Tag Archives: GENYOUth

Smoke and mirrors

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Oatly CEO Toni Petersson sings ‘Wow, wow, no cow’ in the 30-second ad spot during the Super Bowl Sunday evening. It was filmed in 2014 in Sweden where the commercial is legally banned from airing. Screenshot

By Sherry Bunting, Farmshine, Feb. 12, 2021

EAST EARL, Pa. – Some are calling it the worst commercial of this year’s Super Bowl, others say it was so bad, it could be the most memorable. The 30-second ad aired over most of the nation in the second quarter of the game. It was filmed in Sweden in 2014 and ultimately banned from airing in Sweden, where the Oatly brand of fake-milk beverage originated.

The ad seen by millions during the Super Bowl depicted Oatly CEO Toni Petersson singing in the middle of a field of oats (some believe the crop looked more like soybeans but that is beside the point). 

Donning a T-shirt with the words “No artificial badness,” Petersson played an electric piano with a carton of Oatly and a poured glass of the oat beverage atop, singing: “It’s like milk, but made for humans. Wow, wow, no cow. No, no, no. Wow, wow, no cow.”

At another point in the Super Bowl, TurboTax ran its #taxfacts ad showing a man on a computer screen atop a rolling desk going from one scene and tax-related question to another. As the singing computer face atop the desk rolls through a herd of beef cows, we hear the words: “In some places they tax flatulence, like the kind that comes from cows,” (followed by the sound of a fart). Just a couple seconds of the 30-second spot completely unrelated to cows and reality subtly reinforces and normalizes the myth that cow flatulence is taxable because it’s a climate-thing, when it is actually, factually and mathematically insignificant as a climate thing.

Seriously, stop the madness. And, as always, the lack of a television presence for milk and dairy farmers leaves silence as the answer.

One thing is clear: Dairy farmers once again find themselves on the losing end of a long-term ‘partnership’ with the National Football League.

By his own admission, DMI CEO Tom Gallagher says the checkoff has been working through its partnerships over the past 12 to 13 years on the sustainability plan and Net Zero Initiative. Now the rollout dove tails in content and timing with the malarkey coming out of the World Economic Forum Great Reset and its food transformation stalwart the World Wildlife Fund (also known as Worldwide Fund for Nature, WWF).

DMI integrates the industry through its unified marketing plan and the various nonprofit organizations, alliances, committees and initiatives — beginning with the Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy, formed in 2008-09, launching the industry’s structural drivers beginning with the globalization initiative (Bain Study 2008), then social responsibility (FARM program 2015) and now ‘sustainability’ (Net Zero Initiative 2020). Graphic by Sherry Bunting, source USdairy.com

Over those past 12 to 13 years, the direction of promotion has moved off-radar through partnerships. This began with DMI’s creation of the Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy (known officially to the IRS as the Dairy Center for Strategic Innovation and Collaboration). Within the Innovation Center is the Sustainability Initiative headed by Mike McCloskey over the past 12 to 13 years and known officially as listed on IRS 990 forms as Global Dairy Platform.

Yes, it is all so very confusing. An entire new structure for the dairy industry and its farm-to-table supply chain has been created, along with sustainability parameters and promotion partnerships, within these non-profits under the DMI umbrella.

DMI’s umbrella of tax-exempt organizations where checkoff dollars flow and bring partners into the picture to “work on shared priorities.”

Cutting through to the point here is this: Dairy farmers have continually asked their dairy checkoff leaders over the past 12 to 13 years why television ads are seldom, if ever, seen; why those that are seen air at off hours; why the NFL’s reference to Play 60 never includes the “Fuel up” part. The milk is always absent from the promotion on the NFL side.

Whenever these questions are asked at meetings or on conference calls, dairy checkoff leaders say – in unison – “television ads don’t work” and “the NFL owns Play 60, but we own the Fuel Up and can use the Fuel Up to Play 60. Yes, the flagship program of GENYOUth.

Meanwhile, milk’s competitors are using television ads. All the beverage competition is using television ads. Granted, the checkoff budget is not large enough to put all of its eggs into the television ad basket, but surely a few well-placed prime time ads – like in the Super Bowl – would generate ongoing exposure. Those ads get rated, replayed and talked about for weeks.

Here’s the thing: Each year, DMI lists the NFL among its top five independent contractors on its IRS 990 form showing $4 to $6 million annually in checkoff funds is paid to NFL Properties for “promotion.”

In the recently acquired 2019 IRS 990 form, DMI listed just over $6 million to NFL Properties.

By comparison, the cost of a 30-second television spot during the prime-time Super Bowl for 2021 was $5.5 million. Perhaps the over $6 million handed over to the NFL would have been better spent buying 30 seconds of airtime to promote milk and dairy.

After all, DMI can’t even answer the question asked by farmers or media who have inquired about what the money paid to the NFL is actually for. This question was asked face-to-face last March at a Q&A meeting on a farm with DMI chair Marilyn Hershey and UDIA executive vice president Lucas Lentsch. They did not answer it. They scratched their heads and acted as though they didn’t know that kind of money was paid to the NFL. They said they would ask. This reporter has also asked the question. No answers have been forthcoming.

Here’s the other deal. It was 12 to 13 years ago that GENYOUth was created with the official name as it appears on tax forms: Youth Improved Incorporated. That saga began with a memorandum of understanding (MOU) signed by then USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack, the NFL and the National Dairy Council, along with GENYOUth CEO Alexis Glick. She was suggested for the spot by worldwide communications firm Edelman. (Edelman does the PR work for Oatly, is engaged with the NFL and also with PepsiCo. Edelman also received over $16 million for promotion from DMI in 2019 and similar amounts in each of the previous four years as DMI’s all-in-one PR firm, creator of Undeniably Dairy.)

Since that 2009 MOU signing, we have seen fancy New York City Gala events explained as a way for GENYOUth to raise funds for school breakfast carts and to give dairy farm checkoff leaders the chance to rub elbows and talk with ‘thought leaders.’ Meanwhile, GENYOUth is the vehicle to make students ‘agents of change’ for ‘planetary diets’.

We have seen PepsiCo – the NFL’s real long-term beverage partner – come on-board the GENYOUth bus, even receiving a major GENYOUth award in 2018, with just a $1 million one-off investment next to the over $4 million spent every year since inception by DMI to keep the GENYOUth vehicle running — not to mention salaries and other soft costs not parsed-out on tax forms. We have seen a proliferation of PepsiCo branded products on breakfast carts and in school cafeterias next to fat-free and low-fat milk and dairy offerings.

And at this year’s Super Bowl pre-game festivities, DMI excitedly reported that GENYOUth would have the honor of hosting the “Taste of NFL” in the virtual pandemic environment and using the event to “raise money for children to get their school meals.”

Throughout the Taste of NFL pre-game session last week, GENYOUth CEO Alexis Glick was promoting the PepsiCo-product-filled thank you boxes for donators. In one video appearance, she stated, offhand, that she’ll have to go get her milk, but never did. There was no milk in the scene, just a small plate of cheese and fruit off to the side and a large zoom lens focused on the PepsiCo Super Bowl box.

Promotion time – and money — wasted.

But checkoff leaders say it’s okay because all of this is for a good cause! The GENYOUth bus full of boarders focused on one thing, raising money for hungry children.

While it’s true that the NFL ran an ad this football season talking about partnering with America’s dairy farmers to raise money to feed hungry kids. Those commercials were only seen by this reporter during pre-game interviews, not during actual games and nothing of the sort ran on Super Bowl night. The closest thing to it was the NFL’s celebration of essential workers at the start of the game, where glimpses of farmers, truckers, and store staff stocking shelves were included among the photos and videos of medical personel.

As for NFL’s big beverage partner, PepsiCo, the CEO of its North American division, Albert Carey, was presented with the GENYOUth Vanguard award at the 2018 Gala, he stated that the company had long admired the Play 60 program of the NFL and wanted to be part of it. — Now PepsiCo has a new joint venture with Beyond Meat to produce and market ‘alternative protein’ snacks and beverages.

Yes, the cross-purposes and proprietary partnerships make the whole scene confusing.

Dairy farmers are good hearted people. Of course, they want to be part of efforts to feed hungry children and to help America’s youth be well and have access to good nutrition. But even this worthy goal has been wrestled right out of their hands by the other ‘partner’ in the three-way MOU – the USDA and its flawed Dietary Guidelines that inform regulations that smile on Mountain Dew Kickstart offerings in schools and prohibit whole milk.

You can’t make this stuff up.

Dairy transformation has been in the works for 12 to 13 years through the proprietary partnerships working ‘pre-competitively’ within the vehicles constructed with mandatory farmer funds under the DMI umbrella.

It is all smoke and mirrors. So much of what has gone on for these 12 to 13 years is just now becoming evident as the smoke clears, and producers can see they have indeed been funding their own demise.

Time to get back to the drawing board.

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‘Good for me, good for the planet?’ GENYOUth drives ‘future of food’ to make future ‘Greta Thunbergs’ of our kids

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By Sherry Bunting, Farmshine, May 29, 2020

BROWNSTOWN, Pa. — Two checkoff-funded vehicles are refining the “U.S. Dairy” machine. They are GENYOUth and the FARM program under the Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy (“U.S. Dairy” for short), with a board representing food supply chain stakeholders and NGO’s like World Wildlife Fund.

It has been 12 years since the formation of these checkoff-funded organizations and programs under the umbrella of DMI (Dairy Management Inc).

How many times have we heard that consumers are driving FARM program requirements? Are they?

