plan (shakes), and the new fairlife creamers for coffee.

Coca-Cola reports fairlife sales have grown by double-digits each year since 2014, playing a big role in what the company sees as steady growth of value-added dairy products in contrast with the traditional fluid milk category. The brand has been supported by the reach of Coca Cola’s distribution, both through the Minute Maid system and Coca-Cola bottlers across the country.

According to IRI data, fairlife’s first-year sales were $62 million, representing 0.36% of market share in 2014. According to Nielsen AMC, fairlife surpassed $500 million in retail sales last year, an 8-fold increase and representing just shy of 3% of market share.

A new fairlife milk facility is under construction in Goodyear, Arizona to expand production beyond its current plants in Waco, Texas and Coopersville, Michigan. In 2018, fairlife launched its products for sale in Canada and will begin local production and sourcing in Ontario this spring.

According to Dinkins, Coca-Cola “will continue to ensure that fairlife has the best distribution possible and will be here to provide resources and expertise in areas such as sustainability and supply chain management to make the brand stronger and better for the future.”

In the same week as the Coca-Cola announcement on acquiring whole ownership of fairlife, a joint public statement was released by fairlife and Fair Oaks Farms announcing their new and evolving four-part animal and worker care platform as their long term response to the animal abuse videos that became public last June involving one of the 12 separate dairies at Fair Oaks Farms. This was also mentioned in the ownership transaction press packet.

“To guide this journey, we’ve assembled a fairlife Animal Welfare Advisory Council to ensure we are both learning and leading for the short- and long-term,” Doelman stated in a public statement. “We’re working with our supplying farmers to outline more detailed animal welfare policies… investing with and in our farmers … And we continue to require that every farm in our supply chain is subject to regular third-party unannounced audits with clear action plans for learning and improvement after each audit.”

DMI officials have indicated funding promotion and exhibits at Fair Oaks Farms’ visitor center an hour south of Chicago in Indiana. However, DMI indicates that its financial grants to fairlife for promotion ended in 2019. To receive DMI promotion funding, companies with approved innovations must spend a comparatively larger amount of their own funds.

Available tax forms for 2017 and 2018 list DMI grants to fairlife of $8 million for promotion in each of those years, and prior support was available from affiliated research and development resources in the Chicago suburbs of Rosemont where DMI and Fonterra are both located.

Ultrafiltration is a process that can vary by dairy product application and is used around the world. A 2018 Transparency Market Research report pegged Coca-Cola among the companies it listed as “key players operating in the global ultrafiltered milk market, along with HP Hood LLC, Idaho Milk Products Inc., Fonterra Co-operative Group, Kerry Group, Tatura Milk Industries Ltd., Darigold Ingredients Company, Erie Foods International Inc., Enka Sut Company, Grassland Dairy Products and others.”

In 2017, the FDA said ultrafiltered milk could be used to make any fresh cheese product.

While fairlife milk is still considered a fresh product with a 90-day shelf-life, some products in the lineup are shelf-stable and aseptically packaged.

Dr. McCloskey confirmed in a presentation on “the road to innovation” at the 2016 Georgia Dairy Conference that fairlife ultrafiltered milk was at that time designated a Class I fluid milk product; however, some of the other beverages in the lineup are Class II.

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Politics of whole milk, part 2: Vilsack banned whole milk in schools, gets dairy checkoff’s top pay

Posted on December 17, 2019 by Agmoos

By Sherry Bunting, Farmshine, Dec. 13, 2019

The former Ag Secretary instrumental in removing whole milk from schools is now the highest-paid executive at Dairy Management Inc. (DMI) whose virtual $1 million/year in 2018 came from dairy farmers who are going bankrupt.

Farmshine Editor’s Note: Sherry Bunting has written a lengthy, well researched commentary on how the dairy economy and dairy product promotion and marketing evolved over the past decade with Tom Vilsack at the helm. Vilsack served as USDA Secretary in the Obama Administration and is the current chief of the U.S. Dairy Export Council (USDEC), an affiliate of Dairy Management, Inc. Wherever he has been since 2009, Vilsack is unquestionably one of America’s most powerful influencers when it comes to dairying. And the outcome has seldom been favorable to the nation’s milk producers. Part I of this reportappeared in the December 6th edition of Farmshine, page 20. Part II follows

In my journalistic pursuits of the past decade, two statements by checkoff-paid executives and dairy checkoff board members now reverberate in my mind:

1) On milk as a beverage: “Fluid milk is dead, we have to stop beating that horse and innovate for these new beverage markets.” – 2016 during questions after a presentation by a USDEC checkoff-paid employee at a meeting of dairy policy analysts and economists.

