Tag Archives: Milk

Understanding the factors as action on FMMO ‘modernization’ unfolds

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Using the Northeast as an example of a multiple component pricing Federal Milk Marketing Order that still has significant Class I utilization, Dr. Chris Wolf showed how long-term trends and other factors have reduced the Class I utilization and Class I revenue from 50% in 2000 to 34% in 2021 in FMMO 1. The most dramatic part of this decline occurred after 2010 — leaving not enough money to go around with less Class I value in the pool. FMMOs were structured for Class I fluid markets not for the dairy product and export markets where growth is occurring today. Screen capture from Center for Dairy Excellence Protecting Your Profits webinar with CDE’s Zach Myers and his guest Dr. Chris Wolf, Cornell University dairy economist.

By Sherry Bunting

WASHINGTON – There are irons in two fires when it comes to federal milk pricing and dairy policy. One is to do modernization through the Federal Milk Marketing Order (FMMO) hearing petition process. The other is to make some adjustments or seek authorizing language through the dairy title of the 2023 Farm Bill.

On the farm bill front, the May 12 CBO baseline score shows this could be the first trillion-dollar farm bill. Food assistance programs, like SNAP, are eating into the capacity to do other things, say top-level staff for the Senate Ag Committee. 

For dairy and livestock, the Dairy Margin Coverage (DMC) baseline now includes $1 billion in additional outlays projected over the 10-years, while livestock disaster outlays have doubled – even without making any changes in these programs that some are suggesting.

Still, farmers and organizations that represent them are seeking some expansion for the DMC, livestock disaster, and other programs and safety nets, and some are seeking language to instruct the Secretary to do hearings on the Class I ‘mover’, or to expand the flexibility of the scope of a hearing, or to require mandatory reporting germaine to things like raising make allowances. 

The jury is out on whether a farm bill gets done by September 2023 after the May 12 baseline was announced by CBO in the current political environment, but members of the House and Senate Ag Committees and their chairpersons are gathering information in earnest toward that goal.

On the FMMO hearing front, as previously reported in Farmshine, the USDA responded April 28 to the March 30 petitions from two processor organizations by asking for more information instead of granting or denying a hearing on their make allowance update request.

The two petitions from International Dairy Foods Association (IDFA) and Wisconsin Cheese Makers Association (WCMA) both requested a hearing focused exclusively on updating the ‘make allowances’, which are processor credits that are subtracted from the wholesale end-product prices used to derive farm level milk class and component prices.

Make allowances were last updated in 2008 using 2006 plant cost data.

Four days later on May 2, the National Milk Producers Federation (NMPF) submitted its petition seeking an FMMO hearing on a range of national amendments.

NMPF is petitioning USDA for a hearing on these five items:

1.     Increase make allowances in the component price formulas to the following levels: Butter   $0.21 per pound, Nonfat dry milk $0.21 per pound, Cheese  $0.24 per pound, Dry Whey $0.23 per pound 

2.     Discontinue use of barrel cheese in the protein component price formula

3.     Return to the “higher-of” Class I mover

4.     Update the milk component factors for protein, other solids, and nonfat solids in the Class III and Class IV skim milk price formulas

5.     Update the Class I differential pricing surface throughout the U.S.

Not noted within this list is a point that NMPF’s board approved on the legislative front, and that is to seek language in the 2023 farm bill directing USDA to do periodic mandatory and audited plant cost surveys instead of voluntary surveys for future hearings on make allowances.

The American Farm Bureau Federation took a positive approach in their response letter to USDA, showing support for the fact that NMPF’s petition is comprehensive and includes areas of strong consensus among farmers such as returning the Class I mover to the ‘higher of.’

However, AFBF president Zippy Duvall also points out in the response letter that the Secretary of Agriculture already has the authority under the Agricultural Marketing Agreement Act to require processors to provide information relevant to FMMO pricing. This could include mandatory surveys of plant cost data when used to determine the processor credit, or make allowance, in the pricing formulas.

It is Farm Bureau’s position that make allowances should only be updated based on mandatory and audited plant cost surveys.

This leaves a bit of a loophole in the discussion about how to acquire the data to make current or future updates. The Secretary may have the authority to require data from plants that participate in FMMOs. However, it is unclear if the Secretary has this authority to require cost data from plants that do not participate in the FMMOs.

The end-product pricing formulas are based on wholesale prices that are collected mandatorily by USDA AMS on a weekly basis through the Livestock Mandatory Reporting Act on only those products that are used in FMMO formulas. This includes butter, nonfat dry milk, dry whey and 40-lb block and 500-lb barrel cheddar cheese.

The USDA AMS weekly National Dairy Product Sales Report surveys 168 plants for this price data. Therefore, if make allowances are updated as processor credits against those prices, then all 168 plants should have to report their costs, and only the costs that pertain to those specific products, whether or not they participate in FMMOs. In a recent voluntary cost survey, more than 70% of those plants did not report their cost data.

During a Center for Dairy Excellence Protect Your Profits zoom call recently, risk management educator Zach Myers had as his guest Cornell dairy economist Dr. Chris Wolf to talk about the FMMO reform process and background from an economist’s perspective.

Dr. Wolf gave some important and relevant background and statistics.

The FMMOs have been around for 85 years and were created because of disorderly milk marketing conditions. Their primary function is to make markets function “smoothly” with a second stated objective to provide price stability.

“If we were to re-do them today, I would say price adequacy should be addressed,” Wolf opined, noting that “we have times that the milk prices are very stable, but not very adequate.”

Other stated objectives of FMMOs are to assure adequate and wholesome supplies of fluid milk and equitable pricing to farmers.

“These things are still important today,” Wolf suggests, adding that the auditing, certification and a certain level of market information that is provided by the FMMOs benefits all participants and contributes to the public good.

He explained that FMMOs are changing.

“The primary sources of dissatisfaction with FMMOs in recent years arise because there is not enough money to go around, and some of this is related to the longer-term trends (in Class I sales),” Wolf explains.

He showed that while per capita dairy consumption has been increasing roughly three pounds per person per year, the decline in Class I fluid milk is the underlying factor.

“It really is startling how much of that decline (in Class I) in most areas really happened since 2010,” Wolf illustrated with graphs.

Not only did per-capita fluid milk sales decline more rapidly since 2010 than the already long-term decline charted since 1980, but population growth in the U.S. also stalled — so the total Class I sales have been hit with a double-whammy.

“This relates back to where the value is in the Orders, with most of the decline in the past 20 years occurring in that second half, — since 2010,” he explains.

(The Healthy Hunger Free Kids Act of 2010 was the precursor to USDA removing whole and 2% unflavored and flavored milk from schools and requiring flavored milk to be fat-free. Today, USDA has a proposed rule that could eliminate flavored milk until grade 9 as reported previously in Farmshine).

Because Class I has to participate in FMMOs, the FMMOs were “intentionally structured” in a way that the Class I revenue has always tended to be the highest class price because the FMMOs are in place to structure the fluid milk market, and so Class I accounted for at least 50% of the pool revenue – until 2010.

“We finished 2021 at 34% (down from 50%),” Wolf notes. “So there’s not enough money to go around with less (Class I) value in there.”

What changed? Wolf notes some of the long-term trends.

“First, exports are now 18% of U.S. milk solids production when it used to be that the U.S. exported about 5%… Milk beverage consumption is down while cheese, butter and yogurt are all up. We are still importing 4 to 5%, but as a large net-exporter now,” he says, “The U.S. is basing bulk commodity product prices off the world market. This introduces more outlet for milk but brings back the issues that come with international price-setting, overall,” he explains.

Another change, according to Wolf, is the level of consolidation at every level of the supply chain.

Wolf went over some of the make allowance data based on existing voluntary surveys as well as a prior California state order audited survey. He showed there is a wide range in costs between older and smaller plants vs. larger and newer plants. When determining where to set make allowances – as an ‘average’ or at a percentile of this wide range — there are regional impacts to consider, he suggests.

Wolf also took webinar attendees through the steps of a hearing that can take at least a year or more to complete and he dug into the make allowances from an economic perspective and some of the other pieces of potential reform. Over the next few weeks, we’ll continue to examine them in this series.

The Center for Dairy Excellence Protecting Your Profits webinar with Zach Myers and Dr. Chris Wolf can be heard as a podcast at https://www.centerfordairyexcellence.org/pyp/ or viewed on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEMDA4iWyNw

OPINION: Abuse of dairy is long-running orchestration of deceit

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By Sherry Bunting, Farmshine, March 3, 2023

In what appears to be scripted unison, the disappointing draft guidance on imitation milk labeling, published by the FDA on Feb. 22, is timed perfectly for Danone’s new advertising campaign to position its Silk Nextmilk as “the better milk.”

This includes putting imitation ‘Nextmilk’ mustaches on the adult daughters and sons of several “Got Milk” celebrities that donned real milk mustaches decades ago.

Never has the flagrant abuse of misleading marketing been more corrupt.

Danone officials have been quoted in news releases saying their NextMilk campaign is aimed at “inspiring a new generation of plant-based milk drinkers.”

In fact, Danone is deliberately corrupting the iconic milk mustache of the former MilkPEP ‘Got Milk’ campaign, which was originally launched by the California Milk Processor Board that started Got Milk 30 years ago.

This move by Danone’s Silk actually mocks producers of Real Milk. 

Several weeks ago, in Farmshine, I authored an article detailing Danone’s timeline on plant-based imitations for the milk, yogurt and cheese categories and the company’s stance on seeing this fake-milk area as the growth market they are investing in.

The recent FDA draft guidance on labeling of plant-based and other imitations is pathetic. FDA has caved to big global corporations seeking to exploit the nutritional benefits that are unique to real milk for their own fake-product financial gains. 

FDA even acknowledged in its draft guidance that consumers are confused about the nutritional differences and that a smaller percentage of consumers may even be confused about whether or not these products contain milk. Somehow, the FDA concluded that consumers are not being misled!