How many times have we heard that today’s young people – Generation Z – are agents for change, that they are socially and environmentally attentive in their food choices, that they are concerned about the impact of agriculture on climate and the environment? Are they?

The next wave for FARM will be environmental requirements to fulfill a new “sustainability” platform from U.S. Dairy’s Sustainability Alliance.

And the next frontier for GENYOUth is to use our nation’s schoolchildren and the climate change conversation as leverage for an emerging industry vision for the “future of food.”

In fact, it looks like they want to make future ‘Greta Thunbergs’ out of our school kids. (Thunberg is the teenage vegan anti-animal climate change activist from Sweden who was recognized as person of the year.)

GENYOUth_Edelman_Survey (1)
According to a checkoff-funded survey of 13 to 18 year olds via GENYOUth and Edelman Insights, 56% of teenagers said they have heard of the idea of “sustainable foods” or never really thought about the idea of “sustainable foods” and in saying so, also checked the box that they want to know more. The “want to know more” is what GENYOUth is hanging its hat on to drive new education and influence shifts from food choices that taste good and contribute to personal health to food choices that demonstrate the ‘good for me, good for the planet’ mantra — a self-fulfilling prophecy of food and dairy system transformation DMI food partners want children to lead.  — Source GENYOUth Insights Spring 2020 

GENYOUth’s tagline is “Exercise your influence,” and in the Spring 2020 edition of GENYOUth Insights — the organization’s newsletter to schools and “partners” — the main article under the headline “Youth and the future of food” connects the dots.

GENYOUth used funding from DMI and Midwest Dairy, under the guidance of Edelman Intelligence, to do a survey of teenagers about their food choices.

EAT_FReSH (2)

There are 30 primary companies set on transforming the food system through the Food Reform for Sustainability and Health (FReSH) initiative that is now linked to the EAT Lancet ‘planetary health diets’. Many of these companies are moving into plant-based and lab-cultured alternatives for animal protein.  — Source EATforum.org

Known for its “purpose-driven marketing,” Edelman is the global communications  that receives $15 to $17 million a year in checkoff funds from DMI for contract services. Richard Edelman, himself, is a key member of the GENYOUth board of directors. Many of the global companies getting involved in the EAT Forums, such as PepsiCo and Danone, are Edelman clients. Edelman also ‘loaned’ personnel to work with the EAT foundation from Sweden that launched the now infamous EAT Lancet report, and EAT FReSH (Food Reform for Sustainability and Health) Forums last year preaching “planetary boundary diets” that represent huge reductions in consumption of meat, milk and dairy products.

The minds of children are the next frontier. In fact, this is something Edelman identified in that pivotal year of change for DMI. That year, 2008, Edelman launched its “Edelman Food and Nutrition Advisory Panel” staffed by “globally known food and nutrition experts,” who “provide strategic counsel to the firm’s food and nutrition staff in the areas of obesity, food ethics, food policy, functional foods, health claims and nutrition communications,” according to the Holmes Report.

Among those Edelman panel members were past Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee members as well as a later appointee to the 2015 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee.

Fast forward to 2020, the recent GENYOUth newsletter article states in large bold type that, “What youth know, care about and do might make or break the future for healthy, sustainable food and food systems… The future of sustainability – which includes the future of food and food systems – will benefit from youth leadership and voice.”

The GENYOUth Insights article identifies the problem as revealed by the Edelman-guided checkoff-funded survey: “Youth are twice as likely to think about the (personal) healthfulness of their food over its environmental impact,” and the GENYOUth newsletter bemoans this finding needing action because “teens aren’t thinking too much about the connection between food and the health of the planet.”

IMPORTANT_Surveys (1)

The GENYOUth / Edelman survey (left) of teens 13 to 18 shows pretty much the same trends as the International Food Information Council (IFIC) 2019 Food and Health Survey (right) of 18 to 80 year olds. Environmental impact is just not the food-purchase driver that global food companies want it to be in order to complete their transformation of global food systems. — Sources GENYOUth Insights Spring 2020 and IFIC 2019 Food and Health Survey at foodinsights.org 

Specifically, 65% of youth surveyed said they regularly think about how healthy or nutritious their food is, but only 33% regularly think about whether the food they eat has an impact on the environment.

In fact, when it came to actual food and beverage choices, a whopping 91% of teens said they think about taste, followed by cost (76%), followed by how personally healthy it is (76%). Whether or not the food is produced in an “environmentally friendly” manner was far behind at 60%. (Teens did say “package recycling” ranked high on their list of considerations.)

What’s wrong with teenagers choosing foods and beverages based on taste, cost and personal health? From this reporter’s perspective, those are logical choice factors for maturing young people. Incidentally, those are criteria that bode well for milk and dairy products.

But GENYOUth and friends want to guide teens to make food and beverage choices based on real or perceived “impact on environment.” This opens the door for partnering food companies to do “social purpose-driven marketing” and for organizations like WWF to further influence them.

This would seem to fall in line with the direction of the next round of Dietary Guidelines, which in 2010 became tied more closely to institutional feeding in schools and daycares through USDA administrative rules and the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act.

For the 2020 Guidelines, the Committee has ignored good research on saturated fat that was screened out of the process by USDA, and they released a draft report this week that further reduces the recommended level of saturated fat in the diets of children over age 2 and adults.

Back in the last cycle of Dietary Guidelines (2015), the committee attempted to use anti-cattle “sustainability” and “planetary health” as criteria in meal pattern recommendations. At the time, the “sustainability” requirement was directed toward reducing beef (cattle) consumption. The dairy industry was silent, while other animal protein sectors became vocal. One thing to remember is that whatever happens to beef will eventually happen to dairy because cattle are most definitely in the “planetary” crosshairs of anti-animal activists.

The “sustainability” language and framework were ultimately removed from the 2015-2020 Dietary Guidelines, but fat is still the tool.

Back to the Spring 2020 GENYOUth Insights article, a new tagline has been coined: “good for me, good for the planet.”

The walk down the slippery slope begins. GENYOUth and friends, including USDA, want today’s teens to place more decision-making emphasis on the impact of food on the environment. In the Insights article, GENYOUth points out to its partnering companies and schools that kids don’t care enough about the environmental impact of the food they choose to eat.

This is where  FARM requirements and checkoff promotion are headed – toward social purpose-driven marketing as defined by the various supply chain partners that have people on these checkoff-influencing boards. The plan is to indoctrinate schoolchildren on sustainable food choices, then adapt what farms have to do to meet new consumer-driven criteria.

Yes, GENYOUth spent 12 years bringing big business into the schools through its non-profit foundation status. During that time, USDA, mainly 2010-2016 under Secretary Vilsack, has tightened the way Dietary Guidelines are tied to school food, NFL has marketed football through FUTP60 (while receiving $5 to $7 million annually from DMI), the NFL’s longstanding beverage partner PepsiCo received the 2018 GENYOUth Vanguard award and has created one of the largest K-12 foodservice companies in the U.S. Meanwhile, the dairy farmers – who started it all and fund the majority of GENYOUth through DMI – are stuck promoting fat-free and 1% milk, fat free yogurt and fat free cheese.

As reported recently in Farmshine, the partnership with DMI also gave Domino’s access to a whole new $63 million a year business making Dietary-Guidelines-correct cheese pizza for schools.

Through GENYOUth, America’s young people are being “led” into their ordained role as “agents of change” to lead the “future of food.”

The GENYOUth Insights article focuses on two examples of climate activism – holding them up as examples of how young people can and should be energized.

First, they reference the recently released report “A Future for the World’s Children?” produced by the World Health Organization (WHO), UNICEF and The Lancet. Think of this as the youth-version of the now infamous 2019 EAT Lancet report where new “planetary boundary” diets, depleted of animal protein, are recommended for human and planetary “health.”

We’ll call this report “EAT Lancet Junior”, and in GENYOUth’s own description, this report “reinforces the importance of placing children at the heart of United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.”

DMI has been actively working to incorporate these U.N. SDGs into “U.S. Dairy’s” sustainability framework and Net Zero emissions benchmark. This work also began over a decade ago when the Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy was formed and GENYOUth was founded and the FARM program was under initial development.

Lead the children through confirmation bias, get them to become energized activists, respond with a “U.S. Dairy” plan that aligns with that activism, and implement it through the FARM program – further refining who can and can’t be part of “U.S. Dairy” in the future.

Microsoft PowerPoint - Mike McCloskey.pptx

Under “Non-governmental organizations”, the NGO on this flowchart for U.S. Dairy is World Wildlife Fund (WWF).  Brent Loken is WWF’s lead scientist today.  Previously, Brent worked for EAT, the science-based global platform for food system transformation. He was a lead author on the EAT-Lancet report on Food, Planet, Health and is currently working on the roadmaps for how nations will meet GHG goals through changes in food and agriculture.     — Sources farmfoundation.org and worldwildlife.org

DMI knows full well that not all farms will be able to meet the criteria that are coming. In fact, according to a news release from PDPW covering the virtual presentation by Dr. Mike McCloskey, a key member of the U.S. Dairy Sustainability Council, acknowledged this fact.

Meanwhile, GENYOUth quotes from the “EAT Lancet Junior” report, asserting that, “Sustainability is for and about the next generation… We must find better ways to amplify children’s voices and skills for the planet’s healthy future.”

In its Edelman Intelligence survey of teenagers, GENYOUth reveals what it calls the “surprising disconnects and opportunities for stakeholders throughout the food ecosystem to do more to help ensure youth can lead, act and choose wisely in today’s food environment.”