2) On dietary guidelines and school milk: “They are a different breed. We have our own plan. We have a friend inside the White House. We are already working with someone on this. And we finally have a drink that consumers want (fairlife).” — 2015 phone call to me from a DMI board member who also served on DFA’s board, challenging an article I had written that year. In the course of our conversation, he made this comment in response to my question to him asking why the dairy industry was being silent on the 2015 Dietary Guidelines that year, and why dairy was not joining forces with beef to push the solid science on animal fat as revealed in Nina Teicholz’s book Big Fat Surprise. I had also asked him why they weren’t supporting the beef industry’s opposition to the “sustainability” driven parts of the 2015 dietary guidelines.

In his Ag Secretary role in 2010, Vilsack was instrumental in the creation of GENYOUth through the MOU signed between USDA, National Dairy Council (Dairy Checkoff) and the NFL. (In fact, as Ag Secretary, Vilsack appointed some of the current Dairy Board members who then hired him at the end of the Obama administration as a DMI executive vice president and CEO of USDEC.)

USDA Photo from Feb. 4, 2011 where then Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack spoke to young people at the Fuel Up to Play 60 (FUTP60) event held at the Sheraton Hotel in Dallas, Texas before the 2011 Super Bowl, the same day that the MOU was signed between NFL, USDA, Dairy Checkoff and GENYOUth to focus on ending childhood obesity with fat-free / low-fat foods and beverages and 60 minutes of daily exercise. And so, a decade later… here we are so much farther down this wrong road.

Today, GENYOUth is the bus on which more companies each year are hitching a ride into the schools — paid for primarily by dairy farmers in effect funding their own demise. Meanwhile, dairy farmers are the only ones not free to fully promote their best product, being relegated and regulated to government speech on fat-free / low-fat.

When Vilsack was presented the Vanguard Award during the 2017 GENYOUth Gala aboard the U.S.S. Intrepid in New York City Harbor, former President Bill Clinton spoke his accolades, and congratulated him on being the one to overcome the hurdle of getting beverage calories included in the school meal calculations. It is the very thing the current Senate Bill seeking to allow whole milk in schools would reverse.

Bill Clinton, a vegan, went on in his 2017 GENYOUth Gala speech to emphasize how beverages were a “huge” problem in the obesity epidemic, that we don’t think about how many calories kids consume in a drink, and that regulating school beverages was a big step forward on that front.

He was talking about whole milk. Whole milk is named, specifically, on the list of beverages prohibited from sale on school grounds during school hours.

And yet plenty of PepsiCo beverages — made specially to meet the 60-calorie threshold with a combination of high fructose corn syrup and sucralose, including Gatorade and Mountain Dew Kickstart — are welcomed on those school lunch “smart snacks” acceptable beverage lists.

Vilsack started with DMI six days after the Obama Administration ended in January 2017. But 2018 was his first full year as a DMI executive, and he has been busy earning his highest-paid status.

In May, Vilsack wrote about how the U.S. dairy industry would meet its new goals to export 20% of production, and he praised the record level of exports in 2018 as “a banner year for exporters.” (We all know 2018 was anything BUT banner for dairy farmers paying his salary. In fact, export volumes were higher in 2018 than in 2017 and 2019 while prices paid to farmers were lower in 2018 than in 2017 and 2019.)

In June, Vilsack testified before Congress that the government should partner with the dairy industry to pay ‘pilot farms’ to develop and test the innovations “U.S. Dairy” will need in order to reach the Net Zero emissions goal he has been instrumental in setting. In fact, Senators referred to him as ‘the president of dairy innovation.’

The ultimate vehicle for those practices after they are tested on pilot farms will be the dairy checkoff-funded and NMPF-administrated FARM program initiated through the Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy.

At that “sustainability” hearing of the Senate Ag Committee in June, Vilsack earnestly stated that the Net Zero project – and government assistance for pilot farms to find the practices to achieve it — was essential for the U.S. dairy industry to have an edge in international markets.