The FDA draft guidance “recommends” a “voluntary” statement about nutritional deficiencies, but this is not mandatory.

Even the voluntary statement criteria are described as being measured against USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service “substitution levels” for key nutrients, not what milk actually contains.

Furthermore, no importance is given in the FDA draft guidance to the differences between calcium additives and natural bioavailable calcium. No importance is given to milk as a COMPLETE protein with all 9 essential amino acids we must get from our foods and beverages because our bodies don’t make them.

Animal-derived protein, like in dairy and meat, contain all of these amino acids. Plant-derived proteins only contain some of these amino acids. Consumers need to know this.

There is much to say about the FDA’s track record of ignoring its own standards of identity for milk and other dairy products. The current administration shows little respect for milk’s integrity in the new draft guidance and other bureaucratic moves.

What will the dairy checkoff programs do about the manner in which Danone is stealing and perverting past real milk campaigns to dupe consumers into thinking NextMilk is real and better? What will be done about the packaging made to resemble whole milk?

We asked that question in an email to DMI’s press office and are still waiting for a response.

(UPDATE: The following response was provided to Farmshine by the DMI press office two days after this article was published: “The trademark registration for the ‘milk mustache’ expired and was not renewed by the organization which managed the campaign. And while imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, the national and local dairy checkoff teams along with MilkPEP, NMPF and IDFA remain focused on engaging consumers with the nutritional value that dairy from a cow provides. It’s important to note plant-based alternatives overall are down 2.6% year over year, according to IRI data.” )

To me, it appears the dairy checkoff organizations are unconcerned. We have researchers paid with checkoff dollars looking at ways to fractionate milk and develop new protein drinks that address other desires of consumers — practically giving in to their survey findings that consumers don’t think dairy protein has any advantage over plant protein. 

BUT IT DOES! Why are we not pushing that message? Does USDA forbid such comparisons by checkoff organizations? Or is that a convenient excuse?

Now is not the time to give up the fight. Now is not the time to say, oh well, protein is protein so let’s blend them and make new beverages or let’s focus on other ways to draw consumers. Now is not the time to be shy, but to be bold.

Now is the time to push the education of consumers and rally the troops to support real milk and dairy.

All of the checkoff emphasis on ‘sustainability’ is not going to sell milk.

All of the emphasis on Gen-Z and ‘meeting consumers where they are’ is not going to sell milk.

Gen-Z has been robbed of the opportunity to have good tasting whole milk in school where they grow up receiving two meals a day, five days a week, three-quarters of the year with the only milkfat option being fat-free and 1%. They have been sold a bill of goods by Big Food while farmers have paid billions out of their own pockets in checkoff funds over the past 12 years to ‘play nice’ with the enemy.

To be honest, soy beverage has always been an alternative for those who can’t consume milk, and it remains the most nutritious of the fakes. But the proliferation of fake imitations is now just completely out of control, and most of these beverages aren’t much more than water, flavor and additives.

Danone is using “artificial intelligence” to redesign its imitation products. This global giant takes the lazy and perverse path of stealing not only milk’s name through misleading advertising, it is using a former real milk advertising campaign to promote an imitation product. 

Danone is packaging Silk’s fake imitations in red and white cartons to resemble whole milk in the supermarket dairy case, and even adding the words ‘whole’ or ‘whole fat’ under the brand name to make consumers THINK it’s the whole milk more people are turning to. 

In 2019, Danone even trademarked the phrase and artwork for its imitation beverage: “Silk – the original nutrition powerhouse”.

Silk? Original? Nutrition Powerhouse? Give me a break!

Danone is thumbing its nose at dairy farmers and using “sustainability” as the virtue signal to get away with these perversions.

In fact, I got a text message from a farmer this week who caught the tail end of a Today Show spot on television, where they interviewed the Danone Silk models, wearing Nextmilk mustaches like their celebrity mothers or fathers did years ago in the Got Milk campaign. 

This farmer thought actor John Travolta was going to do a Got Milk mustache campaign. But no, Danone hired his daughter to do a Silk NextMilk mustache campaign. Even the Today Show headline called it a ‘new milk campaign’ and highlighted the way the FDA draft guidance makes it all possible. 

No one was there to talk about the nutritional differences or to talk about real milk. 

Americans are being misled, dairy farmers are being thrown under the bus, and children are being deprived, while government agencies facilitate, and checkoff organizations twiddle their thumbs or say their hands are tied. 

We are thankful there are champions in the United States Congress who have introduced legislation to try to turn these circumstances around. We are thankful that Pennsylvania lawmakers are working on resolutions to file with federal government agencies on these proposed rules.

We are thankful for people like dairy producer and country singer Stephanie Nash of Tennessee who was interviewed on the Fox Business channel about the FDA guidance. She put it straight: ‘Milk comes from cows, not a lab.’ 

This is going to require all of us to get involved.

Here’s what you can do:

Call your Senators and Representatives and ask them to cosponsor the Dairy Pride Act and Whole Milk for Healthy Kids Act.

Call your state lawmakers and ask them to pass resolutions in support of whole and 2% flavored and unflavored milk options in schools and then formally file those resolutions on the open USDA proposed rules docket.

Sign and promote others to sign the Whole Milk in Schools petition at https://www.change.org/p/bring-whole-milk-back-to-schools

Write a brief public comment and urge others to comment by April 10 on the USDA school nutrition proposed rule that would limit flavored milk in schools. Simply tell USDA our children need the nutrition whole milk provides, so school meals should include the options of whole and 2% unflavored and flavored milk. Comment on that docket at link https://www.regulations.gov/commenton/FNS-2022-0043-0001

Write a brief public comment and urge others to comment by April 24 to the FDA to stop allowing beverages that aren’t milk to be labeled as milk. Comment on that docket at https://www.regulations.gov/commenton/FDA-2023-D-0451-0002

And stay tuned on how to get involved as the next round of USDA Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee deliberations recently got underway. The stage is already set for more demonization of milkfat and abuse of milk’s integrity there as well.

This abuse of milk cannot stand. It’s going to be up to us — the grassroots farmers and citizens — to stand in the gap for what is right.

Are we moving toward cow islands and milk deserts?

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Opinion/Analysis

By Sherry Bunting, Farmshine (combined 2 part series Aug. 12 and 19, 2022)

In Class I utilization markets, the landscape is rapidly shifting, and we should pay attention, lest we end up with ‘cow islands’ and ‘milk deserts.’

Farmshine readers may recall in November 2019, I wrote in the Market Moos column about comments made Nov. 5 by Randy Mooney, chairman of both the DFA and NMPF boards during the annual convention in New Orleans of National Milk Producers Federation together with the two checkoff boards — National Dairy Board and United Dairy Industry Association. 

Mooney gave a glimpse of the future in his speech that was podcast. (Listen here at 13:37 minutes). He said he had been “looking at a map,” seeing “plants on top of plants,” and he urged the dairy industry to “collectively consolidate,” to target limited resources “toward those plants that are capable of making the new and innovative products.”

One week later, Dean Foods (Southern Foods Group LLC) filed for bankruptcy as talks between Dean and DFA about a DFA purchase were already underway. It was the first domino right on the heels of Mooney’s comments, followed by Borden filing Chapter 11 two months later in January, and followed by three-years of fresh fluid milk plant closings and changes in ownership against the backdrop of declining fluid milk sales and an influx of new dairy-based beverage innovations, ultrafiltered and shelf-stable milk, as well as lookalike alternatives and blends.

The map today looks a lot different from the one described by Mooney in November 2019 when he urged the industry to “collectively consolidate.” The simultaneous investments in extended shelf-life (ESL) and aseptic packaging are also a sign of the direction of ‘innovation’ Mooney may have been referring to.

Two months prior to Mooney issuing that challenge, I was covering a September 2019 industry meeting in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where dairy checkoff presenters made it clear that the emphasis of the future is on launching innovative new beverages and dairy-‘based’ products.

Here is an excerpt from my opinion/analysis of the discussion at that time:

“While we are told that consumers are ditching the gallon jug (although it is still by far the largest sector of sales), and we are told consumers are looking for these new products; at the same time, we are also told that it is the dairy checkoff’s innovation and revitalization strategy to ‘work with industry partners to move consumers away from the habit of reaching for the jug and toward looking for these new and innovative products’ that checkoff dollars are launching.”

These strategy revelations foreshadowed where the fluid milk markets appear to be heading today, and this is also obvious from recent Farmshine articles showing the shifting landscape in cow, farm, and milk production numbers.

When viewing the picture of the map that is emerging, big questions come to mind:

Are today’s Class I milk markets under threat of becoming ‘milk deserts’ as the dairy industry consolidates into ‘cow islands’?

Would dairy farmers benefit from less regulation of Class I pricing in the future so producers outside of the “collectively consolidating” major-player-complex are freer to seek strategies and alliances of their own, to carve out market spaces with consumers desiring and rediscovering fresh and local, to put their checkoff dollars toward promotion that helps their farms remain viable and keeps their regions from becoming milk deserts? 

What role is the industry’s Net Zero Initiative playing behind the scenes, the monitoring, scoring, tracking of carbon, the way energy intensity may be viewed for transportation and refrigeration and other factors in Scope 1, 2 and 3 ESG (Environment, Social, Governance) scores? 

Shelf-stable milk may provide solutions for some emerging (or are they self-inflicted?) milk access and distribution dilemmas, and maybe one view of ESG scoring favors it? But ultimately it also means milk can come from cow islands to milk deserts — from anywhere, to anywhere.

It also becomes clearer why the whole milk bill is having so much trouble moving forward. The industry machine gives lip-service support to the notion of whole milk in schools, but the reality is, the industry is chasing other lanes on this highway to ‘improve’ the school milk ‘experience’ and ensure milk ‘access’ through innovations that at the same time pave the road from the ‘cow islands’ to the ‘milk deserts.’ 