When it comes to this idea of  ‘food that is good for me, good for the planet,’ teens said they currently rely on their families for most of this information and that they trust farmers for information.

But GENYOUth would like to move schools and food companies into this knowledge building arena – using farmers to ‘tell the story’ and teaching kids how to make ‘good for me, good for the planet’ food and beverage choices.

GENYOUth makes the case in its newsletter that now is the time to move toward ‘good for me, good for the planet’ food choice training of youth, which they say “aligns with a growing interest and sense of urgency among the food industry, farmers and others about the future of food and sustainability.”

So far this plan seems like one in which dairy farmers are helping steer the conversation and future choices, right?

Until we read deeper.

“How can the food industry and farmers become helpful and effective messengers around sustainable nutrition information to support youth?” And “How can schools play a bigger role?” These are two questions GENYOUth asks in its spring newsletter.

The answers, according to GENYOUth, are to see schools and food-related sectors become supporters that engage and inform young people about what foods and beverages are ‘good for me, good for the planet.’

Bottom line? The path to the future of food is one that moves the next generation away from prioritizing personal health, cost and flavor to put more emphasis on the importance of how food impacts communities, animals and the planet. DMI executive and former Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack said as much to the Senate Ag Committee a year ago when he asked Congress to help fund the pilot programs on farms that will get dairy where they believe it needs to be.

It’s not hard to understand why DMI is so slow to want to “educate” consumers about dairy products from a nutrition or comfort-food standpoint and why it is putting its checkoff bets on “sustainability” and “animal care.” Promotion of nutrition puts all dairy farmers on a level playing field. Promotion and implementation of sustainability requirements is a method for refining the U.S. Dairy machine.

GENYOUth says it wants young people to tackle the tradeoffs between health and environment and between taste and environment. They want schools and food companies to reinforce the concept that, “We all must take part in helping to sustain a fragile planet.”

We already see this beginning in our schools. A recent Scholastic Weekly Reader made headlines on social media when fake hamburger was touted as “the meat that could save the planet.” We see it in the vested plans of multi-national companies that are moving toward these products and marketing.

But it was the next part of the GENYOUth spring newsletter that was really shocking. Being held up as the example of youth leadership was Greta Thunberg, the teenage vegan anti-animal climate activist from Sweden, the country from which the EAT Lancet report on new planetary diets originated in 2019.

Don’t forget, the EAT Forum has the backing and participation of most of the top multi-national food companies including the top dairy product companies, as well as NGOs like WWF, and the dairy checkoff’s PR firm Edelman.

According to the GENYOUth newsletter: “We all must take part in helping to sustain a fragile planet. The astonishing power of aware, engaged, passionate youth is being brought home to us daily. As a remarkable example, look no further than Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg as the face of the climate-change movement.

“Aware, informed and engaged youth can be a powerful force for the movement toward food that’s ‘good for me and good for the planet,’” the GENYOUth newsletter continues.

Yes, alongside dairy farmer mandatory checkoff funds that launched and are maintaining GENYOUth administratively are the token funds of so-called “thought leaders” — large multi-national food corporations, sleep companies (because USDA is now interested in sleep studies on kids), technology companies, advertising and marketing companies, as well as celebrities and investor philanthropists.

In the name of breakfast cart donations, they are all riding the GENYOUth school bus to make future Greta Thunbergs of our kids.

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WWF school milk waste report ignores the one small step that changes the WHOLE story!

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WholeMilkKidsBy the time these two little girls are in school, their happy smiles and enjoyment of milk will be but a memory as the low-fat and fat-free brain-washing will begin and the full-fat brain-building they get at home will come to an end. Milk will become yucky to them, and the one they get with their school lunch and/or breakfast will likely go into the trash. Such is the plight for millions of children in our schools every day over the nine years of government prohibition against whole milk. Meanwhile the weights and waste at U.S. schools are ballooning out of control. 

But never fear, the government (and its NGOs) are here! Dairy checkoff’s “sustainability” partner, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) — in cooperation with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) — estimates 45 million gallons of milk are discarded at U.S. schools annually. Here’s the unbelievable part: They recommend schools reduce the size of milk containers, use self-serve dispensers and end the practice of ‘serving’ milk with every meal. Yes, the dairy checkoff’s sustainability partner is recommending less milk as the solution to more waste.

Meanwhile, one school is offering whole milk on a trial basis and gathering data showing how this one small step is changing the whole story — for healthy kids and a healthy planet. We are protecting the identity of this school from the USDA school milk police because if “caught” for doing what’s right, they could lose eligibility for state and federal education funds that are tied to participation in USDA’s low-fat school lunch rules.

By Sherry Bunting

Dairy Checkoff’s “sustainability” partner — the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) — released a 2019 “Food Waste Warriors” student-led audit report a few weeks ago indicating that U.S. schools discard an average of 28.7 containers of milk per student per year.

This amounts to an estimated 45 million gallons of milk discarded from schools annually, the report said.

Of the totals, elementary students discarded 37.6 cartons per student per year while middle schools discarded 19.4 cartons per student per year. The difference is middle and high school students have more alternative beverage options.

A gallon of skimmed milk weighs 8.63 pounds, so 45 million gallons amounts to over 388 million pounds per year and a cumulative estimated 3.5 billion pounds of discarded school lunch skimmed milk over the past nine years since USDA removed whole and 2% milk as choices in the 100,000 schools participating in the National School Lunch Program (95% of U.S. schools).

WWF funded the study, with support from Kroger Co. Foundation and the EPA, analyzing food waste in 46 schools in nine cities across eight states.

The objectives of the WWF project were to engage students in the act of measuring waste, foster an understanding of connections between food and its environmental impacts, and “formalize how we might gather more streamlined data on cafeteria food waste,” the report explained.

In its report, WWF identifies the National School Lunch Program as “one of the most influential programs for educating youth on conservation opportunities linked to our food system.”

Waste-reducing milk strategies used, compared and suggested in the WWF report are: 1) serve smaller containers of milk, 2) educate schools to realize they are actually not required by USDA to force students to take a milk with their lunch or breakfast in the first place, and 3) invest in bulk milk dispensers so students can take only the amount of milk they will drink.

So here we go. Let the WWF / USDA / EPA / DMI ‘sustainability’ propaganda begin. The idea of milk dispensers is a good one. But, what matters more is the fat content of the milk IN the dispensers, bottles or cartons!

Of course, the report does not identify the simplest, tastiest, most nutritious and ‘sustainable’ solution: Waste could be reduced overnight if USDA would simply allow the 100,000 schools enrolled in the National School Lunch Program to put whole milk on the menu! 

That’s right folks: 95% of U.S. schools are ruled by the iron-hand of the USDA milk police.

Not only are school nurses beginning to report to Farmshine that their annual student weight averages have climbed 7 to 9% in the 9 years that whole milk has been forcibly removed from school menus, one school reports it is doing its own study of student preferences and milk waste reduction this year.

We are keeping the names of the reporting schools anonymous to protect their identities from the USDA milk police.

Since September, one anonymous school’s study shows students are choosing whole milk 3 to 1 over 1% low-fat milk at the middle school and high school where the trial is being conducted.

Imagine that! Middle and high school students CHOOSING milk, and actually drinking it!

Oh, and by the way, when whole milk is used to make chocolate milk instead of using skimmed (1% or fat free) milk, less sugar is added!!

And, by the way, the data from this particular anonymous school shows that not only are their secondary students CHOOSING whole milk 3 to 1 over skimmed, the school has reduced its milk waste by 94%… in one year!

They report that their “milk not consumed” totals now average 32 ounces per day as compared with 4 gallons, or 512 ounces, per day the previous year!

Where school lunch is concerned, USDA’s rules are neither practical, nor are they logical, nor are they healthy for our kids or our planet. At the same time, WWF’s suggestions miss the mark completely!

Join in with those farmers and consumers asking Congress and USDA to bring back the choice of whole milk in schools. Sign the petition for choice and be part of the WHOLE solution. If you haven’t signed, you have until February 15 to do so online at this link: https://www.change.org/p/bring-whole-milk-back-to-schools

Also, to get signatures in your community, download the printable version of the petition at this link: WHOLE-MILK-IN-SCHOOL_PETITION_011520_

 

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

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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.)

Fuel Up and Play 60

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.

110206_OSEC_AL_1642

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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But who’s lifting? And who’s rising?

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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 20th 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.

DMI umbrella covers seen and unseen

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New tax-exempt entities form — some with aliases — as checkoff funds flow to partnerships

By Sherry Bunting, Farmshine, Sept. 20, 2019

CHICAGO, Ill. — The Dairy Management Inc. (DMI) umbrella keeps expanding to include a growing number and assortment of tax-exempt 501c3 and 501c 6 organizations, all having addresses of record being either DMI headquarters at 10255 W. Higgins Road, Suite 900, Rosemont, Illinois, or National Milk Producers Federation (NMPF) headquarters at 2107 Wilson Blvd., Suite 600, Arlington, Virginia.

Several file their public IRS 990 forms under alias names, so these forms are a challenge to find. Some of the boards of these related organizations are not announced except on these IRS forms.

In reviewing IRS 990’s, many of these boards are comprised of the executive staff of prominent multinational dairy supply chain companies as well as executive staff and board chairs for prominent dairy cooperatives based in the U.S. and from other countries.

In addition to those IRS forms we could find for 2016-17, there are new organizations that are being formed since 2016-17, for which no IRS forms are yet publicly available.

One up-and-coming new organization is the so-called Center for Dairy Excellence, which is the product of the U.S. Dairy Export Council and the Innovation Center for U.S Dairy under their Dairy Sustainability Initiative and Dairy Sustainability Alliance.