In November, Vilsack endorsed former vice president Joe Biden for President of the United States and praised his candidacy “for including a path to addressing climate change while at the same time helping the rural economy and creating jobs by investing in green infrastructure, renewable fuels and low-carbon manufacturing,” according to an article about the Vilsack endorsement of Biden in the Nov. 23 edition of the Des Moines Register.

In fact, the Register article stated that Vilsack “helped write Biden’s plan for rural America.” But that’s not political involvement by a checkoff executive, is it?

It is interesting that when dairy checkoff board members are asked by the farmers paying the checkoff why they can’t stand up for whole milk in schools, the response they always get is: “That’s politics, and we can’t get into that.” Of course, the rules and regs of USDA overseeing checkoff are then cited forward and backward.

But, when it comes to Vilsack’s hands in the political pie – not to mention dairy farmers’ pockets – there are no rules and it’s all good. In fact, it’s encouraged because it’s part of the plan, the future of dairy, of food.

Vilsack is, after all, the dairy checkoff’s highest-paid executive, who is most culpable in his former position as Ag Secretary for putting the last nail in the fluid milk coffin. His policies on milk in schools and the fat-free / low-fat ‘government speech’ that now defines milk promotion, have at the very least contributed to – if not accelerated — the loss of fluid milk sales in the past decade of steepest decline.

In 2015, when confronted with what investigations have revealed about the science on animal fat, especially milk fat – according to the new and previously buried research — Vilsack said the preponderance of the evidence still favored low-fat diets. And with that proclamation, he signed the 2015 Dietary Guidelines that accelerated taking dairy markets – and our nation’s children – down the wrong road.

Think about this. From 2010 to 2018, the era in which the alliance between Vilsack’s USDA and the dairy checkoff was initiated and bloomed and in which he is now the highest paid executive – DMI controlled $140 to $159 million annually in mandatory dairy farmer funds. In that pool of funds, 25% went to salaries and other costs associated with core operations and another 30% went to contractors for promotion in ways that could be considered ‘core operations.’

In 2018, as in previous years, the NFL received $5 million; Edelman, the world’s largest PR firm, received $16 million; Fairlife $8 million, Domino’s $9 million, a marketing firm for GENYOUth with ties to Edelman $4 million, McDonald’s $5 million, and Vilsack got his virtual million.

Yes, folks, hindsight is 20/20. And here we are on the eve of 2020 with former Ag Secretary Vilsack – who was paid a $999,421 salary in 2018 from mandatory dairy producer checkoff funds and is now the top-paid DMI executive — to thank for the removal of whole milk and whole dairy products from our schools. And no one cares to ask him to testify to Congress about why whole milk should be allowed in schools, but he is politically involved in so many other discussions.

The dairy industry had and has Tom Vilsack — or vice versa.

Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) was signed on Friday, Feb. 4, 2011 at Sheraton Hotel in Dallas, TX. The MOU outlines the joint commitment of the National Football League (NFL), Department of Agriculture, National Dairy Council (NDC), and Gen YOUth Foundation, to end childhood obesity. (Signing L to R President of the National Dairy Council Jean Regalie, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, and GENYOUth Foundation CEO Alexis Glick)

Today, DMI IRS 990 forms show that Dairy Checkoff pays Tom Vilsack just shy of $1 million/year as DMI’s highest paid executive; Dairy Checkoff pays the world’s largest PR firm Edelman $15 to $17 million/year as the purpose-driven brain-trust behind the GENYOUth and Innovation Center ‘sustainability’ concepts; Dairy Checkoff pays the GENYOUth CEO over $200,000/year to run the foundation; Dairy Checkoff pays the core operations of GENYOUth to the tune of $1.5 million; Dairy Checkoff has USDA attorneys at every meeting and on every conference call to approve promotion projects and messages (government speech); and Dairy Checkoff pays the NFL $5 to $7 million annually for their part in this “promotion.” Meanwhile, NFL promotes its brand through flag-football sets to FUTP60-participating schools; USDA markets and enforces dietary guidelines with the financial assistance of dairy farmers through the checkoff; and other companies participating in GENYOUth, most notably PepsiCo, are able to market their own pet projects, products, brands and influence to kids while the dairy farmers are regulated to government speech. Dairy Checkoff touts the FUTP60 breakfast carts as serving milk with every breakfast, but only fat-free and 1% are promoted and permitted, and USDA’s own studies show that this fat-free and 1% low-fat school milk is among the most frequently discarded items. The entire deal ignores the fact that the dietary guidelines have exacerbated the obesity and diabetes trend, that children are not getting the valuable nutrients from the milk they are served if they don’t like the taste of fat-free and 1% and throw it away to buy something else. And the deal further ignores studies showing that body fatness was lower and Vit. D status higher in children drinking whole milk as compared with children drinking 1% low-fat milk. What will it take to see positive change when the very government figure who was influential in getting us here is now the dairy industry leader that the industry organizations revere and who is looked at by USDA, Congress and other policymakers as speaking for dairy? If he took whole milk out of the schools, and he now ‘speaks for dairy’ and is ‘believed’ to be so concerned about kids, who else matters in the discussion? Does the government care about the over 15,000 online and 5000 by mail signatures of dairy farmers, parents, grandparents, students, teachers, coaches, school boards, town boards, county commissioners, state lawmakers, health experts, nutrition experts, athletes, nurses, doctors, and generally comcerned citizens among these signatures asking for the choice of whole milk in schools?