It is now clearer — to me — why the Class I mover formula is such a hotly debated topic. 

If major industry-driving consolidators are looking to transition away from turning over cow to consumer fresh, local/regional milk supplies by turning toward beverage stockpiles that can sit in a warehouse ‘Coca-Cola-style’ at ambient temperatures for six to 12 months, it’s no wonder the consolidators want the ‘higher of’ formula to stay buried. What a subversion that was in the 2018 Farm Bill.

In fact, if the industry is pursuing a transition from fresh, fluid milk to a more emphasis on shelf-stable aseptic milk, such a transition would, in effect, turn the federal milk marketing orders’ purpose and structure — that is tied to Class I fresh fluid milk — completely upside down.

Landscape change has been in motion for years, but let’s look at the past 6 years — Dean had already closed multiple plants and cut producers in the face of Walmart opening it’s own milk bottling plant in Spring 2018. The Class I ‘mover’ formula for pricing fluid milk — the only milk class required to participate in Federal Milk Marketing Orders — was changed in the 2018 Farm Bill that went into effect Sept. 2018. The new Class I mover formula was implemented by USDA in May 2019, resulting in net losses to dairy farmers on their payments for Class I of well over $750 million across 43 months since then.

(Side note: Under the formula change, $436 million of Class I value stayed in processor pockets from May 2019 through October 2019, alone. DFA purchased 44 Dean Foods plants in May 2019 and became by far the largest Class I processor at that time.)

These and other landscape changes were already in motion when Mooney spoke on Nov. 5, 2019 at the convention of NMPF, NDB and UDIA describing the milk map and seeing plants on top of plants and issuing the challenge to “collectively consolidate” to target resources to those plants that can make the innovative new products. 

One week later, Nov. 12, 2019, Dean Foods filed for bankruptcy protection to reorganize and sell assets (mainly to DFA).

Since 2019, this and other major changes have occurred as consolidation of Class I milk markets tightens substantially around high population swaths, leaving in wake the new concerns about milk access that spur the movement toward ESL and aseptic milk. A chain reaction.

What does Mooney’s map look like today after his 2019 call for “collective consolidation” and the targeting of investments to plants that can make the innovative products, the plants that DMI fluid milk revitalization head Paul Ziemnisky told farmers in a 2021 conference call were going to need to be “dual-purpose” — taking in all sorts of ingredients, making all sorts of beverages and products, blending, ultrafiltering, and, we see it now, aseptically packaging?

In addition to the base of Class I processing it already owned a decade ago, the string of DFA mergers has been massive. The most recent acquisitions, along with exits by competitors, essentially funnel even more of the market around key population centers to DFA with its collective consolidation strategy and investments in ESL and aseptic packaging.

The South —

The 14 Southeast states (Maryland to Florida and west to Arkansas) have 29% of the U.S. population. If you include Texas and Missouri crossover milk flows, we are talking about 37% of the U.S. population. 

The major players in the greater Southeast fluid milk market include DFA enlarged by its Dean purchases, Kroger supplied by Select and DFA, Prairie Farms with its own plants, DFA and Prairie Farms with joint ownership of Hiland Dairy plants, Publix supermarkets with its own plants, an uncertain future for four remaining Borden plants in the region as Borden has exited even the retail market in some of these states, and a handful of other fluid milk processors. 

In Texas, alone, DFA now owns or jointly owns a huge swath of the fluid milk processing plants, having purchased all Dean assets in the Lone Star State in the May 2020 bankruptcy sale and now positioned to gain joint ownership of all Borden Texas holdings through the announced sale to Hiland Dairy. 

The Midwest — 

Just looking at the greater Chicago, Milwaukee, Green Bay metropolis, the population totals are a lake-clustered 6% of U.S. population. Given the recent closure by Borden of the former Dean plants in Chemung, Illinois and De Pere, Wisconsin, this market is in flux with DFA owning various supply plants including a former Dean plant in Illinois and one in Iowa with Prairie Farms having purchased several of the Dean plants serving the region.

In the Mideast, there is Coca Cola with fairlife, Walmart and Kroger among the supermarkets with their own processing, and DFA owning two former Dean plants in Ohio, two in Indiana, two in Michigan, and a handful of other bottlers. 

In the West: DFA owns a former Dean plant in New Mexico, two in Colorado, two in Montana, one in Idaho, two in Utah, one in Nevada and one in California, as well as other plants, of course. 

The Northeast —

This brings us to the Northeast from Pennsylvania to Maine, where 18% of the U.S. population lives, and where consolidation of Class I markets, especially around the major Boston-NYC-Philadelphia metropolis have consolidated rapidly against the backdrop of declining fluid milk sales and a big push by non-dairy alternative beverage launches from former and current dairy processors.

DFA owns two former Dean plants in Massachusetts, one in New York, all four in Pennsylvania, one in New Jersey. The 2019 merger with St. Alban’s solidified additional New England fluid milk market under DFA. In 2013, DFA had purchased the Dairy Maid plant from the Rona family in Maryland; in 2014, the prominent Oakhurst plant in Maine; and in 2017, the Cumberland Dairy plant in South Jersey.

More recently, DFA struck a 2021 deal with Wakefern Foods to supply their Bowl and Basket and other milk, dairy, and non-dairy brands for the various supermarket chains and convenience stores under the Wakefern umbrella covering the greater New York City metropolis into New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania. This milk had previously been supplied by independent farms, processed at Wakefern’s own iconic Readington Farms plant in North Jersey, which Wakefern subsequently closed in January 2022.

The long and twisted tale begs additional questions:

As Borden has dwindled in short order from 14 plants to five serving the most populous region of the U.S. – the Southland — what will happen with the remaining five plants in Ohio, Kentucky, Georgia, Louisiana, and Florida? What will become of Elsie the Cow and Borden’s iconic brands and new products?

What percentage of the “collectively consolidated” U.S. fluid milk market does DFA now completely or partially own and/or control?

Will the “collective consolidation” in the form of closures, sales and mergers continue to push shelf-stable ESL and aseptic milk into Class I retail markets and especially schools… and will consumers, especially kids, like this milk and drink it?

What role are rising energy prices, climate ESG-scoring and net-zero pledges and proclamations playing in the plant closures and shifts toward fewer school and retail milk deliveries, less refrigeration, more forward thrust for shelf-stable and lactose-free milk, as well as innovations into evermore non-dairy launches and so-called flexitarian blending and pairing?

Looking ahead at how not only governments around the world, but also corporations, creditors and investors are positioning for climate/carbon tracking, ESG scoring and the so-called Great Reset, the Net Zero economy, there’s little doubt that these factors are driving the direction of fluid milk “innovation” over the 12 years that DMI’s Innovation Center has coordinated the so-called ‘fluid milk revitalization’ initiative — at the same time developing the FARM program and the Net Zero Initiative.

The unloading of nine Borden plants in five months under Gregg Engles, the CEO of “New Borden” and former CEO of “Old Dean” is also not surprising. Engles is referred to in chronicles of dairy history not only as “the great consolidator” but also as “industry transformer.”

In addition to being CEO of Borden, Engles is chairman and managing partner of one of the two private equity investment firms that purchased the Borden assets in bankruptcy in June 2020. Investment firms fancy themselves at the forefront of ESG scoring.

Engles is also one of only two U.S. members of the Danone board of directors. Danone, owner of former Dean’s WhiteWave, including Silk plant-based and Horizon Organic milk, has positioned itself in the forefront on 2030 ESG goals, according to its 2019 ‘one planet, one health’ template that has also driven consolidation and market loss in the Northeast. 

Not only is Danone dumping clusters of its Horizon milk-supplying organic family dairy farms, it continues to heavily invest in non-dairy processing, branding, launching and marketing of alternative lookalike dairy products and beverages, including Next Milk, Not Milk and Wondermilk. 

There is plenty of food-for-thought to chew on here from the positives to the negatives of innovation, consolidation, and climate ESGs hitting full-throttle in tandem. These issues require forward-looking discussion so dairy farmers in areas with substantial reliance on Class I fluid milk sales can navigate the road ahead and examine all lanes on this highway that appears to be leading to cow islands and milk deserts.

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School lunch money scare tactics are holding up PA whole milk bill

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Cousins Grace and Bella are my youngest granddaughters, pictured here in 2020 obviously enjoying their milk — mustache and all. They both started kindergarten in 2021, where for the next 12 years, their meals at school will not allow their choice of whole milk or even 2% milk — unless state and/or federal lawmakers act. Children consume 2 meals a day, 5 days a week, 75% of the year at school where they are denied the simple choice, even a la carte. A saddening and maddening state of affairs.

As adults, we should be ashamed of ourselves

By Sherry Bunting, Farmshine, July 8, 2022

I guess it’s true, good dairy bills – for more than a decade now – continue to be introduced in the Pennsylvania legislature, only to pass in the House but then die in the Senate. We’ve seen it with the many bills over the years aimed at amending the Pennsylvania Milk Marketing Law, and now we are seeing it with the Whole Milk in Pennsylvania Schools Act.

HB 2397 was introduced by Representative John Lawrence, and it passed the State House almost unanimously (196 to 2) in April. It then passed the State Senate Agriculture Committee and was re-referred to the State Senate Appropriations Committee, where it sits today digesting the “scare tactics” of its opponents – causing some heartburn for lawmakers thinking USDA could withhold all free and reduced school lunch reimbursements in Pennsylvania.

USDA is the bully waving children’s lunch money like a mighty sword demanding submissive obedience, even suggesting in May that schools lacking appropriate LGBTQ+ policies for “gender affirming” use of locker rooms, rest rooms and sports participation could be denied their free and reduced school lunch reimbursements. USDA has since recanted this notion — saying they meant only to address discrimination associated with the provision of the food. That’s more like it. But that redirection of the Department’s prior statement did not happen until more than 20 states’ Governors and Attorneys General threatened to sue the Biden Administration for using the lunch money of economically disadvantaged children to implement federalized bathroom gender policies.