At a recent dairy risk management seminar in Harrisburg, Pa., a panel of DMI staff mentioned the new “Center for Dairy Excellence”, which they said is unrelated to Pennsylvania’s Center for Dairy Excellence, it just happens to use the same name.

An internet search shows the information about this new center is available in the password-protected “members-only” area of USDEC’s website, but the word is that it will be a new hub for product innovation and sustainability.

One point the DMI panelists made really hit home: “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.”

Products that are rooted in what is increasingly the very hands-on work of national dairy checkoff through these proprietary partnerships that are facilitated by this growing series of related tax-exempt organizations that are then able to push decisions about how checkoff funds are used further into the proprietary pre-competitive hands of the global dairy supply chain and multinational corporations that serve on these related boards.

The companies involved benefit from DMI’s ability to use tax-exempt status to conduct new product research and market testing paid for by dairy farmers under entities such as the Dairy Research Institute — a 501c3 organization that files under the alias name of Dairy Science Institute Inc. and includes several university laboratory sites, including Cornell, where the new fake butter made with water and 10% milkfat was recently discovered and paid for by New York dairy promotion dollars (reported in Farmshine Sept. 6, 2019).

The Dairy Research Institute is referenced at the websites for National Dairy Council and the Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy, but most of the links to their work are in a password-protected “members-only” area. Attempts to sign up to view this information were denied.

Yes, dairy farmers pay for the research, the market testing, and so forth, and the companies then bring these products into the marketplace via the national dairy checkoff funding stream via the tax-exempt status of the Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy.

Having gathered as many related IRS 990 forms as we could find (due to the confusing use of alias names), there are some interesting things to learn about how the vehicle of dairy industry consolidation and trends in promotion and research have been forming since 2008 — right under our noses — and how the mandatory dairy farmer checkoff continues to fuel the global supply chain engine.

IRS 990 forms show how executive staff for large multi-national companies – some of them based in other countries – are influential in charting this course under the mantra of “pre-competitive collaboration”, which of course makes it all confidential and proprietary.

These related organization boards include leaders of companies and cooperatives based not just in the U.S. but also in New Zealand, China, Netherlands, Canada and Denmark as they acquire assets and form joint ventures in the U.S.

The 2011 implementation of the 7.5-cent import promotion checkoff that perhaps gave entities like Fonterra the entitlement to help shape this direction, leading UDIA to transfer ownership of the Real Seal to NMPF, which now charges companies a licensing fee to use the Real Seal. (More on that another day.)

While a main focus of the USDEC and U.S. Dairy efforts is to increase exports, it is interesting to note that these gains have had a reverse effect on dairy farm milk price revenue, according to a recent study by dairy economist and supply chain expert Chuck Nicholson (more on that, too, another day).

Suffice it to say for now that export volumes were higher in 2016 and 2018 compared with 2017 and 2019, while dairy farm level milk prices were lower in 2016 and 2018 compared with 2017 and 2019. In fact, former Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack called 2018 “a banner year for exporters.” For dairy farmers, 2018 was anything but banner.

Meanwhile, Tom Vilsack, president and CEO of USDEC and a primary leader on the board of U.S. Dairy, is heavily promoting two of DMI’s new internal campaigns: 1) The “Next Five Percent” campaign wants to move exports from 15% of U.S. milk production to 20% within the next two years, and 2) The Net Zero Initiative wants the entire dairy supply chain at net zero emissions by 2050.

Let’s open the DMI umbrella with a short summary on some of the DMI-funded 501c3’s and 6’s by their known names and aliases. (We published a timeline for some of the major pieces under the umbrella in Keep in mind that NMPF is intrinsically involved in at least two: USDEC and Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy. These are the two organizations spawning a growing number of new tax-exempt organizations under DMI’s umbrella.

U.S. Dairy Export Council

USDEC and NMPF share offices at 2107 Wilson Blvd., Suite 600, Arlington, Virginia, just outside of Washington D.C., according to forms filed with the IRS. According to financial audits, DMI and NMPF trade and buy services from each other, and NMPF rented offices from DMI in Arlington until 2016 when these offices were sold.

In 2017, USDEC listed NMPF as an independent contractor paid $1.85 million for “trade services”.

USDEC paid DMI $6.5 million for management services in 2017, while also listing $6.4 million in salaries and employee compensation.

USDEC’s total revenue was $24.6 mil in 2017, of which $1.43 mil came from membership dues, $5.7 mil from government grants and $17.1 mil from DMI. This means that USDEC received 71% of its funding from national mandatory dairy checkoff and 23% from government grants with just 6% of its funding coming from the membership dues paid by the corporations and cooperatives that are significantly represented on the USDEC board of 140 directors.

The chief financial officer for USDEC in 2017 was Carolyn Gibbs, who was also listed as the CFO for the Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy. Halfway through 2017, she left this position to become a principal officer of Newtrient LLC, another related organization formed under the DMI umbrella in 2017. IRS forms for this organization are not yet publicly available.

Before coming to DMI, Gibbs spent 13 years at Kraft Foods, Inc. Her consulting work today with Newtrient LLC is described as “industry outreach, strategy, Net Zero Initiative, and project continuity.”

Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy

The Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy — a 501c6 formed in 2008 — is officially known to the IRS as Dairy Center for Strategic Innovation and Collaboration doing business as Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy. The national dairy checkoff organizations increasingly refer to this organization simply as “U.S. Dairy,” and the website for some of its activities is USDairy.com.

According to DMI’s IRS 990 form, this organization is directly controlled by DMI.

The “collaboration” has a small budget of around $115,000 for each of the past three years and no paid staff. But it is the hub of new tax-exempt organizations as well as trademarked initiatives.

Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy describes its reason for tax-exempt status on the 990 forms, as follows: “…to provide a forum for the dairy industry to identify opportunities to increase dairy sales through pre-competitive collaboration. It combines the collective resources of the dairy industry to provide consumers with nutritious dairy products and foster industry innovation for healthy people, healthy products and a healthy planet.”

On its 990 forms, U.S. Dairy lists its board of directors — a who’s who of chief executive officers and board chairs for prominent dairy cooperatives as well as multinational dairy processors. The board also includes DMI CEO Tom Gallagher and of course Vilsack.

The Dairy Sustainability Alliance

A key subset of The Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy is The Dairy Sustainability Alliance, trademarked by DMI in June 2017. A search for The Dairy Sustainability Alliance at guidestar.org, a database of non-profits, brings up Global Dairy Platform Inc.

Global Dairy Platform Inc.

Global Dairy Platform is a tax-exempt organization formed and incorporated as a 501c6 in 2012 and it lists its physical address as DMI headquarters in Rosemont, Illinois.

It describes its tax-exempt justification as follows: “A pre-competitive collaboration of dairy sector organizations, the Global Dairy Platform works with its global membership, scientific and academic leaders and other industry collaborators to align and support the international dairy industry to promote sustainable dairy nutrition.”

Chaired by Rick Smith, president and CEO of Dairy Farmers of America (DFA), the Global Dairy Platform (GDP), has a board of 12 executives representing the following corporations, cooperatives and organizations: Fonterra (New Zealand), Saputo (Canada-based multinational), Leprino (multinational), Land O’Lakes, Meiji Holdings Ltd. (China), FrielandCamprino (Dutch multinational), Arla (Denmark multinational), China Mengniu Dairy Company and the International Dairy Federation.

Donald Moore was paid nearly $600,000 as GDP executive director in 2016, the most recent IRS 990 form available. Moore currently also serves as chairman of the International Agri-Food Network and the Private Sector Mechanism to the United Nations Committee on World Food Security.

DMI senior vice president Dr. Greg Miller is listed as the research lead for the GDP, and he is currently also serving on a food and sustainability committee with the UN World Health Organization. He was the highest paid DMI executive in 2017 at $1.49 mil (including benefit package and deferments).

GDP had revenue of $3.74 million from DMI in 2017 — $2.6 mil for program services and $1.12 mil in the form of grants in 2016. According to the IRS 990, $583,329 of this revenue came from the import checkoff assessment. Research projects accounted for $1.85 million of expenses.

Newtrient LLC

Until July of 2017, Carolyn Gibbs was listed as chief financial officer of USDEC and the Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy, where she assisted with the launch of Newtrient LLC, another tax-exempt 501c6 formed in 2018, according to Gibbs’ bio at newtrient.com.

Newtrient falls under the Dairy Sustainability Alliance (Global Dairy Platform), which comes under the Dairy Sustainability Initiative.

No IRS 990 forms are available yet for Newtrient LLC.

Newtrient is described at its website (newtrient.com) as “an entity focused on turning waste into renewable energy and other commercially viable products, while reducing dairy’s environmental footprint and improving economic returns for dairy farmers.”

Dairy Research Institute

The Dairy Research Institute is a name trademarked by DMI, but the IRS recognizes this 501c3 as Dairy Science Institute Inc. doing business as Dairy Research Institute with a physical address at DMI headquarters in Rosemont, Ill.

The Institute describes its tax-exempt status to the IRS as “created to strengthen the dairy industry’s access to and investment in the technical research required to drive innovation and demand for dairy products and ingredients globally. The Institute works with and through industry, academic, government and commercial partners to drive pre-competitive research in nutrition, products and sustainability on behalf of the Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy, the National Dairy Council and other partners.”

The Institute is primarily funded by DMI with reported revenue of $1 million in 2016 and $785,935 in 2017. However, from 2013 through 2017, the Institute received a total of $24.3 million from DMI, including it’s first-year startup grant of $19.16 mil. in 2013.