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The time has come to disrupt the disruptors

Posted on December 5, 2019 by Agmoos

Opinion: Dean bankruptcy offers opportunity we should earnestly pursue

By Sherry Bunting, Farmshine, Friday, Nov. 29, 2019

If ever there was a time for state governments to sit down with their dairy farmers and agriculture infrastructure for a meeting of the minds… it is now.

The future is very much at stake with Dean Foods – the nation’s largest milk bottler – in Chapter 11 bankruptcy and sale proceedings, as the industry is largely signaling the buyer should be DFA.

But not so fast.

This could be an opportunity to look at the strength of Dean’s holdings and consider a different path forward, one that returns some of the regional branding power to farmers and consumers in the regions served by Dean’s 60 milk processing plants.

Dean Foods accounts for one-third of the milk bottled in the U.S., and the roots of its holdings go back to family operations with brands that were once – and some still are – household names.

In focus groups and shopper surveys, consumers demonstrate they understand what it means to buy local. They understand that buying local – especially fresh staples like milk – means keeping their dollars working in their communities. Consumers also say they want to help local farms. And they want to see clear labeling to know where their milk comes from.

Meanwhile, surveys show the gallon and half-gallon jug are still the most popular packaging among real milk buyers. Even though the category as a whole is declining, it is still a huge category and one that has not been tended or nurtured or cared for in more than a decade. In fact, the category has seen the deck stacked against it by government rules and government speech.

Taste is also important to consumers, as is nutrition. Where fluid milk is concerned, these two areas have also been lacking because checkoff-funded promotion became government speech that pushed fat-free and low-fat milk to the point where consumers have no idea what real milk tastes like – until they switch to whole milk, and they are.

Folks, this is an opportunity to chart a new path for fresh fluid milk, to breathe some life into it. We see it in whole milk sales that are rising. Just think what could be accomplished if significant resources were devoted to truly revitalizing milk.

As the dairy industry streamlines behind innovation and checkoff-funded partnerships to disrupt the dairy case — to be more like the plant-based non-dairy disruptors — there is still a majority of consumers choosing real milk, and more of them are choosing real whole milk as whole milk today is the top seller in the category, and whole flavored milk is growing by double-digits.

Can we disrupt all the disruption with a disruptive back-to-the-future original? I think so. But now is the time to hit it hard. A few years from now will be too late.

Dean Foods has the network and the facilities and the history a savvy consortium of buyers could tap into for going back to local or regional emphasis with brands. The DairyPure national branding experiment started out strong, but in the past few years has been squeezed-out by large retailers – and notably Walmart — pushing their own store brands with loss-leading strategies while hoisting the price of Dean DairyPure much higher.

And that’s part of the problem. Stores think it’s okay to loss-lead with milk, but they are not willing to eat that loss themselves. We need them at the regional dairy future table as well.

In the bankruptcy proceedings at hand, some of Dean Foods’ unsecured bondholders are protesting a rapid sale of assets to DFA in what they say equates to a “fire sale” that doesn’t maximize value. Did Dean receive a proposal from them too before filing bankruptcy? Sources indicate bondholders offered restructuring terms before the bankruptcy filing that would have changed the current picture for Dean Foods.

Will these bondholders that are opposing sale to DFA make an offer now? Can Dean Foods’ assets be sold piece by piece to be broken up more regionally? These questions don’t have clear answers at this time.