On whole milk in schools, similar scare tactics are being used to prevent the Pennsylvania state bill from being voted on in the Senate chamber.

Bow thee, oh Pennsylvanians, to King Vilsack and the Dietary Police.

Even a certain farm paper published in Lancaster County has made it their business to take every point of whole milk choice supporters, the evidence, the law, and tear it apart – piece by piece. A head-scratcher, for sure.

I have been digging into the original Richard B. Russell National School Lunch Act of 1946 and the subsequent amendments through the 2010 Healthy Hunger Free Kids Act (HHFKA), as well as various memos from USDA to state nutrition program directors when the ‘Smart Snacks’ rules were implemented to govern a la carte beverages in 2012. I have also read through Pennsylvania Department of Education audits of schools, which are all publicly available. I can find no tie between a state law offering a self-select choice of whole milk (paid for with state or local or parental funds) to students as grounds for withholding free and reduced school meal reimbursements from schools. In fact, quite the contrary. 

Even the individual schools that would choose to provide the choice of whole and/or 2% milk to students could not be threatened with loss of their free and reduced lunch subsidy — as long as the meal pattern for the ‘served’ lunch is met; however, more importantly, it is clear that the only audit feature tied specifically to this reimbursement is that the financial eligibility of the recipients is properly qualified.

Here’s the key: Even if a school is deemed out of compliance on meal pattern or does not have a strong enough ‘wellness policy’ on ‘competing foods’ — as would be the case if whole milk was offered as a choice, USDA does not have the authority to yank the free and reduced school meal subsidy on that basis. This authority is linked to eligibility, financial eligibility.

Research into the 2010 HHFKA shows that the loss of this reimbursement is directly tied to how the students/families are qualified as financially eligible. There are extensive details on this in the law, and the auditing schools go through, the paper trail for eligibility, is extensive. This is a separate audit section from the meal pattern performance.

In fact, in passing the 2010 Healthy Hunger Free Kids Act (HHFKA), the U.S. Congress clearly stated — separately — that schools can receive a 6-cents per eligible meal ‘performance increase’ as an incentive to meet the new HHFKA-prescribed meal patterns and in addressing competing foods and beverages in school wellness policies per USDA. This ‘bonus’ is tied to the Food and Nutrition Board of the Academy of Sciences, not the Dietary Guidelines. (A 2018 National Academy of Sciences review was highly critical of the Dietary Guidelines process.)

In setting a 6-cent performance increase per eligible meal in the 2010 HHFKA, Congress also capped the total to be spent for this meal-pattern incentive at $50 million annually nationwide. This is over and above the separate free and reduced meal reimbursement, itself, which dwarfs the performance bonus at $14 billion annually nationwide. 

These are separate portions of the 2010 HHFKA. In Section E of the law, Failure to Comply spells out precisely what is at risk if a school is not in meal pattern compliance — the 6 cents increase per eligible meal, not the reimbursement for qualified free and reduced meals.

As for the ‘Smart Snacks’ rules promulgated by USDA and implemented fully in 2012, which govern the a la carte beverages and snacks that can be “available” on school premises during school hours? It is important to note that USDA’s own memos to state directors in 2014 clarified that the Department will “provide exemptions for certain foods that are nutrient dense, even if they may not meet all of the specific nutrient requirements.”

Whole milk is a nutrient dense food.

However, in playing ‘dictator’ with our children’s health, USDA chose its exemptions and ignored the nutrient density of whole milk. What did they use as an example in a memo to schools? “Peanut butter and other nut butters are exempt from the total fat and saturated fat standards since these foods are also nutrient dense… and we want students to consume more of these foods,” a memo to state directors stated.

Perhaps Impossible Burger is another ‘exemption’ given its calories, fat and sodium far exceed USDA rules, but it was so-impossibly approved by USDA in May 2021 for actual federal meal reimbursement. Impossible Burger is not particularly nutrient dense – but real beef is, and real beef is greatly limited in school meal pattern compliance, along with the ban on whole milk.

Bottomline, the USDA under Secretary Vilsack in 2012 took aim at beverages. In 2018, while working for DMI as one of dairy checkoff’s highest paid executives serving as President and CEO of the U.S. Dairy Export Council, Tom Vilsack was cheered and awarded during the dairy checkoff founded and funded GENYOUth Gala that year for his “success” in “finally” addressing the beverage situation in schools. 

Those were the words of former President Bill Clinton, a vegan, who spoke at length during the Gala about the beverage problem in the obesity crisis and how his friend Tom is the person who finally “got it done.”

What did he get done? He booted out the whole milk and paved the path for all of PepsiCo’s artificially sweetened and partially artificially sweetened beverages in school cafeterias – the Gatorade Zero, Mountain Dew Kickstart, Diet Coolers, Diet Cola’s, flavored waters – with that blend of high fructose corn syrup and sucralose that keeps them under 60 calories (the USDA threshold for an a la carte beverage per the Smart Snacks rules) and of course fat free – but also nutrition free. (PepsiCo got the GENYOUth Gala award the following year)

Sadly, the U.S. Congress also let dairy farmers down in 2010 by including the reference to the Dietary Guidelines in the one and only sentence on school milk in the HHFKA. All other nutritional references for the meal pattern are linked to the Food and Nutrition Board of the Academy of Sciences. 

Here’s what the HHFKA states under Nutrition Requirements for Fluid Milk Section 9(a)(2)(A) is amended to say: “shall offer students a variety of fluid milk. Such milk shall be consistent with the most recent Dietary Guidelines for Americans.” 

Even that milk sentence is ‘loose,’ and open to interpretation. Is the DGA recommendation of consuming ‘less than 10% calories from saturated fat’ a per-food, per-beverage, or per-meal ordinance or a whole-day allotment? 

We are told over and over that the DGAs are recommendations. Somehow USDA didn’t get that memo and decided to use DGAs to bully milk choices of children.

Never mind how counterproductive this is for children. When removing satiating nutrient dense fat from whole nutrient dense foods, kids compensate and replace this with nutritionally empty carbohydrates. 

Such were the early warnings of school foodservice personnel I interviewed over a decade ago as they piloted the draconian rules  before they were implemented. 

Such is also among the recent findings of the Milky Way controlled study by Australian researchers involving two sets of children — one having their milkfat consumption increased and the other having their milkfat consumption decreased. 

Care to guess which group saw a reduction in Body Mass Index percentile? Or which group had higher blood sodium levels? Or what the differences were in other biomarkers related to cardiovascular and metabolic health? (An article about this study appeared in the May 20 edition of Farmshine. It was the group of children who increased milkfat consumption that saw decreased BMI percentile and it was the group of children who decreased milkfat consumption that saw increased blood sodium levels! All other biomarkers for health were the same between the two groups.)

There are so many tentacles behind the scenes of how this whole school meal and school milk thing really work, that it boggles the mind – so much so that vested interests can come in and scare well-intentioned state lawmakers into thinking if they dare pass this bill and make nutrient dense flavorful whole milk available to schoolchildren as a CHOICE, that somehow the economically disadvantaged children of the Commonwealth could go hungry because USDA will take their lunch money. School foodservice directors are undoubtedly scared as well because the free/reduced reimbursements are a huge part of their budgets.

I’ve got news for the opponents of this bill, the State Senate Appropriations Committee, the Governor and the USDA: Our children are already suffering from hunger pangs in math class, and the absence of nutrient density in their school meals – on your watch right now, today. Do you care? Do the opponents of the whole milk bill spewing their scare tactics care?

The federal prohibition of whole milk in schools is the tip of a mighty iceberg that is failing our children while paving the path to an even less healthful future for America and a less economically healthful status for Pennsylvania dairy farms, the backbone of our state’s ag economy into the future.

We just celebrated our nation’s Independence Day, and yet our children cannot choose whole milk at school — even if their locally elected school boards want to offer it and even if their parents pay for it.

No one supporting this bill believes USDA will reimburse the actual whole milk, itself. Supporters just want the choice to be fully recognized as legal so that as parents, grandparents, farmers, citizens we can get about the business of next finding a way to provide this nutrient dense, satiating, delicious option to the children in our communities who consume two meals a day, five days a week, three-quarters of the year at school.

The issue spills out from the schools into other foodservice meals. It is heartwrenching for this reporter to listen to adults involved in dairy checkoff boast to farmers about how they are getting whole milk and cream into McDonald’s coffee drinks, into foodservice hot chocolate, into all of these trendy adult venues – while our children get a tiny fat-free chocolate milk in their happy meal because this school edict spills over into foodservice chains being bullied to do the same outside of school ‘for the kids’.

As adults, we should be ashamed of ourselves and reflect on our pathetic disregard for our children.

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Comments due March 24: Ask USDA to end its prohibition of whole milk in schools, give students milkfat choice

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Photo credit (Top) USDA FNS website screen capture from https://www.fns.usda.gov/building-back-better-school-meals and (bottom) fat-free flavored milk and fat-free yogurt on a local school lunch tray.
Screen capture and lunch tray photo S.Bunting

By Sherry Bunting, published Farmshine, Feb. 18, 2022

WASHINGTON — As reported in the Feb. 11 Farmshine, USDA announced a ‘transitional standards’ rule on Feb. 4 for milk, whole grains, and sodium for school years 2022-2023 and 2023-2024. 

The transitional standards are only in place while USDA works with stakeholders on long-term meal standards through a new rulemaking. 

The proposed rule for the longer-term is expected to come from USDA in fall 2022 and will become effective in school year 2024-25. It will be based on the Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2020-2025, but USDA says it is conducting a public comment and review process related to the standards and to the “gradual implementation” plan it will develop based in part on stakeholder input. 

