"It will probably come out in the next couple of months," Deborah Cera, team leader for a U.S. Food and Drug Administration Drug Residue Compliance Team, told a dairy audience on Nov. 9.

Addressing the Professional Dairy Producers of Wisconsin Dairy Policy Summit, Cera said one set of samples will be taken from farms that have had a previous history of drug residues in meat from cull cows, and another set will come from a randomized sample of dairies at large.

It will be in the form of a survey, which will be less obtrusive than the aggressive monitoring strategy that FDA had proposed earlier this year.

Samples will not be identified back to the farm of origin. And, "no enforcement actions will be taken (in response to the findings) because this is a survey sample," Cera said.

Eighteen hundred samples - 900 from the farms with previous residue histories and 900 from farms at large - will initially go to the Institute for Food Safety, a private lab in Illinois. From there, they will go to one of three FDA laboratories to test for a broad range of drugs.

LuAnn Troxel, Deb Osza, Andy Gall

What actually happens at the milk processing plant in Goshen? I recently was privileged to get a tour of this interesting facility, a DFA (Dairy Farmers of America) processing plant. The plant manager, Bob Gelke, and the production manager, Andy Gall, organized this tour for our friends at Milk Promotion Services of Indiana and me. Andy also serves as the president of the Indiana Milk Quality Professionals.

I have to admit that I had some preconceived notions about this "drying plant." It was my opinion that when milk was in over supply, this plant was busy. When our own milk hauler would tell us that our milk was "heading to Goshen" where I assumed it would be dried, I had a fear that milk prices were probably heading south. While this could be true, there is so much more that happens. Currently, milk prices are high AND the Goshen plant is busy, operating three shifts 7 days a week.

First of all, let's stop calling it a "drying plant" and start calling it an "ingredient and balancing plant." The DFA Goshen facility is the only balancing plant in Indiana and it provides a huge service to dairy farmers. It is owned by DFA, but they work with many other co-ops and milk manufacturers. Of course we all know that dairy farmers produce a highly perishable product every single day. This plant is the elasticity  in the system that can buffer the challenges not only in over-under supply, but also in holiday and weekend schedules, and other things that can affect getting milk from our farms onto grocery shelves. Here are some hypothetical examples:

• A specialty cheese plant that typically buys 100 tank loads of milk a week only accepts them Monday through Thursday
• A large processing plant has a mechanical breakdown and can't accept its scheduled loads for 24 hours
• An ice cream manufacturer closes down between Christmas and New Years
• After a state inspection, a dairy manufacturing plant must make some adjustments before they can take more milk. Their scheduled loads have to go somewhere

In a nutshell, the job of the Goshen plant is to "take water out of milk." They can do this three different ways: reverse osmosis, evaporation, and drying. They can separate 130 thousand pounds of milk an hour, and they have processed over 3 billion pounds of milk in the past 6 years, including 536 million pounds last year. This is the largest milk processor in Indiana, with 50 employees. They produce pasteurized milk, condensed skim and whole milk cream, non-fat dry milk (at low, medium and high heat), and occasionally they produce butter.  They have a laboratory on-site where rigid quality controls are in place, testing for antibiotics, sediment, flavor, odor, temperature, standardization and testing of finished products, solids, butterfat, added water, standard plate bacteria, and more.

The Goshen plant is a domestic milk ingredient company, meaning that they do not currently sell anything directly as an export. Andy Gall was quick to point out that exports are very important to the dairy industry. As world market and dairy policy changes take place (possibly in the near future) some of these could affect what happens at the Goshen plant.

As dairy farmers, we know what it is like to work nights, weekends, and holidays. It's also good to remember that the Indiana dairy infrastructure, like the folks who work at this DFA plant, as well as our milk haulers and others, are also doing the same...every single day!

For a lot of farm kids, "learning to drive" means learning to drive a tractor before ever driving a car.

Tractors are a big part of family farm life, which is one reason advocacy groups and dozens of congressional representatives have heavily criticized a U.S. Department of Labor proposal that would bar children under age 16 from doing many dangerous farm jobs, such as driving a tractor and handling pesticides. The outcry has been so strong that on Monday, the agency backed away from the Nov. 1 deadline it had set for public comment and extended it another month.

But while traditional family farmers say the change threatens the future of agriculture, child and labor advocates say the plans are a much-needed update to protect vulnerable young workers.
 
The changes do include a legal exemption for farm families that would allow children to work on the farms owned by their parents. But it would still affect many farmers who hire kids in the summer or who have extended family members work on their land.

Read more.