Its officers are listed as Dr. Gregory Miller, president, Tom Gallagher, chairman and Carolyn Gibbs, CFO through July 2017 (before heading over to Newtrient and being replaced by Quinton Bailey).

Dr. Miller is also the research lead for Global Dairy Platform and chief science officer for the National Dairy Council (NDC), a 501c3 tax-exempt organization formed in 1969 and today controlled by United Dairy Industry Association (UDIA) and managed by DMI.

GENYOUth

While the sustainability organizational rollouts have been ongoing since 2009-10 memorandums were signed between USDA and DMI, another organization was simultaneously formed while Tom Vilsack was Ag Secretary in 2010 through a three-way memorandum of understanding between National Dairy Council, USDA and the National Foodball League.

This 501c3, of course, is Youth Improved Inc. doing business as GENYOUth, describing its tax-exempt status as “activating programs that create healthy, active students and schools, empowering youth as change-agents in their local communities, engaging a network of private and public partners that share our goal to create a healthy, successful future for students, schools and communities nationwide.”

DMI is listed as GENYOUth’s controlling organization and paid one of its partners, the NFL, $5.6 million for promotion in 2017, according to IRS filings. 

At the same time, in 2017, GENYOUth’s most expensive “charitable activity” was listed as Fuel Up to Play 60, costing $5.4 million and giving considerable advertising exposure to the NFL among future fans. That year, the NFL contributed less than $1 million to GENYOUth, and that year the NFL also received $5.6 million from DMI.

Alexis Glick, a television personality until 2009, has been GENYOUth’s CEO since its inception in 2010. In both 2016 and 2017, she was paid $259,584 as “compensation for services provided under an independent contractor agreement.”

Other employee compensation totaled $517,165, including vice president Mark Block, at $221,000. Pension plans and other employee benefits totaled $110,026 and other professional fees paid to contractors totaled $2.36 million.

Since 2010, the organization has brought donors to the table including some of the multinational dairy and foodservice corporations DMI is working with in other tax-exempt product innovation and ‘sustainability’ ventures.

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Are we going to keep zigging? Or is it time to zag?

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By Sherry Bunting, Farmshine, March 8, 2019

BROWNSTOWN, Pa. — In Part 7 last week, we looked at some of the questions still unanswered by DMI regarding GENYOUth. As noted, a copy of the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) created in 2009-10 and signed in 2011 by USDA, National Dairy Council and the NFL has not been provided.

Data requested on the “before” and “after” purchases of dairy by FUTP60 schools has also not been provided.

The question about total funds provided by DMI in addition to what appears on the GENYOUth 990 form has also not been answered. However, the 2016-17 DMI audit reflects amounts that are almost double what appears on the GENYOUth 990s.

And the question about Edelman’s role in the formation of GENYOUth and any knowledge or concern DMI may have about Edelman’s role in the EAT FReSH Initiative was simply not been acknowledged, let alone answered.

This is the concern that is perhaps most vexing, and here is the what the public record tells us.

Richard Edelman sits on the board of GENYOUth and as previously mentioned, he is credited with recruiting GENYOUth CEO Alexis Glick in a marketing publication’s story about her taking this position.

The Edelman firm is listed as a corporate sponsor of GENYOUth, including the board seat held by Richard Edelman, but the firm is not listed as a donor of funds on the GENYOUth IRS 990s, except that Richard Edelman, himself, is on record donating $25,000 in both 2016 and 2017.

Edelman is widely considered the world’s largest and leading public relations and marketing firm with offices worldwide. Based in Chicago, the firm, according to the writings of Richard Edelman himself, has been involved in work for DMI (Dairy Checkoff) for 20 years.

The firm is listed among the 41 corporate sponsors (logos pictured below) of the EAT FReSH Initiative. This Initiative is an extension of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD).

And, in Edelman’s own words in a May 2018 blog post, “Edelman has partnered with FReSH to help accelerate transformational change in global food systems.”

As reported in Part 6 of this series, Danone and PepsiCo are just two companies among the 41 corporate sponsors that are Edelman clients, and both companies planned new plant-based non-dairy “look-alike” product launches to coincide with the EAT Lancet Commission and EAT FReSH launch in the first quarter of 2019.

Edelman is best known for its annual Edelman Trust Barometer shared with the world’s leading business CEOs each year at the World Economic Summit in Davos, Switzerland.

Purpose driven marketing is their thing.

DMI will not acknowledge our question about Edelman’s role in the formation of GENYOUth. Our question about the link between Edelman and the marketing of the EAT FReSH Initiative was also not acknowledged.

However, on the secret Dairy Checkoff facebook page, we have received screenshot copies of answers given to farmers who have asked the checkoff staff questions about this. In those one-to-one facebook group replies, DMI staff are stating on the one hand that “Edelman is not involved in EAT Lancet.” On the other hand, stating that, “we should be glad we have someone representing us there.”

So which is it? And who is representing whom?

What we found in the public record is that Edelman is not, technically, on record as “the” marketing firm for EAT Lancet. The situation is far more subtle, and clever, because Edelman “loaned” their Amersterdam office account director, Lara Luten, to the EAT FReSH initiative for at least one year prior to 2019’s EAT FReSH launch.

This was confirmed in Richard Edelman’s blog post at the company website in May 2018 where he did a series of questions and answers about the work Luten was doing with the EAT FReSH Initiative during her second 6-month “secondment” with EAT FReSH.

A “secondment” is defined as the detachment of a person from his or her regular organization for temporary assignment elsewhere. 

In the blog post, Richard Edelman asks the firm’s Amsterdam account director on loan to the EAT FReSH Initiative what has been most interesting in her work with FReSH.

Her answer: “The current (2018) preparations for the EAT Stockholm Food Forum and the EAT Lancet Commission Report. But also: Setting a basis for communications for the FReSH team.”

That’s pretty clear, isn’t it?

He asks her what she has learned from this partnership that can be applied to other work, and Luten replies: “Working in a pre-competitive environment on a project (EAT FReSH) that is driving impact by leading the change. I’m also gaining in-depth knowledge about the food system (its topics and stakeholders) that will definitely be useful for other projects.”

So not only was the Edelman firm involved, but their involvement is “leading the change.”

In mid-January 2019, at precisely the point in time when the EAT Lancet Commission report was released and the EAT Forum and EAT FReSH Initiatives were launched, Luten left her employment with Edelman to take the job as manager of communications for the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD).

What is the WBCSD? It is described at its website as “ a CEO-led organization of forward-thinking companies that galvanizes the global business community to create a sustainable future for business.” It is made up of the 41 corporations, including the Edelman firm, that have launched the EAT FReSH Initiative.

In her new employment as WBCSD communications manager, Luten now carries on the public relations, social strategies and marketing she began planning, organizing and laying the groundwork for during the time that she was employed by Edelman “on secondment” to this 41-corporation group now launching the EAT FReSH Initiative.

It all fits together with how Edelman does business. This is not in any way a question of ethics. Plenty of marketing agencies work for competing accounts in the world of advertising and public relations. There’s nothing new about that.

There’s also nothing new about this concept of working in “pre-competitive” environments where products and marketing are developed in a way that all corporations involved can utilize in their own new product campaigns.

This is, in fact, a signature way that DMI has also functioned over the past 10 years. In addition to GENYOUth, the Sustainability and Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy began similarly with an MOU between DMI and the USDA, and it also includes the participation of dairy processors in a pre-competitive environment to develop and initiate innovations and sustainability measures. One example to come out of that pre-competitive environment is the innovation of ultrafiltered milk known as fairlife. Another example is the F.A.R.M program.

The goal of these pre-competitive collaborations is to give all corporate participants something they can use in a way that takes away a competitive edge.

What is concerning for dairy producers — who are mandatorily funding DMI — is that this has folded dairy promotion into a broader setting of corporations working in pre-competitive environments to pass back through the supply chain requirements about how things are done on the farm.

Toward that end, Edelman has actually played an even larger role in DMI projects over the past 20 years and especially in the past two years in coming up with the design of the Undeniably Dairy campaign. Again, purpose-driven marketing is an Edelman specialty.

And it seems noble to drive marketing with a social purpose. More companies today engage in purpose-driven social marketing, aiming to win consumers by showing what they are doing to address social concerns, such as the environment. In fact, they create problems to fit the solution they want to market.

In its own way, each corporate member of pre-competitive collaborations then capitalizes by introducing products that solve a real or “created” need in this realm of social purpose.

Here’s where it gets cloudy for dairy farmers. The government mandates that dairy farmers pay 15 cents per hundredweight for education, research and promotion. DMI administrates the use of the national portion of these funds and even sets the direction for regional funds — under the ever-more-micro-managing-oversight of USDA via two key MOU’s (GENYOUth and Innovation and Sustainability Center for U.S. Dairy).

DMI’s association with Edelman over 20 years has increased its alignment with purpose-driven marketing via pre-competitive environments with food supply chain corporations. On its surface, that doesn’t sound so bad.

But here’s another way to look at this trend. As one creative strategist, Zac Martin, stated recently in his opinion piece for an ad agency publication, “purpose” was 2018’s “most dangerous word.”

Martin defines “purpose” in marketing in the context of “brands aligning with and promoting social causes, almost always seemingly out of nowhere.”

This is most definitely the road we are on. We are being told that consumers don’t want to know what you know, they want to know that you care. We are told that consumers make brand choices based on the “why” not the “what.”

Some of this comes from the annual Edelman Trust Barometer and other research where consumers are surveyed about who they trust in their buying decisions.