In the official transitional standards rule, USDA notes that full implementation of its 2012 meal pattern requirements for milk, grains and sodium have been delayed at intervals due to legislative and administrative actions. “Through multiple annual appropriations bills, Congress directed USDA to provide flexibility for these specific requirements.” 

Read the transitional standards rule here at https://www.regulations.gov/document/FNS-2020-0038-2936 where a comment button can be clicked to provide a public comment to USDA by March 24, 2022.

Now is the time to comment before March 24, 2022 and to call for an end to the prohibition of whole milk in schools. Request that USDA restore the choice of whole milk in schools by commenting at the online rulemaking portal https://www.regulations.gov/commenton/FNS-2020-0038-2936

Comments and questions can also be sent to: Tina Namian, Chief, School Programs Branch, Policy and Program Development Division—4th Floor, Food and Nutrition Service, 1320 Braddock Place, Alexandria, VA 22314; telephone: 703-305-2590. 
Include FNS-2020-0038-2936 in your correspondence. 

In a rare move Feb. 7, the American Association of School Superintendents (AASA) made a public media statement on the transitional standards — pointing out their concern that the long-term standards will be ‘more stringent’ due to the restrictive Dietary Guidelines that were approved by USDA and HHS in 2020. 

The Association of School Superintendents stated: “It is important to acknowledge that healthy meals are only healthy if students eat them.” 

Agreed! This applies to the milk also. Students miss out on 21 minerals, 13 vitamins, complete high quality protein, a healthy matrix of fat and several nutrients of concern when they don’t actually consume the milk offered or served at school. Those nutrients ‘on paper’ are then not realized. Many key nutrients of concern are also fat-soluble. A study at St. Michael’s Children Hospital, Toronto, showed children consuming whole milk had 2.5 to 3x the Vit. D absorption compared with those consuming low-fat milk, and they were at 40% less risk of becoming overweight! Details were presented in a June 2021 hearing in the Pennsylvania Senate, listen here

Milk consumption plummeted and waste skyrocketed since USDA’s 2012 fat-free/low-fat milk rules were set for both ‘served’ milk and competing a la carte offerings. Studies by USDA and others show milk is now one of the most discarded items at school. In fact, USDA did a plate waste study comparing 2011 to 2013 (pre-/ and post-change) They focused on fruits and vegetables, but saw milk decrease significantly, waiving it off as though it were due to an “unrelated policy change.” Technically, it was the smart snacks rules for beverages and it WAS related to the 2012 standards as both were implemented together.

See the losses in Tables 2 through 4 below in ‘selection’ and ‘consumption’ of milk from the USDA study reflecting a 24% reduction in student selection of milk (offer vs. serve) after the 2012 fat-free/low-fat implementation and 10 to 12% reduction in consumption among those students being ‘served’ or selecting the restricted fat-free/low-fat white milk option or fat-free flavored milk option. That’s a double whammy for childhood nutrition and for dairy farm viability. Since 2012, at least one generation of future milk drinkers has been lost.

Charts above are from a USDA study published in 2015 to assess school meal selection, consumption, and waste before and after implementation of the new school meal standards in 2012. Those standards impacted a la carte offerings as well as beverages, not just served meals. The method for the USDA study was: Plate waste data were collected in four schools in an urban, low-income school district. Logistic regression and mixed-model ANOVA were used to estimate the differences in selection and consumption of school meals before (fall 2011) and after implementation (fall 2012) of the new standards among 1030 elementary and middle school children. Analyses were conducted in 2013. The authors note that prior to the full implementation of new nutrition standards in 2012, a variety of fat levels of milk were offered to students and no restriction upon flavored milks. See the report here —– Additionally, a PA school trial offering all fat percentages, including whole milk, revealed a 52% increase in selection of milk and 95% reduction in discarded milk, netting a 65% increase in consumption of milk in 2019.

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Milk fuels these Olympic athletes, one is a dairy farmer

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Katie Ledecky (Right) on Tuesday, July 27 when she won gold in the first ever women’s 1500-meter distance freestyle race. She drinks 12 ounces of chocolate milk after every race and workout.
Photo courtesy Team USA.
Elle Purrier St. Pierre (left) is a Vermont dairy farmer pictured here in June celebrating cows and cheese. Today, she’s in Tokyo getting ready to compete in Olympic track events next week.
Photo courtesy @ellie_runs_4_her_life

By Sherry Bunting, Farmshine, July 30, 2021

TOKYO — Commentators have likened Olympic gold medal swimmer Katie Ledecky to a Lamborghini, a powerful machine, gliding through the water in freestyle sprints and distance races. She won four gold medals for Team USA in Rio de Janeiro in 2016 and one in London in 2012.

Then, in Tokyo Tuesday, July 27, in the same 24-hour period — after winning silver in the 400-meter and missing medals altogether in the 200-meter — Ledecky came back with determination and poise to win Olympic gold by a healthy margin in the 1500-meter freestyle. Teammate Erica Sullivan secured the silver.

Ledecky was a machine Tuesday night in Tokyo. Her methodical straight line stretch of 30 laps in the 50-meter pool ended when she touched the wall at 15 minutes 37 seconds. That’s freestyle swimming of roughly one mile in just over 15 minutes – ranging 1.5 to 1.7 meters per second! She makes history as this is the first women’s 1500-meter freestyle Olympic event.

As she headed into the final four laps, NBC Sports commentators broadcast to a worldwide audience her training and nutrition regimen, how she fuels her body in the morning with oatmeal – made with milk, peanut butter and fruit — and always downs a 12-ounce bottle of chocolate milk after every race or workout.

Described as inspirational in her work ethic and a beast in her daily workout, Ledecky is one of Team USA’s Olympians who is proud to be powered by milk. Dairy farmers will be happy to know Ledecky teamed up a few years ago in the Built with Chocolate milk campaign, sponsored by the Milk Processors Education Program (MilkPEP). The campaign features athletes and the science behind low-fat chocolate milk as a recovery and refuel beverage. Low-fat chocolate milk is Ledecky’s choice, and milk and dairy are part of her dietary regimen in other ways too.

The swimmer told Fitness in 2018 that the bottle of chocolate milk 30 minutes after a workout or race has been part of her routine for more than a decade.

“This is my go-to post-workout recovery beverage since I was 13 years old,” said Ledecky in the Fitness interview. “I remember being a young swimmer when someone explained that drinking chocolate milk for recovery gives my body the nutrients it needs to refuel. Since then, I make sure to keep one in my lunchbox daily and drink it after a tough workout. Of course, it tastes great too.”

A year ago, Katie Ledecky helped MilkPEP bring back the ‘Got Milk campaign with this ‘Got Milk Challenge’ — swimming 50 meters freestyle in 35 seconds with a glass of chocolate milk balanced on her head, then managing to flip it at the end and drink it — never spilling a drop. The TikTok video went viral. Photo courtesy @katieledecky 

When the 2020 Olympics were postponed, Ledecky did the fun video of herself swimming 50 meters with a glass of chocolate milk on her head — without spilling a drop. That’s how steady, balanced and methodical her stroke is. Of course, at the end, she drank the milk — all smiles. The video went viral and inspired other swimmers to film themselves attempting the feat, and drinking the milk. Just a fun, feel-good moment for an accomplished Olympian who relies on and loves her chocolate milk.

As for Ledecky’s Tokyo Olympics this week, she has a few more events to go and we are rooting for her. Of her 1500-meter gold, Ledecky said in an NBC Sports interview just after the race that it “means a lot.”

With a nod to falling short of her goals in the 200- and 400-meter races just before the 1500, she said: “People may be feeling bad that I’m not winning everything, but I want people to be more concerned about other things in the world. People are truly suffering. I’m just proud to bring home a gold medal to Team USA.”

We are also rooting for the first-ever farm girl fueled to compete in the Olympics. Runner Elle Purrier St. Pierre arrived in Tokyo this week and will compete in the Olympic track events next week.

According to NBC Sports, Elle took first in the final 1500-meter race during Olympic trials, breaking a previous record and setting other track records as well, including breaking a 37-year-old record for the U.S. women’s indoor mile last year and breaking the two-mile record earlier this year.

Elle is a dairy farmer! She grew up on a 40-cow dairy farm near Montgomery, Vermont. Today she lives with her husband Jamie on his family’s Berkshire, Vermont dairy farm. 

During the Covid-19 pandemic, Elle trained from the farm with her own equipment and has reported in various mainstream media interviews how working on the dairy farm has helped her own fitness.

Whether at home on the farm in Vermont, or after a race or workout half the world away, Olympian Elle Purrier St. Pierre says the first thing she does after running is to chug a glass of milk. Facebook courtesy photo

She also explains every chance she gets how crucial dairy is to her diet. Elle’s husband studied dairy management at Cornell, and Elle studied nutrition at the University of New Hampshire. She says she could not have reached the heights of her running career without milk.

“The first thing I do when I get done running is, I chug a glass of milk, and I just know everything in there is going to help me do better,” says Elle in an interview with USA Today. “It’s got the perfect ratio of carbs and protein, when you add the chocolate, and just so many vitamins and minerals. It’s crazy what a great resource it is.”

There are also other Olympians proud to make milk and dairy part of their regimens, and to talk about it. We are rooting for Team USA and especially for Team Milk!

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‘Climate-neutral milk?’ Northeast, Southeast milksheds can already claim it

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EDITORIAL – OPINION

By Sherry Bunting, Farmshine, July 16, 2021

Farmshine readers will recall coverage of the U.S. Senate Ag Committee’s climate hearing in 2019, when Tom Vilsack, then president and CEO of U.S. Dairy Export Council, lobbied the Senate for climate-pilot-farm-funding. Remember, he announced DMI’s Net Zero Initiative at that hearing – five months ahead of its formal unveiling.