What is clear is that payments for milk by Dean to DFA are being delayed five business days as bondholders want to be sure they are truly ‘critical vendor’ payments and that there are no shenanigans between the would-be buyer and seller.

What is also clear is that Dean and DFA have a history, and that history includes the good, the bad, and yes, the ugly.

DFA was there every step of the way as mergers and acquisitions led Dean Foods on its path to become the nation’s largest milk bottler. DFA is Dean’s largest supplier of milk, and DFA leaders are on record stating that Dean Foods is the largest buyer of DFA milk.

If DFA purchases “substantially all” of Dean’s assets, we know more rapid consolidation of the fluid milk market will occur. DFA’s leaders — as well as the leaders of all the prominent organizations in the dairy industry, including the dairy checkoff — have been clear if we’re paying attention. The future they see is in moving away from investing in fresh fluid milk and moving toward ultrafiltration and aseptic packaging and blending and innovating for beverages that can be supplied to anywhere from anywhere without transporting milk’s water-volume by tanker.

Those are more of the ingredients for a monopolization of milk that may not even be considered by the Department of Justice. Without another offer or series of regional offers on the table, DFA would stand as the only option — other than complete failure of the firm under bankruptcy. This, alone, could put the sale to DFA on the fast track as sources talk about bankruptcy clauses that allow purchases to occur — without DOJ approval — when failure is the only other option.

So while consumers are consciously being pursued by the industry and dairy checkoff to move them away from their habit of reaching for that jug of milk and toward new beverages that contain milk — or are innovated new varieties of milk, or are blended and diluted with plant-based alternatives — what happens to the dairy producers in communities whose relevance is tied closely with retaining fresh fluid milk as a nurtured market and being a producer of a ‘local’ and fresh product? These producers are also forced to pay into the dairy checkoff that is developing these alternatives, not promoting or educating about fresh whole milk, and in effect funding their own demise.

Who will tend this store, nurture these customers, satisfy consumer desires to buy-local and ‘help farmers’ and their new-found eagerness to learn more about real fresh whole milk nutrition?

If states and regions don’t work to keep fresh milk facilities in their midst, the global message on ‘sustainability’, ‘carbon footprint’, ‘flexitarian diets,’ and ‘planetary boundaries’ will overtake the public consciousness, and the choices disrupting and diluting the dairy case will overtake fresh fluid milk.

In business today, that’s all we hear: Innovate and disrupt. Maybe it’s time to disrupt the disruptors, to put together a fresh fluid milk branding and packaging campaign that makes milk new again.

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But who’s lifting? And who’s rising?

Posted on November 7, 2019 by Agmoos

The theme for the 2019 GENYOUth Gala in Manhattan Dec. 4 will be “Rise, by lifting others.” It’s clear that dairy farmers are doing GENYOUth’s heavy lifting, but for whose priorities? And who is rising? Are our schoolchildren really better off? Are our farmers?

By Sherry Bunting for Farmshine, November 1, 2019

Tom Gallagher is “setting the record straight about the value of the annual GENYOUth Gala, which has garnered millions of dollars for our youth wellness efforts without spending any checkoff dollars,” according to the Oct. 24 weekly checkoff update emailed by American Dairy Association Northeast.

Gallagher is CEO of Dairy Management Inc. (DMI) and chairman of Youth Improved Inc., doing business as GENYOUth, and he writes about the Gala set for Dec. 4 in Manhattan.

Let’s take a look.

Gallagher says the Gala “will resemble a Hollywood red carpet event” and tells us it’s understandable to see it as being “a bit on the extravagant side.” He states that the “formal-attire affair is held each year in New York City, drawing famous athletes and CEOs from some of the nation’s most recognized companies.”

Gallagher reminds us that this ‘formula’ mixes dairy farmers with corporate influencers!

“It’s a very different look and a very different strategy from the traditional efforts done to support dairy farmers’ priorities,” he writes, asking dairy farmers to “not get blinded by the glitz and glamour of the evening and instead look deeper into the strategic aspect.”

Okay, let’s look deeper.

By now, more dairy farmers are seeing the effects of the ‘strategic aspect’ in DMI’s ‘formula’ put into play over the past 10 years, beginning with deals (MOUs) struck between dairy checkoff and USDA under then Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack in 2008-10. Today, Vilsack collects $800,000 a year working for dairy checkoff.