But what information do consumers actually use when they buy? Price, flavor, freshness, perceived nutrition. 

Are we part of the problem? Are these alignments helping or hurting the promotion of actual milk?

Think about this. EAT FReSH is just the newest and most transformational example of how a “why” – climate change and the environment – are being used to sell new food products based on their fulfillment of a created “why”.  

What could be more perfect than to use unsubstantiated “science” to make untrue claims about certain food and agriculture impacts and then use that as a selling point for a whole new product answering the “why” that has first been created?

The EAT Foundation even has the new “planetary” diet patterns outlined (1 cup of dairy equivalent a day, a little over 1 ounce of meat/poultry/fish a day, and only 3 ounces of red meat per week, and 1 ½ eggs per week for examples). Within that context, the participating corporations are now coming out — simultaneously — with a whole bevy of new beverages, snacks and staples that do not contain any animal protein. Protein is played down and favors plant protein (incomplete proteins) and refined sugar or high fructose corn syrup is just fine.

They’ve created the “why” (planetary boundaries that they have set) and now they can sell consumers the products (fake meat and fake dairy) that fulfill that social planetary purpose that they themselves have convinced us we need!

Looking at this ‘social purpose’ trend in marketing, Zac Martin states the following: “The fad (of purpose-driven marketing) seems to driven by the likes of Simon Sinek, who notoriously said: ‘People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.’ But Simon is wrong. It’s a claim made without substantiation.”

In fact, Martin observes that purpose-driven marketing to is made up of “feel good” stuff that promotes and aligns with social causes while doing little as a sound marketing strategy.

Undeniably Dairy feels good. Telling our “why” feels good. Do consumers need to understand more about what happens on a dairy farm, why we do what we do? Of course! But this does not substitute for sound marketing of the dairy farmers’ product: Milk.

Martin says this trend amounts to “brand noise” that is “a sign of desperation”.

He defines purpose-driven social marketing as “fabricating an experiment, presenting pseudoscience disguised as research,” and all the while appearing “authentic.” (Think EAT FReSH).

He makes the point that when everyone is zigging, maybe it’s time to zag. I could not have said it better myself.

This series of articles is not meant to question the good intent of good people doing what they believe is good for their industry. Rather, the point is to show the direction dairy promotion dollars have taken since 2009 and some of the guiding principles that are not working.

Going back to part one, the graph showing fluid milk consumption trends could not be more clear. What we are doing is not working — unless the objective is to sell less fresh fluid milk, especially whole milk, that returns the highest value to farmers and keeps dairy farms relevant in communities, especially in the eastern states, while selling more global dairy commodities, at cheaper prices, fueling rapid expansion of more consolidated and integrated dairy structures in the western states.

Dairy Checkoff has been aligning more closely to USDA/HHS Dietary Guidelines when nothing in the Congressional Act establishing the Checkoff states that it must. Dairy Checkoff has been aligning in pre-competitive environments with corporations that turn around and push us right out of the dairy case with non-dairy alternatives that fill a social purpose of their own creation.

Dairy Checkoff has partnered with fast food chains that help sell more cheese, and yet one pre-emptive cheese company is a primary beneficiary, and rapid milk production expansion in certain states follows with that.

Dairy Checkoff has bought-in to the idea that rapid expansion of exports is a primary mission, when that actually lowers the farm-level milk price because the focus of those sales is the lower-value commodity dairy.

Meanwhile, the marketing largely ignores the best selling point we have: Nutrition and Flavor in the domestic market.

Now the pressure is on for Dairy Checkoff promotion to draw more farms into “telling our story.” As noble and wonderful as this may be, what’s the 15 cents doing to actually sell milk, to win back the milk market we’ve been losing in the process?

We have a simple product. It doesn’t have a list of additives to make it look, feel and sort of taste like milk, it IS milk.

We have a nutritious product. Nothing else on the market comes close.

We have a delicious product. But we have to market the tasteless version and train our children to dislike milk by doing so… because somehow we have ended up in a place where the government’s dietary police are in charge, and we either must obey, or we just think we must.

Telling consumers our ‘why’ can be a good thing, but with 15 cents per hundredweight forked over by farmers by government mandate, the question remains, what is being done to truly sell the “what” — the actual milk that comes out of the cow because of all the good things farmers do. 

Consumers don’t know squat about milk. That’s being proven over and over again, despite over $300 million a year in mandatory promotion funds deducted from farmer milk checks for promotion.

We’ve been zigging with the ziggers long enough.

Maybe it’s time to zag.

(The graph below shows us what has happened to per capita real fluid milk consumption since 2010 while we increased the amount of zigging, suggesting it is time to zag.)


This graph illustrates what has happened to fluid milk consumption and the steep drop-off since 2010 while the dairy industry has increased the amount of zigging with the ziggers. It may be time to zag, especially when we see that consumers — where given a choice — are CHOOSING whole milk more frequently since 2014 even though the checkoff message is still fat-free / low-fat.

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The need for more digging is even more obvious

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Delays, diversions and disregard for specific questions keep the investigation rolling.

By Sherry Bunting, Farmshine, March 1, 2019

BROWNSTOWN, Pa.– The public record is clear on Dairy Checkoff alliances of the past decade through GENYOUth, and the financial side of the picture is coming into even sharper focus. 

Meanwhile, important questions were only partially answered last week while other questions were outright ignored.

This is especially true about the questions concerning the firm doing public relations and marketing for DMI over the past 20 years. 

Instead of answering those questions, we saw diversions. We saw DMI chairperson Marilyn Hershey, in her letter on page 17 of Farmshine last week (and at the end of the article at this link, here), give Dairy Checkoff the credit for changing the conversation on milk fat! Hard to believe!

While it is true that Dairy Checkoff has moved a bit in that direction since 2014, the change in the conversation can be attributed to independent science writer Nina Teicholz and her 10 years of exhaustive investigation that led to her book The Big Fat Surprise, which led to the interest of Time magazine on this topic.

As for our unanswered questions? We are still waiting.

Last week, we referenced some of the questions that had been sent to DMI three weeks ago. One being the MOU between USDA, Dairy Checkoff and NFL.

In previous installments of this series, we had mentioned the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) signed by USDA and other government agencies, along with GENYOUth, National Dairy Council (NDC / DMI) and National Football League (NFL), and we included a photo of the original 2011 signing found on a Flickr photo stream link at a USDA blog post that year.

There had been no press release about this development at the time. But that’s water under the bridge.

After examining the public record, we reached out to DMI via chairperson Marilyn Hershey, and her letter, of course, was published on page 17 in the Feb 22 edition of Farmshine and at the end of the report at this link. Instead of answering each of our questions, she chose the option of writing a letter for publication, unedited, in Farmshine.

Most of the questions, however, remain unanswered. While there are vague glimpses here and there of something to hang a hat on, it is the outright silence on some questions that is so telling.

First and foremost, we have not received the requested full copy of the MOU. Our request to DMI was ignored. Our request to USDA has been referred to Public Affairs. And we wait.

Hershey maintained in an email response that the MOU is nonbinding and has nothing to do with how milk is promoted in school. In her letter, she said,“MilkPEP and DMI programs are limited to promoting school milk as governed by the Dietary Guidelines set by USDA.”

As mentioned last week, there is nothing in the Checkoff Order that requires this, just a progression in that direction over the past 10 years, and no sign of the MOU that was in development 10 years ago and officially signed eight years ago.

Another question we asked was: “What role did Edelman (the longtime public relations firm for DMI) play in the creation of GENYOUth as some public articles say Richard Edelman, on the GENYOUth board played a significant role?

This question was completely ignored in both the DMI letter published last week and in any other correspondence with Hershey or DMI staff. It was not even acknowledged. When pressed, it was ignored further.

We also asked: “What role does Edelman continue to play and are you at all concerned that Edelman and other aligned partners in GENYOUth are aligned with the EAT Forum, specifically the FReSH initiative which seeks to accelerate global transformation of the food system to plant-based diets for “healthy people and a healthy planet”?

This question was also completely ignored in both the DMI letter published last week and in any other correspondence with Hershey or DMI staff. It was not acknowledged.

Meanwhile, after these articles were published, the information has come under heavy criticism by DMI staff and board members in discussions with questioning farmers on the private facebook page where farmers can join to ask checkoff-related questions and DMI staff and board members engage in conversation. 

There, farmers who ask are told on the one hand that Edelman is “not involved” in the EAT Lancet Commission or EAT FReSH initiative, and on the other hand that it’s “good to have representation on the inside”. 

But again, no public statement or answers to these questions are forthcoming. This seems odd given that DMI is funded by dairy farmers through an Act of Congress and the questions are being asked by a dairy farming publication.

When asked if a particular statement made by DMI staff on the private Checkoff facebook page is considered an official public statement answering a question for which we have not yet received an answer, the staff reply by email was that these statements are only for the private facebook participants, not official public statements.

To this point, we have information from the public record,  questions for which we have received indirect answers, at best. Many questions that have been completely ignored. And we have a letter of response that contains plenty of diversions.

I find it puzzling that Hershey attempts to position DMI in the letter as the champion of changing the conversation on milk fat, that checkoff would be credited with the Time magazine “Eat Butter” cover in 2014, when that was through the independent work of science writer Nina Teicholz! 

I find it puzzling that I was promised a long list of all the whole milk and full-fat dairy research DMI has done for years to change the conversation, but I am still waiting for that list.

These are more diversions. Look over here, not over there. 

We’ll look at some of the other unanswered questions next week and see if we can press for more information about the Edelman PR firm regarding the EAT FReSH initiative.