In that same June 2019 hearing, animal scientist and greenhouse gas emissions expert Dr. Frank Mitloehner of University of California-Davis explained the methane / CO2 ‘biogenic’ cycle of cows. 

He said that no new warming, is produced when cow numbers are “constant” in an area because methane is short-lived and converts to CO2 in 10 years time, which is then used by plants, cows eat the plants, and the cycle repeats. It is always cycling.

Dr. Mitloehner also said that this cycle changes when cattle concentrations move from one area to another.

Nationally, dairy cow numbers are rising after decades of declining. However, in the Northeast and Southeast milksheds, cow numbers are declining — and by a wide margin. 

This should indicate net methane reductions in the biogenic cycle or climate-friendly milk for the fluid milk regions of the Northeast and Southeast.

As USDA and the industry coalesce around DMI’s unified approach through the Net Zero Initiative and the work of DMI’s Dairy Scale for Good with partner WWF — stating large integrators can be net zero in five years to spread their climate ‘achievements’ across the footprint of all milk in the dairy supply chain — I have to wonder what this means for the areas of the country beyond the ‘chosen’ growth areas.*(see footnote at the end)* 

Looking at the work of DMI’s Innovation Center and it’s fluid milk revitalization committee, sponsoring the launches of various diluted dairy-‘based’ beverages, something occurred to me from a marketing standpoint.

Here is a thought that could be helpful in the future for whole fluid milk bottled regionally to compete with emerging climate claims of dairy-‘based’ beverages that are made with ultrafiltered solids shipped by centralized cheese and ingredient facilities (without the water) to be reconstituted as mixtures with plant-based alternative beverages for population centers on the coasts.

The milk produced and bottled in the Northeast and Southeast milksheds is not just climate neutral, it’s already offsetting, producing not just no new methane, but less than prior-decades’ methane.

Bear in mind, these new dairy-‘based’ — blended — beverages are NOT Class I products. I have been informed that the 50/50 blends, for example, do not meet the standard of identity for milk, nor do they meet the milk solids profile that requires Class I pricing. This means that even though milk is part of a fluid dairy-‘based’ beverage, it is not priced as Class I.

The milk used in these emerging products that combine ultrafiltered solids with water, additives and maybe an almond or two, fall into Class II or IV, some are Class III if whey protein is used. Examples include products like DFA’s Live Real Farms ‘Purely Perfect Blend‘ that arrived recently in Pennsylvania and the greater Northeast after its first test-market in Minnesota. 

Think about it. Unity is great on many levels, and is to be encouraged in an industry such as dairy, but when it comes to marketing, who is calling the shots for future viability within the DMI integration strategy, otherwise known as unity?

Pre-competitive alliances and ‘proprietary partnerships’ working on food safety are wonderful because all companies should work together on food safety. But animal care? Environment? Climate? Why not just offer quality assurance resources and pay farmers certain premiums for investing as companies would like to see and pay them for providing the consumer trust commodity — instead of implementing one-size-fits-all branches in programs like F.A.R.M.? 

These so-called voluntary programs have the power to negate contracts between milk producers and their milk buyers even though consumer trust is a marketable commodity that producers already own and are in fact giving to milk buyers, and their brands, without being compensated. 

Instead, producers are controlled by arbitrary definitions of the consumer trust commodity that the producers themselves originate. This goes for Animal Care, Worker Care, Environment, and Climate.

The pre-competitive model used in food safety is applied to all four of the above areas today. This is exactly the supply-chain model World Wildlife Fund (WWF) — DMI’s ‘sustainability partner’ — set in 2010 to “move the choices of consumers and producers” where they want them to go.

*footnote

In the 2019 Senate hearing referenced at the beginning of the above op-ed, Dr. Mitloehner stated that the mere fact there are 9 million dairy cattle today compared with 24 million in 1960 and producing three times more milk shows that dairy producers are collectively not only emitting zero new methane, they are reducing total methane as old methane is eradicated by the carbon cycle and less new replacement methane is emitted.

The problem may be this: Year-over-year cow numbers for the U.S. are creeping higher. While still much lower than four to five decades ago, the issue emerging for DMI’s Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy is how to accommodate growth of the new and consolidating dairy structures to attain the checkoff’s expanded global export goal and to accommodate massive new dual-purpose plants if dairy farms in other areas remain virtually constant in size, grow modestly, or decline at a rate slower than the ‘designated’ growth areas are growing.

DMI is at the core of this, you see, to reach it’s new collective net-zero goal, cow numbers would have to decline in one area in order to be added in another area, or they will all have to have their methane buttons turned off or the methane captured because now the emissions are being tracked in order to meet one collective “U.S. Dairy” unit goal under the DMI Innovation Center and F.A.R.M. We don’t even know if they are using this method of calculation. U.S. cows may be on global calculations where numbers are rising.

At that 2019 Senate hearing, Dr. Frank Mitloehner testified that dairies already create zero new methane but this can be tricky when cattle move from one area to another (as we see in the industry’s consolidation). Then we have DMI’s Dairy Scale 4 Good claiming the dairies over 3000 cows can be net-zero in 5 years and ‘spread their achievement’ over the entire milk footprint. Do we see where this is going?

Will all dairy farms have to meet criteria — set by organizations under the very umbrella of the checkoff program they must fund — to get to a ‘collective’ net-zero using the GHG calculator developed by the checkoff-funded Innovation Center in conjunction with its partner WWF (12 year MOU)? This GHG calculator has been added to the FARM program. These are the big questions. Where is the science and the math?

Feeling good about milk

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By Sherry Bunting, Farmshine, June 11, 2021

“The beverage industry is savage.”

So says Rohan Oza, an American businessman, investor, and marketing expert behind several large brands. He was with Coca Cola until 2002 and in the past 19 years has the distinction of being a brand mastermind behind Vitaminwater, Smartwater and Bai beverages, among others, and he has been a recurring guest on Shark Tank, a television show where entrepreneurs pitch their fledgling businesses to several investor “sharks” in hopes of getting an investment deal for a percentage of equity in their businesses.

In an archived episode of Shark Tank from 2018 when a husband and wife pitched their apple cider drink, known today as Poppi, Oza had other pearls of wisdom to share about the beverage industry.

He said the largest companies aren’t creating the drinks, they’ve perfected the manufacturing and distribution. Instead, they rely on entrepreneurs to have the vision to bring a new beverage to market.

Packaging and marketing matter. Information is power. Flavor is king.

Oza said consumers want beverages they can feel good about.

That’s what has been missing over four decades in the milk industry, especially the past decade since 2010 when fluid milk sales took the sharpest nosedive. This has stabilized a bit in the past two years as whole milk sales rose 1% and 2.6% in 2019 and 2020, respectively, providing a bit of a safety net to overall fluid milk losses.

There is an innovative and entrepreneurial trend in bringing to market new dairy-based beverages that contain dairy protein, or ultrafiltered low-fat milk as an ingredient. However, MILK, itself, as a beverage, lost its power to make people feel good because people were not empowered with good information, and children were robbed of opportunities to choose the good milk — whole milk — at schools and daycares.

What milk itself lost as a beverage was the power to make people feel good about drinking it — because people lost touch with what they were getting from milk, what whole milk actually does for them. One big reason? GenZ-ers (and to some degree millennials) have grown up drinking (or tossing) the low-fat or fat-free milk as their only choices in school, and then found themselves searching for something else to drink in the a la carte line.

That’s changing. Research, studies and scientific papers keep coming forward, identifying the benefits of whole milk. When people try it, a common reaction is, “this is the good milk.”

Yes, whole milk is winning customers. Efforts by dairy producers — at large and through organizations like 97 Milk — have been focusing lately on giving the public the information they need about whole milk to make informed choices. It’s about giving people the opportunity to know what whole milk can do for them, and we hope that bills in the United States Congress as well as conversations with the Pennsylvania State Senate bear fruit in the ongoing effort to legalize the choice of whole milk in schools… so future generations can feel good about milk too.

We notice that if USDA can give the coveted Child Nutrition label to the Impossible Burger — a fake meat product with more saturated fat (8 grams) in a 4 ounce patty than whole milk (5 grams) in an 8 ounce glass and more sodium (370 mg for Impossible vs. 120 for whole milk) and more calories, then surely USDA can loosen its grip on the fat content of the milk choices for children in schools. Incidentally, the USDA approval of Impossible for school lunch is really a head scratcher next to 85/15 real beef because the real thing has less saturated fat, less sodium, and fewer calories.

Yes, USDA qualified Impossible Burger for reimbursement with taxpayer funds in the National School Lunch Program, but still outright forbids the choice of whole milk in schools.

USDA and Congress are moving toward universal free lunch and breakfast (even supper and snack) for all kids. FDA is in the procedural phase of developing a “healthy” symbol for foods that “earn” it — according to whom? Dietary Guidelines! The trend in government is toward giving consumers less information on a label, not more.

This is why milk education and freedom of choice are more important than ever. Even the Hartman Group young consumer insights cited at PepsiCo’s K-12 foodservice website state that GenZ-ers show a preference for ‘fast food’ and ‘familiar tastes.’ Millennials and GenZ-ers both show high preference for foods they grew up with.

Kids need to grow up able to choose the good milk — whole milk — not have that choice forbidden. That’s why the milk kids get to choose at school where they get 1, 2, even 3 meals a day is so important.

Give them the choice of the good milk that is good for them, and the power of information, and they’ll remember feeling good about milk.

Happy June Dairy Month! A big thanks to dairy farmers for all they do.

Vale Wood Farms stays steady, but nimble, delivering ‘moo to you’ since 1933

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Carissa Itle Westrick enjoys working every day with her father, Bill Itle. They see whole milk, local connections and home delivery as big trends for dairy — even before the pandemic — that are key parts of their farm and processing for decades. They also share concerns about consumer confusion with the onslaught of imitation beverages in the dairy case.
 