As reported in the September 20^th edition of Farmshine, the ‘formula’ since 2008 has led to the creation of a growing number of tax-exempt organizations with aliases under the DMI umbrella, most of them through the Innovation Center, known to the IRS as Dairy Center for Strategic Innovation and Collaboration doing business as Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy.

The ‘formula’ brings certain multi-national corporations, dairy innovators and dairy production integrators into these tax-exempt organization boards that then influence how dairy farmer promotion dollars are spent via partnerships.

They’ve all got their eyes on our kids, you know. They want to shape those future consumers. But how? With ‘government speech.’

The ‘formula’ also brought in World Wildlife Fund (WWF) to be the stamp-of-approval partner for “sustainability” platforms, including the FARM program. And yet, WWF promotes vegan diets to solve climate change, and USDA, under Vilsack, was instrumental in pushing whole milk out of schools. Some partners, right?

In effect, the ‘formula’ is bringing these ‘foxes’ – a whole den to be precise – into the henhouse and using the hens’ own mandatory funds to do it.

It is disconcerting, to say the least, to hear DMI staff, who are paid with mandatory farmer-funds, speak at a September seminar in Pennsylvania stating that, “We want to move consumers away from the ‘habit’ of reaching for the jug and get them to be looking for these new and innovative products.”

They are talking about the products developed with industry partners using checkoff funds. Most believe that these products are aimed at consumers who are NOT in the habit of reaching for the milk jug, not the consumers who are!

You see, DMI is helping to shape future consumers toward the diluted diets the ‘thought leaders’ promote for our futures. These are touted by USDA through Dietary Guidelines and enforcement of ‘government speech’ in dairy promotion. Diet dilution is embraced by the Edelman company, via their sponsorship and social marketing assistance with the EAT FreSH Initiative that promotes “eating according to planetary boundaries,” meaning less dairy and animal products.

As a key link, Edelman, the purpose-driven social marketing company was instrumental in DMI’s formation of GENYOUth. (Edelman is paid $15 to $17 million a year in dairy checkoff funds as a contractor for DMI according to 2016-17 IRS 990s.)

The ‘strategic aspect’ is clear: Throw a Gala, bedazzle a few dairy producer board members to rub elbows with the elite corporate CEOs and ‘thought leaders’, and everyone goes home feeling good because they think they are working on shared ‘health’ and ‘sustainability’ goals.

Gallagher states in the checkoff update that dairy farmers have the number one health and wellness program in the schools. DMI chairwoman Marilyn Hershey has stated that “other companies would kill to have our what we have in the schools.”

One fox in the henhouse is PepsiCo. Did you know PepsiCo assisted USDA with the development of a Smart Snacks website where school foodservice directors go for lists of products and beverages that are designed to meet the USDA requirements for calories, fat, salt, etc.? Most of them courtesy of PepsiCo?

Guess what is not on the Smart Snacks list? Whole Milk.

Guess what is on the list? Mountain Dew Kickstart energy drink, Gatorade, Doritos, Breakfast bars, Breakfast cookies, and on and on – courtesy of PepsiCo.

Gallagher states that the Gala “supports a goal that is near and dear to every dairy farmer I have ever met – childhood health and wellness.”

Meanwhile, how is the health and wellness of our kids at school with these diets?

Gallagher also tells us: “Not a single farmer checkoff dollar is used to put on the event. The Gala is underwritten through third-party sponsorships, table sales and on-site auction purchases.”

Well, that’s a relief, right? But think again.

According to IRS 990 forms, the supposed partner of dairy farmers in this effort – the NFL — has donated anywhere from less than $500,000 to a little over $1 million annually to GENYOUth, but at the same time, DMI paid the NFL $5 to $7 million annually for promotion !(according to 2016-17 IRS 990s)

In addition, over 50% of GENYOUth’s total annual expenditures as an organization comes from dairy farmers via their mandatory nickel and the dime. Yes, one can say those regional funds are linked to breakfast carts in schools, but the checkoff nickel portion funds the operating budget, and more.

Meanwhile, the kids. Who has been looking at their breakfast carts lately?

The carton of milk with every breakfast is the same fat-free and 1% milk that USDA’s own studies show is often discarded. The soupy sweet hot pink yogurt doesn’t come close to the real thing; many children turn away from it. The cheese, well they’ll eat that, but it too is fat-free.