As the public record is clear on some of the Dairy Checkoff alliances of the past decade, and as the financial side of the GENYOUth connection comes into sharper focus with additional documentation that is surfacing, and as specific important questions about the Edelman firm doing public relations and marketing for DMI over the past 20 years are ignored, it’s obvious to me that the digging needs to go further. 

And it will. 

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Gov. speech rules; producers have little say

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Creation of GENYOUth in 2010 brought Dairy Checkoff and USDA into closer alignment

By Sherry Bunting, Farmshine, February 22, 2019

BROWNSTOWN, Pa. — Examining the public record over the past six weeks, we find no specific language in the Dairy Research and Promotion Order requiring commodity checkoff organizations to promote USDA Dietary Guidelines. Legal and other challenges may have fostered this association as the federal government’s defense of mandatory checkoff programs in the 2006 time frame offered protection as “government speech.”

A slippery slope, but the shoe fit as Congress authorized these programs in 1983, and USDA oversees them, appoints the boards that manage them and enforces the assessments paid by producers to fund them.

With the government declaring checkoff advertising to be “government speech” as a defense to challenges, producers cannot claim they are forced to support private or commercial speech with which they disagree. Instead, they are said to be supporting “government speech,” which is protected from such challenges, according to a scholarly articles published by Parke Wilde, a Cornell-educated professor of nutrition science and policy at the Friedman School at Tufts University. 

Wilde is the author of several editions of “Food Policy in the United States.” His 2010-12 article, entitled Federal Communication about Obesity in the Dietary Guidelines and Checkoff Programs explored this relationship, with special focus on dairy and meat checkoff programs. In fact, he wrote in 2018 about diet as a means of reducing greenhouse gas emissions late in 2018 previewing the EAT Lancet Commission’s report released officially in January 2019.

While Congress has never acted to require checkoff promotion within the boundaries of USDA Dietary Guidelines, the path to align the two was chosen by dairy checkoff in 2010 to protect it from external and internal challenges.

Dairy collects, by far, the largest pot of money among all checkoffs – approximately $350 million annually. Much of this money over the past 10 years has been spent through various partnerships in pre-competitive environments to potentially drive category demand, particularly for cheese.

The creation of GENYOUth in 2010 brought Dairy Checkoff and USDA into closer alignment. 

Unanswered questions remain. On February 11, specific questions and document requests were sent by email to Marilyn Hershey. A Chester County, Pennsylvania dairy producer with her husband Duane, she has served on the DMI board for almost seven years and has been chairperson for almost two years.

We asked specific questions about GENYOUth and Fuel Up to Play 60 (FUTP60) and other aspects of DMI alliances, including a request for information about the role of Edelman in the founding of GENYOUth.  As mentioned last week, Edelman is the world’s largest marketing, communications and public relations (PR) firm, and they have done social marketing and communication strategies for DMI for 20 years, including the 2017 creation of the Undeniably Dairy social ‘trust’ campaign.

We also asked if DMI had knowledge or concern about Edelman’s simultaneous involvement as social marketing and communications strategist for the EAT Lancet Commission, EAT Forum, and in particular the EAT FReSH Initiative — funded by 41 corporations, many of them Edelman clients.

We asked what specific entities received the more than $2 million paid annually in 2014-17 for “professional services” from the GENYOUth fund, which is by DMI’s own 2016-17 audit, described as being primarily funded by DMI “as the primary source of unrestricted funds for administration and operations” to the tune of more than $2.5 million annually.

We asked why the audit shows those numbers funding GENYOUth, which are much larger amounts than the $1.5 million listed annually as DMI contributions on the GENYOUth 990 forms filed with the IRS.

We asked for a full copy of the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) signed by National Dairy Council, USDA and the NFL in 2011 after the agreement for GENYOUth was solidified in 2010.

We asked for specific dairy sales tracking data from FUTP60 schools before and after receiving a grant for implementation, since we have learned from current and former board members and staff of DMI that this information is available and in fact part of the grant process.

We asked for comments about the benefits of GENYOUth programs to dairy farmers, such as what has been mentioned in the articles already in terms of breakfast carts containing dairy offerings, asking for specific information about recorded dairy sales via the breakfast carts.

And we asked for comments about the GENYOUth alliances being formed, and how they are beneficial for the dairy farmers funding the checkoff, which remains the foundation’s primary sponsor for operations – given the example of PepsiCo’s specific goals to be a leader in plant-based diet transformation through the incubator and ‘oat milk’ the company CEO touted when receiving the Vanguard Award at the 2018 GENYOUth Gala.

These questions were presented, and two options were offered — answering the questions point-by-point or providing a letter of response.

Marilyn Hershey chose the latter, providing Farmshine with a letter of response on Feb. 18, which was published on page 17 of the Feb. 22 edition (see it included at the end of this report).

As an editor’s note, the DMI letter of response by Hershey highlights the June 23, 2014 Time Magazine “Eat Butter” cover story, by Brian Walsh, as a checkoff accomplishment that changed the conversation on fat. However, Walsh in fact wrote the revealing cover story one month after his May 14, 2014 review of The Big Fat Surprise, by Nina Teicholz, which made the New York Times Best Sellers List at that time.

Walsh had reviewed her book before his “Eat Butter” story, stating: “It’s nutrition dogma: saturated fat is bad for you. But a new book makes the case that our obsession with low-fat diets has made us, and he went on to tell of the “6 facts about saturated fat that will astound you” as revealed in Teicholz’s book.

In fact, the checkoff-funded full fat dairy research mentioned by Hershey in her DMI response is said to be within the past five years, which would be since the publication of Teicholz’s book, which lays out the 10 years of investigation Teicholz conducted as an independent investigative science journalist, beginning in 2004. She accepted no industry funds for this work.

Walsh in his Time cover story retraced the steps of Teicholz’s book, leading with: “The taste of my childhood was the taste of skim milk. We spread bright yellow margarine on dinner rolls, ate low-fat microwave oatmeal flavored with apples and cinnamon, put nonfat ranch on our salads. We were only doing what we were told” (And what we are still told).

He then retraced the history Teicholz laid out in her book, beginning at the point in the book where a Senate committee, led by George McGovern in 1977, codified the Dietary Guidelines by 1980.

And, like today with the EAT Lancet Forum unfolding before our eyes, the food industry jumped in step – overnight — filling shelves with lowfat offerings and effectively replacing fat with sugar and carbs.

“… beef disappeared from the dinner plate, eggs were replaced … and whole milk almost wholly vanished,” Walsh wrote in the 2014 Time article patterned from the work of Teicholz he had reviewed a month earlier. “We had embarked on a vast nutrition experiment… Nearly four decades later, the results are in: The experiment was a failure.”

We will leave it to readers to determine whether the letter of response (below the chart) answers these questions.

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DMI chair Marilyn Hershey responds

Marilyn Hershey

I am thankful that Farmshine gave me the opportunity to comment on the series of recent articles that have been published about the work of the checkoff.

Let me introduce myself, I’m Marilyn Hershey, a fourth-generation dairy farmer from Pennsylvania and have been Chairman of Dairy Management Inc., for a little more than a year.

As a dairy farmer, like all of you, I’m experiencing the same economic difficulties and challenges. I invest in the checkoff just like every dairy farmer in the U.S. does. And just like everyone else I expect a solid return on my investment. Like you, I too want to ensure that my checkoff investment is used effectively to increase sales and trust. So does every member of both the DMI Board and the State and Regional Promotion Boards.

My fellow board members and I take great care in knowing and watching how every penny is spent by the checkoff to improve sales and trust on behalf of all dairy farmers. And we take program measurement and accountability seriously.

I have recently read Farmshine articles where GENYOUth and other checkoff related matters are discussed. Many of the statements and conclusions are out of context. 

As a dairy farmer, I am extremely proud of the programming that has been put into place to help raise healthy and high-achieving youth for decades. While my aim is not to provide a counter to each point, I do want to share a few key facts about the achievements we’ve made through farmers’ investments in dairy promotion and youth wellness.    

First, the fact is, dairy processors’ milk promotion board MilkPEP and DMI programs are limited to promoting school milk as governed by the Dietary Guidelines set by USDA. But we have had a laser focus on bringing full fat milk, and its benefits, back to the diet.

As you are aware, the benefits of milk fat are finally being recognized in the public health community as essential in the diet. Why? The checkoff. The checkoff research on the value of dairy fat was an important foundation for the health professional community to rethink the role of dairy fat in the diet, ultimately leading to the Time Magazine cover headline, “Eat Butter.”

This change in thinking, plus the powerful voices of leaders like Nina Teicholz, are why full-fat dairy products such as whole milk are enjoying a resurgence with consumers. For more on farmer-funded NDC research over the last five years, people can visit  http://researchsubmission.nationaldairycouncil.org.

Given all that has been accomplished in this arena, we are hopeful that the next round of Dietary Guidelines will include whole milk. I am also hopeful that the new Dietary Guidelines Committee will include voices around the table that support and stand behind whole milk.

Second, GENYOUth, just like the Gala it hosts, brings a net return of other organizations’ resources and money well above any farmer expenditure.

Through the Fuel Up to Play 60 program, the money coming from other companies has been used to fund school breakfasts and breakfast carts, which always include milk along with rotating options like yogurt, whole grain granola bars, string cheese, oatmeal, and fruit. The resources have also helped translate Fuel Up to Play 60 into Spanish for the increasing number of Hispanic students in America’s schools.