By Sherry Bunting (updated since originally published in Farmshine in 2018)

LORETTO, Pa. — Take a step back to a simpler time. A time when dairy farmers were looked up to, not questioned. A time when the milkman delivered fresh dairy milk to the metal ice box on the doorstep. A time when milk’s good name was upheld. When milk was milk.

A visit to Vale Wood Farms, Loretto, Cambria County, Pennsylvania, is in some ways a step back in time, but it is also a bold look into the future — one that delivers fresh, local, real milk and dairy to consumers. One that develops farm-to-consumer relationships as everything old becomes new again.

It’s not easy to corral a few of the third and fourth generations of the Itle family as they go about their work here. Getting them to drop what they’re doing for a group photo? Forget about it. Everyone’s busy with three separate businesses under one sign. And they’re not keen on drawing attention to themselves, but rather draw attention to milk and dairy.

Converging trends shape their market, and consumer connections are critical. (For example, today, two years since this article was first published, people have rediscovered whole milk and cream and since the Coronavirus pandemic, local foods and home delivery are a trend.)

But in the overall dairy industry, there is a growing number of competing beverages marketing outside the lines of real milk’s FDA standard of identity — introducing a growing surge of competing imitations into the dairy case.

In these challenging times, many dairy farmers consider on-farm processing. Carissa Itle Westrick, director of business development at Vale Wood Farms, acknowledges the risk and insecurity of this business that relies on building consumer and community relationships.

She points out that in some of their sales – wholesale and institutional – they, too, are price takers.

“My great great grandfather (C.A. Itle) was grappling with difficult economic choices in 1933 when he hitched up his horse and wagon and went to town,” Carissa relates.

Today, the Itles have a window into seeing how milk production levels in excess of demand impact profits throughout the supply-chain.

In the dairy sector, we often hear the experts and consultants drive home the point that ‘the next pound of milk is the most profitable milk on the farm.’

Is it?

“Our economics are different,” Carissa points out. “That next pound of milk is not necessarily the most profitable. If we can’t sell that next pound of milk, then making it means we just made less profit on all the milk. For us, that approach doesn’t make sense.”

What does make sense is adding processing efficiencies and capitalizing on consumer trends, while helping to shape them.

“We have to make sure what we do fits today’s families,” Carissa notes. “We are small enough to be fairly nimble, which is so important to our business model.” For example, customers can sign up and manage their home-delivery online.

Technology-driven, home-delivery — Valewood-style — still comes with a personal touch. Of their 50 employees, five are drivers. 

“Our drivers cater to our customers. They might even be asked to let the cat out or pet the dog or put the product right in the fridge,” she says with a smile. “We are hyper-local, and it’s not just a selling point for us. We shake hands with whose buying our milk.”

Meanwhile, connecting consumer dots is very much a family affair as events like the mid-July Pasture Party draw in large numbers from the community and those members of the Itle family not involved daily in the business. They bring their friends and tell their neighbors.

“When people come to an event here and go on the crazy hay wagon ride, it’s us on that wagon. It’s my uncle Dan on that wagon,” she says. “That’s our one-on-one time to tell about our cows and how they are cared for. We focus our education on how much attention we pay to the cows. They are our livelihood, and we depend on them. The effort, time, energy and emotion we put into keeping them healthy and comfortable – that’s what we want people to understand.”

The nearby schools also bring classes to connect with the farm providing their milk. In fact, Carissa’s aunt, Jan Itle, developed the “Moo to You” formal school tour program that began with five teachers and today works with nearly 75 teachers and reaches up to 5000 students annually, in addition to the other community events hosted at the farm.

Jan was recognized as 2017 Pennsylvania Dairy Innovator of the Year. Her good-natured humor is evident when she talks about working with seven brothers. And she is enthusiastic about hosting school tours.

“Give back to the community at all times,” is something Jan says they learned from their parents.

For her generation growing up, the Itle house was the gathering place, Jan recalls. “Our house was like a train station, and we still extend that invitation to the community today — to come and see what we do and share our passion.”

As the public becomes more generations removed from farm life, and the dairy disconnect grows, the Itles are doing all they can to reconnect. That helps their business model and the dairy industry as a whole.

The Itle family has seen it all in their farm-to-consumer business at Vale Wood Farms. The land on which the farm and processing plant sit today has been in the family since 1841, and while they’ve been processing and home-delivering milk and dairy products since 1933, “we are still addicted to our cow habit,” says Carissa.

Carissa is one of six fourth-generation family members working full-time here. Her father Bill is one of eight third-generation siblings involved full-time, plus another involved to some degree with a career as a veterinarian.

As company president, Bill manages the processing side. His brother Pat manages the 500 acres of crops. His sister Jan is the herd manager with her nephew Zach as assistant herd manager.

Being one of the oldest of the 18 members of her generation, ranging from adults to infants, Carissa describes the overlap. It’s easy to see how her role serves as a bridge between generations.

All told, Vale Wood Farms employs 55 people, including family members. In fact, Carissa confirms that some of their employees are also multi-generational. In fact, even the many family members with careers outside of Vale Wood Farms, come back to help with events and such. “We were all raised to jump in and do, when we see something needing done,” says Carissa.

When Bill Itle looks at the future, he notes the confusion about what is real dairy is an issue.

“We feel the pain when farmers feel the pain, because we’re part of that, and it’s not always the processor making the money,” he says. While he has seen an increase in whole milk consumption, the overall drag on total fluid sales, says Bill, is confusion in the dairy case.

“It’s tough to get our name back and away from imitation products. They’ve been doing it a long time. They aren’t hiding in the woodwork,” Bill relates.

Carissa agrees, noting that some consumers don’t really know that almond milk isn’t milk.

“I have friends who ask why we don’t make it,” she says. “They think it’s a milk flavor.”

For all of its challenges and opportunities, this is a family that loves what they do.

“We appreciate how lucky we are to have this tradition here, and we also have a responsibility to keep it alive,” says Carissa, noting that for multiple generations to run three separate businesses together takes flexibility.

She recalls her grandmother often saying, “you can disagree without being disagreeable.”

“Balancing the generation with one foot out the door with the generation gaining life experience can be tricky,” says Carissa, admitting sometimes her role is more “cat herder” and interpreter. 

“In a family business, we learn that there will be differing opinions, but at the end of the day, we make decisions and everyone supports the decisions. In a family business, you learn to have good healthy debate and to strongly support your point of view, but then to compromise and accept a decision once it’s made, and that’s how you thrive.”

As the industry changes around them, the Itle family jumps in to make key consumer connections. As a result, they maintain a steady market for their steady milk supply, growing home-delivery sales in the face of increased competition and consolidation being the new reality in supermarket dairy case sales.

They have an on-site dairy store, but it is off the beaten track and represents just 2% of their sales. As we sit in the pavilion that Carissa’s sister Jen has decorated for the following week’s Pasture Party, Carissa explains the evolution of dairy trends coming full-circle.

She gives four examples: The resurgence of fresh, real and local foods; the ‘new’ idea of home delivery; how ‘old’ products like whole milk, butter, and cottage cheese, are making a comeback; and how those old paper cartons are making a comeback too.

(In fact, take a look at the dairy case the next time you go to the supermarket. Most ‘new’ plant-based non-dairy beverages and ‘new’ dairy case items like iced coffees are packaged in paper cartons.)

“Consumers are gravitating back to the carton,” says Carissa. While Vale Wood bottles a variety of sizes in plastic bottles, paper half-gallon cartons are also available “because our customers see this as a great thing, from an environmental standpoint, and we like it because it protects the milk from light.”

We talk about the growing number of consumers seeking food delivery services and how the meal kit companies have really taken off. In fact, the three biggest food retailers – Walmart, Kroger and Amazon/Whole Foods — have either bought or created meal kit or food box delivery services.

Even as total consumption of dairy milk continues to erode, the large chain supermarkets and big-box stores are getting into the game because their checkout scanners confirm that milk — real dairy milk — is still the most frequently found item in grocery baskets.

So the future will either be a competition for shrinking market share – or an all-out effort to expand the fluid market. Vale Wood pays attention to those trends to steady their market while opening eyes of consumers expand it.

The upheaval in the industry reveals the trend toward the nation’s larger retail chains wanting a bigger piece of the shrinking fluid market. Small processors, like Vale Wood, on the other hand, seek to appeal to consumers and increase product demand.

The direct competition for supermarket shelf space is becoming intense because milk, though consumption is down, is still a store’s gateway to win customer loyalty.

As all processors navigate the competitive pressures, it is the home delivery service that is steadying the ship for Vale Wood. That part of their business brings them back to that key: connecting with consumers. A big part of that connection is the cows at the farm.

“It’s unique that we still milk cows,” says Carissa. “The cows are central to our farm history and heritage and our sense of identity.”

The Itle family milks 200 cows. Their processing covers 400 cows, as they purchase milk from three neighboring dairy farms instead of expanding their own.

In addition to bottling milk and flavored milk and making ice cream, they do soft products like dips and cottage cheese, and are now doing flavored butters. They do “a little bit of everything” to capitalize on trends. This helps them deal with increased competition for fewer milk drinkers.

“We can never underestimate the effort required to get into (or keep) a market,” Carissa says. And those barriers to entry are becoming more challenging as store brand private label market share increases at the same time that non-dairy beverage alternatives compete for space in the dairy case.

Still, 95% of Vale Wood’s milk utilization is Class I, thanks in large part to their consumer connections and education that lead to product awareness and loyalty.

Farmers forced to dump milk while stores limit consumer purchases

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AUTHOR’S NOTE: There is no single “reason” why farmers are being forced to dump their milk and why stores are largely still limiting the amount that consumers can purchase this week. The situation is complex, and two rumors are confirmed to be untrue. First, there is no health problem or health-related plant closure, nor is there a shortage of gallon jugs, according to Department of Agriculture sources. And no, milk jugs are NOT made in China. Most milk processing plants have their own plastic blow-molds and U.S. companies produce them as well.