What populates the breakfast cart heavily, according to children, is Quaker (PepsiCo) oatmeal bars with chocolate, breakfast cookies, a foil wrapped item similar to a pop-tart, and if you get there early – you’ll find apples or bananas.

Meanwhile, when corporates boarding the GENYOUth schoolbus for this “access” donate to buy ‘grab n go’ breakfast cars or sponsor a table at the Gala, and earmark funds for pet programs. When SAP donates, their funds go specifically for GENYOUth’s recent addition of the AdVenture Capital program, where students can learn about marketing and being entrepreneurs and leaders.

The USDA (MyPlate) is now concerned about students getting enough sleep, so the sleep industry, like Sleep Number, board the GENYOUth schoolbus with donations, and a new sleep program is added to GENYOUth messaging.

GENYOUth has become a marketing vehicle for the ‘foxes’ — cleverly disguised as a school health and wellness program — founded and primarily funded by the ‘hens.’

In fact, dairy farmers are the only ones involved in GENYOUth that are producing a truly healthful product but are not free to truly provide or promote it to the kids.

“One of the great responsibilities we have as your dairy checkoff is to use your investment as wisely and strategically as we can,” writes Gallagher. “This is why we seek globally recognized partnerships that can extend your commitment on goals that matter to you.”

At the Dec. 4, 2019 Gala in Manhattan, the theme will be “Rise, by lifting others.” It’s clear that dairy farmers are doing GENYOUth’s heavy lifting, but for whose priorities? And who is rising? Are our schoolchildren really better off? Are our farmers?

A decade of this ‘formula’ – and the millions spent by dairy farmers annually — have resulted in ‘partners’ profiting while dairy farmer freedom and competitive position diminishes. Meanwhile, new generations of children and adults do not know what real milk and dairy products taste like, and they know absolutely zero about the nutrition in them.

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Addendum after publication:

The latest to board the GENYOUth schoolbus, complete with name and logo-swoosh for its program, is Nike with the “Nike Game Growers”. The program seeks to increase school sports participation — especially among middle-school-aged girls — by having a competition among student teams presenting their ideas for how to grow sports participation at their schools. The Womens National Basketball Association (WNBA) and National Basketball Association (NBA) are also involved in the Nike Game Growers platform. The swoosh has come under fire for its competitive dealings in high school team apparel contracts and recently by female athletes who’ve been sponsored by Nike in ‘elite’ camp teams telling of health impacts from dietary restrictions aimed at keeping them super thin.

The Dec. 4, 2019 GENYOUth Gala (Galabration) Host Committee is made up of: Tom Gallagher, DMI CEO; Alexis Glick, GENYOUth CEO; Roger Goodell, NFL Commissioner; Audrey Donahoe, National Dairy Council Chair; Richard Edelman, Edelman CEO; Carla Hall, former co-host, The Chew famed chef, author and TV personality; Howie Long, commentator, FOX Sports, NFL Hall of Fame; Jeff Miller, NFL EVP Health and Safety; Steve H. Nelson, former United Healthcare CEO; Donald “DJ” Paoni, SAP North America President; Claressa Shields, two-time Olympic Gold Medalist Boxer; DeMaurice Smith, NFL Players Association Executive Director; Selwyn Vickers, M.D., Dean, University of Alabama School of Medicine; Tom Vilsack, President and CEO U.S. Dairy Export Council and former Secretary of Agriculture; Russell Weiner, Domino’s COO and President; and Dr. David Satcher, 16th U.S. Surgeon General emeritus.

Ag Moos

Tag Archives: Dairy Management Inc

Dairy checkoff is ‘negotiating’ your future: Train wreck ahead. Stop the train. Correct the track. (DMI Net Zero – Part One)

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DMI’s DS4G sees dairy feed, cropping, cow care as ‘big hammers’ for net-zero

How data analytics, supply chain ‘ecosystems’ fit DMI’s global strategy for U.S. Dairy

DMI circles wagons around new ‘Net-Zero’ hire

New face, new position, ties ‘Undeniably Dairy’ to ‘milk without cows’

Coca-Cola now sole owner of fairlife, beyond the headlines

Politics of whole milk, part 2: Vilsack banned whole milk in schools, gets dairy checkoff’s top pay

The time has come to disrupt the disruptors

But who’s lifting? And who’s rising?

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