Through our efforts, we have increased millions of school breakfast meals each year consumed by kids, all of which include servings of milk and possibly yogurt and cheese. As a farmer, I’m very proud of this achievement.

As we look at our American Dairy Association North East specifically, we served 104,226 additional breakfasts in 2018. The new dairy occasions were over and above 2017’s numbers. Dairy is optimized in the breakfasts. We calculate that three-quarters of the kids choose milk as their drink of choice in this breakfast opportunity. 

Another recent example of unlocking GENYOUth’s network in partnership with the local promotion group includes securing funds from five new benefactors leading up to Super Bowl 53 — Georgia Power, Delta, The Home Depot, Arby’s Foundation and WellCare. These companies contributed $400,000 to get 53 breakfast carts into Atlanta schools, increasing access to 5.3 million breakfasts over the course of a school year.  

Being a part of GENYOUth, gives us the ability to work with other companies and health professional organizations to extend the message of dairy’s role in the diet. It also gives us the ability to educate others on the exceptional things dairy farmers do on their farm and in their communities.

What’s more, when we need coalition partners to address things like plant-based diets, attacks on dairy farmer practices and/or on animal agriculture in general, we benefit by having partners who speak on our behalf. For example, Domino’s, who sits on the GENYOUth board and funds GENYOUth, has been a strong proponent for dairy farmers. Domino’s has donated $1 million to the future of farming through FFA.

It’s unrealistic to expect to combat animal agriculture detractors without allied partners in health and wellness, environment and agriculture across a wide range of industries. This is a fact.

Since the articles have been published, I am not going to address each point. However, I contribute posts to a checkoff blog at www.dairy.org/blog where I will include more information about GENYOUth and youth wellness programming, as well as keep you informed of other activities the checkoff is implementing locally, nationally and internationally on dairy farmers behalf. Thank you for listening.

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Animal Ag is in globalists’ crosshairs

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DMI’s longtime PR firm is link to EAT Lancet

Decade of ‘players’ and ‘playbooks’ drive youth toward global food transformation endzone

(Left) This is a screenshot of the corporate partners in the EAT FReSH Initiative as displayed at the eatforum.org website on January 15, 2019. (Right) This is a screenshot of the corporate partners of GENYOUth as displayed at genyouthnow.org on January 15, 2019

By Sherry Bunting, Farmshine, February 15, 2019

BROWNSTOWN, Pa. — Edelman, a communications marketing and public relations company, which has been called the world’s largest global public relations firm, figures prominently as a herd-dog bringing non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and corporations together in the launch of the EAT Lancet forum last month.

Edelman also figures prominently in its similar work for DMI and GENYOUth. Richard Edelman, CEO and president of the company, sits on the board ofGENYOUth. According to a 2011 MarketWatch article, Edelman was instrumental in recruiting Alexis Glick to be CEO of GENYOUth.

He and his company have had a working relationship with DMI for 20 years, according to Edelman. The company most recently crafted and launched DMI’s Undeniably Dairy campaign.

None of this is, by itself, alarming, until peeling back the layers to see that Edelman is the core asset for the EAT FReSH launch as part of its move toward working with clients to build social values into business communication goals. The company is known for its annual Edelman Trust Barometer that monitors and interprets societal shifts.

So, what is EAT Lancet and what is EAT FReSH?

Dairy producers who attended the Pennsylvania Dairy Summit recently in Lancaster may have heard Dr. Frank Mitloehner, a climate and air quality expert from the University of California, Davis, talk about climate change and how cows are the solution, not the problem. (click here to read about that)

Dr. Mitloehner talked about how he found the flaws that led to retractions in the 2012 United Nations FAO report on Livestock’s Long Shadow. His discovery led to a substantial change in the report’s original assessment that animal agriculture accounted for 18% of green house gas (GHG) emissions, when the real number “corrected by the authors” is 3.9%.

The EAT Lancet Commission’s report released in January recycles portions of the old and discredited ‘longshadow’ report — and its flawed process — with a new approach to drive global eating patterns toward vegan goals for what it deems to be the pathway to healthy people and a healthy planet.

Mitloehner was confident last week that this EAT Lancet report is full of inaccuracies where milk and meat production are concerned. He outlined them methodically.

So what’s the connection of all of this to checkoff? In a word: Edelman.

In a May 2018 blog post at the company website, CEO and president Richard Edelman wrote about the company’s involvement in the EAT Lancet Commission. He wrote about the EAT FReSH initiative initially involving 25 food and agriculture supply-chain companies, which has since grown to 41. Some of the logos on the accompanying graphic reveal further cross-over alliances with GENYOUth

PepsiCo is one example. (And PepsiCo — recently honored by GENYOUth for buying 100 school breakfast carts at a reported cost of $7000 each – has detailed on its website its health and sustainability goals to be focused on plant-based diet leadership, which they’ve pursued this year with the launch of Quaker Oat beverage, a milk alternative, and with their nutrition “greenhouse” incubator program working with startup companies on non-dairy cheese and non-dairy yogurt).

Another cross-over alliance is Corteva Agriscience / DuPont / Dow as Dupont is part of the corporate EAT FReSH alliance and Corteva now has representation on the GENYOUth board via Krysta Harden, who served as Deputy Secretary of Agriculture under Secretary Vilsack.

Back to the EAT Lancet report and the EAT FReSH Initiative (see eatforum.org), Edelman writes in May 2018 – eight months before the EAT launch: “Food Reform for Sustainability and Health (FReSH) was launched at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) and the EAT Foundation (EAT). The alliance of 41 global food and agricultural companies aims to create new pathways to reach healthy, enjoyable diets for all, produced responsibly within planetary boundaries.”

Richard Edelman continues in his blog post, stating: “Edelman has partnered with (EAT) FReSH to help accelerate transformational change in global food systems.”

These two paragraphs, alone, signal what has occurred since January 2019 in the form of internal media launches, even though the first EAT Forum in the U.S., held at the United Nations last week, had a small media presence on site to “cover” it. In fact, dairy farmers and leaders listening to Dr. Mitloehner at the Pa. Dairy Summit last week breathed a collective sigh of relief because there had been little media coverage of the EAT Forum at the UN on the day before.

Instead, the PR campaign is in full swing. Videos about what the world would be like if it all went vegan were released a few weeks prior by the internationally-renowend magazine, The Economist.

Stories picking up portions of the report signaling animal agriculture in various separate ways as threatening the planet’s ecosystem have been circulating and published in media such as The Guardian.

Democrats, led by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, launched the Green New Deal resolution for which the original “FAQ” included a statement about “eliminating farting cows” and transforming the food system.

A high-profile interview with 2020 presidential hopeful Rep. Cory Booker, a vegan, this week quoted his thoughts. Here’s a sample: “The tragic reality is this planet simply can’t sustain billions of people consuming industrially-produced animal agriculture because of environmental impact.”

These are but a few examples of the insidious PR campaign that has erupted from all angles in the span of a few weeks on the one hand while the actual media coverage of the details of the EAT Lancet Report, itself, have been ‘light.’  

Back to Edelman’s May 2018 blog, where he talks about Lara Luten, who is the account director for Edelman, Amsterdam. In that blog post prior to the EAT launch, Edelman wrote that Luten “will be helping the (EAT FReSH) partnership build communications and marketing plans in preparation for the Stockholm Food Forum and the upcoming (EAT) Lancet Commission Report.”

This EAT deal has a marketing plan underway. Meanwhile, the science behind it needs to be tried in the press with transparency on its significant shortcomings. A marketing campaign is  guiding the public discussion instead.

The EAT Lancet Report calls for drastic reductions in dairy and meat consumption, globally. It mentions a carbon tax on foods derived from cattle. It positions a more vegan diet as the only way to feed 10 billion people seeking to transform the food supply to exist “within planetary boundaries” by 2030 – all based on science that is far from being settled on a dietary or planetary level — while completely overlooking science showing cows to be the solution, not the problem.

Going back to Edelman’s May 2018 blog post again for a moment, he describes his company’s work in the EAT launch as “working in a pre-competitive environment on a project that is driving impact by leading change.”

This same sort of pre-competitive environment has been used by DMI in the formation of the Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy eight to 10 years ago, which works on new products for checkoff grant funding as well as establishing sustainability and stewardship parameters for dairy farms to follow that are then incorporated at program-and-enforcement-levels by milk buyers and cooperatives down through the supply-chain to the farms that fund the checkoff.

What’s all this got to do with GENYOUth and helping kids be healthier in school?

GENYOUth has emerged as an alliance of corporations, government, NGOs and other ‘thought leaders’ on various areas of youth as change agents.

Here, too, Edelman is the prime mover on public relations that one can argue has morphed into NGO social-engineering.

GENYOUth describes its view of youth as “change agents”. Throughout its program layers, youth are educated and ‘herded’ toward the plant-based, low-fat, global-sustainability platforms that form the foundation for the very food-system transformation that the EAT Lancet Commission advocated in its report.

The wheels for this global agenda were set in motion 30 years ago by progressively more restrictive iterations of USDA Dietary Guidelines. Over the past 10 years, the progress toward this end was hastened under the Obama/Vilsack administration, in part through an alliance with Dairy Checkoff and others to educate and feed America’s youth along the lines of these transformational food choices – in the name of fighting obesity — even as obesity and diabetes levels worsened among America’s youth.

In the name of fighting obesity and diabetes, the Clinton Foundation has also been actively involved for at least 10 years, according to former President Bill Clinton’s remarks during his YouTube-televised speech at the 2017 GENYOUth Gala, where Clinton, a vegan, presented the Vanguard Award that year to his friend, former Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack.

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