Now that a few rumors are out of the way…  Here is the industry narrative for plunging farm-level milk prices and farms being forced to dump their milk. It goes something like this: “Schools are closed, foodservice demand is stalled and exports are drying up. The first two weeks of so-called “panic buying” at supermarkets settled into a third week into the COVID-19 national emergency finding consumers continuing to ‘buy’ more milk and dairy products, but “not buying enough to overcome” the aforementioned sales losses…”

It’s difficult to buy something that is not available or has store-level restrictions enforced on how much to buy. Schools account for 8% of fluid milk sales under normal conditions, and children are still served milk with grab-and-go meals offered, which keeps a portion of that 8% going. It is not a ‘panic buy’ when a family of four wants to buy 8 gallons of milk a week because all family members are home due to COVID-19. Interestingly, one week earlier, before store purchase limits were set, USDA reported Class I beverage milk usage quite differently and Nielson Global insights showed sales up exponentially (See more here and here)

While a full report is still in process, here’s my take below as filed for the midnight April 1 press deadline for Farmshine after exhaustive calls, emails, texts, messages, reports, and analysis of letters and forms that I am still pouring over for a more complete report for next week’s edition… One late breaking detail not found below, is that some farms were able to find private food pantries such as Blessings of Hope to take milk that was destined for dumping. In order to go to food banks, the milk needs a processor to pasteurize and bottle it or turn it into something like cheese. Another late-breaking detail not found below is the unofficial tally of milk dumped in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic region north of 200 loads, and the Southeast could approach 150, meanwhile sources indicate large national footprint cooperatives handling nationwide farm milk supplies met a weekly demand increase in the East of twice that amount. The math isn’t adding up.

 

Younker_dump_milk

Stephanie Younker of Mohrsville, Berks County, Pa. watches as her family, along other farms shipping to Clover Farms Dairy in Reading, dump two days worth of milk early this week. According to the Northeast Market Administrator’s office, six to eight different milk ‘handlers’, many of them cooperatives, reported dumping milk at the end of March and that more reports are expected into the first week of April as stores continued limiting purchases with varying availability.

March ends with dairy supply chain bottlenecks, utilization management; Farmers forced to dump milk while stores limit dairy purchases

By Sherry Bunting, Farmshine, Friday, April 3 edition (updated)

BROWNSTOWN, Pa. — While most supermarkets placed limits on consumer purchases of milk, butter and other dairy products — with the majority still enforcing those limits through April 1 at this writing — dairy farmers were forced to dump unprecedented amounts of milk throughout the Mid-Atlantic, Northeast and Southeastern states. Reports late Wednesday indicate some dumping also began in Wisconsin this week.

On Wednesday, the Northeast Market Administrator’s office confirmed six to eight different handlers, principally cooperatives, had reported dumping milk at the end of March in the Northeast Federal Milk Marketing Order. (Payment, pricing and utilization of Class I beverage milk is regulated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) under 11 Federal Milk Marketing Order regions across the country. Prices paid to farmers are based in part on the receipts and utilization reports that are filed by milk “handlers” at the end of each month — dividing the milk by how it was used into four classes of which Class I beverage milk is the highest priced, Class II is frozen and soft products, Class III is cheese, and Class IV is butter and powder and is typically the lowest class.)

USDA Dairy Programs in Washington had received numerous phone calls and inquiries from milk handlers (processing plants and cooperatives) last week and issued a notice late last Wednesday, March 25, stating that, “In response to questions from the dairy industry, USDA will be implementing allowable flexibilities … to meet the changing consumer demand within the Federal milk marketing order program. The flexibilities will meet changing needs of both the dairy farmer and dairy processor and manufacturing communities to ensure efficient milk movements from farm to table. USDA wants the public to feel reassured that retail outlets will have milk available.”

Microsoft Word - GEN-#522324-v1-Covid-19_Response_Letter-March_2This was followed by a letter (above) from the Northeast Milk Market Administrator, allowing flexibility for milk to move from unregulated non-pool dairy product plants into regulated Class I beverage or pool plants and between Milk Marketing Order areas to serve “increasing demand” for fluid milk. The same document states that milk disposal on farms that are “historically associated” with the Order can be dumped, pooled and priced on the Order as “other use” at the lowest Class value. (Clarification: Outside milk from other Orders going into Class I use would be pooled and priced on the Order from which the milk came.)

For March 2020, Class IV is the lowest value, with the price announced for all Federal Orders Wednesday, April 1 at $14.87 per hundredweight (100 pounds) or $1.27/gal. compared with the Class I beverage milk price in the Northeast for March at $20.71 ($1.78/gal). The more Class IV or dumped ‘other use’ milk priced on the order for March, the lower the blend price paid to all farmers for all uses combined. It is already looking like prices paid to farmers for the next three months could fall into the $13 to $14 / hundredweight ($1.16/gal) range or lower. Average breakeven price for farms to produce milk is $17/hundredweight or $1.45-$1.50/gal.)

What started with the news that Mount Joy Farmers Cooperative and the greater DFA cooperative would be forced to dump eastern Lancaster County milk into manure pits for lack of a plant to process it over the weekend (March 28-29), grew to include confirmation of farmers in Berks, Lebanon, Cumberland, Franklin and Perry Counties being forced to dump milk into early this week. And reports from western Pennsylvania indicate the same.

By Monday, all independent dairy farm producers for Clover Farms Dairy in nearby Reading, Pa. were receiving notices that they would have to dump 48 hours worth of month-end milk between Monday and Wednesday (March 30-Apr. 1).

Add to this, confirmation that DFA members were having to dump milk in New York and Vermont, and that small independent cooperatives in New York were either having to dump some of their milk or were being shut out of the ‘spot’ market and having to dump all of their milk. Farms in the Southeast states began reporting they, too, were being notified they would have to dump milk with no where for it to go.

Furthermore, Land O’Lakes member farms in Pennsylvania’s mid-state reported dumping significant milk loads Tuesday, after shipments to the Weis Markets bottling plant in Sunbury, Pa. were turned away despite the Weis Markets stores throughout the region having scant supplies of milk and still enforcing 2-gallon per shopper limits as of Wednesday, April 1.

Walmart

Walmart’s milk cooler in Hamburg, Berks County, Pa. on April 1, 2020

As Walmart, Weis, Aldi’s, Target, some Giant stores, and others were confirmed to have sparse or empty dairy coolers — and a few chains and small town stores reported good stocks of milk and some dairy products — farmers continued to be forced to dump their milk, being told the dairy plants were full, the stores were not ordering, and consumer demand had shrunk after being described by USDA the previous week as “exponentially higher” than a year ago and “extraordinary”, “haywire” and “overcoming inventories” the week before that.

target_butter

Signs like this one at Target were the rule, not the exception among many store chains this week, while nearby dairy farmers were forced to dump milk.

Adding to the complexity of the issue is milk silos and tanks full of cream that could not be moved as candy makers and bakeries closed or cut back, and foodservice and institutional trade came to a standstill.

As the industry supply chain adjusts product lines from schools, restaurants and other foodservice products to retail-packaged products, some plants reported not being able to process milk fast enough for two weeks of surging demand, bringing outside milk in — only to find the stores had started limiting consumer purchases or were spreading their risk of running out by stocking other brands. Difficulties unloading milk to stores in New York City was also cited.

In store dairy cases where milk was most scarce this week, store managers indicated issues with getting supplemental milk from other processors in other areas due to regulatory pricing “zones”, which they interpreted to mean that milk was being rationed so a more uniform distribution of available supplies would occur.

In terms of retail manufactured products, butter continues to be mostly unavailable at stores checked throughout the Mid-Atlantic region, and reports coming in from other areas indicate similar scant supplies and restricted purchases.

By Wednesday, April 1, some stores were re-stocked with milk and dairy products, and a few chains were lifting restrictions on gallons of milk, but they were the exception, not the rule. Almost universally, however, butter was absent or limited at retail outlets despite a cold storage bulk inventory report by USDA last week stating there was 25% more butter in storage than a year ago. Still, last week, processors made more bulk butter for foodservice that ended up in inventory, doing ‘print’ butter for retail on more of a hand-to-mouth basis, and the result is obvious in the lack of butter available to consumers seeking it at retail.

Jennifer Huson, senior director of communications for DFA Northeast reports that anyone having to dispose of milk should take measurements.

According to USDA Dairy Programs, producers should also collect an agitated sample. If not available, it is possible that missing samples can be quantified using previous and next samples in order to calculate protein and butterfat levels for the volumes of discarded milk that in most cases officials say will still be pooled and priced on the Federal Orders.

It is also apparent — according to Federal Order rules and the announced flexibilities — that Class I handlers have a clear financial incentive to price and pool this dumped milk on the Order because it will be priced at the lowest class value ($14.87 instead of $20.71), allowing them to draw from the pool while diluting the previously exponentially higher Class I utilization percentage experienced across the entire Northeast Federal Order the previous two weeks in terms of reducing the USDA blended price based on the milk handlers’ reports of receipts and utilization for March due around April 10 to the Market Administrator’s office.

While there are conflicting reports from some plants and handlers about whether farmers will be paid for the milk they are forced to dump, DFA says dumped milk will be pooled and paid, but they are tracking and looking at it from a comprehensive standpoint to see how to handle and aggregate it going forward.

“We want to make sure we are doing everything we can to fully understand our best opportunities moving forward through dynamics that are changing day by day and hour by hour,” said Huson. “Most importantly, in these uncertain times, we are working to make sure milk continues to be picked up, plants continue to operate, and wholesome dairy products continue to be available to consumers. We are not sure what is coming at us, and we want to make sure as this is evolving that we are doing all of those things.”

Look for a full and ongoing report next week in Farmshine.

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