There is time-honored political axiom that says there are two things that you never want to see being made.  One is sausage.  The other is legislation.  That was certainly the case as the Senate and House furiously dealt with the fiscal cliff, the dairy cliff, and farm policy.  All were woven together on New Year's Eve and New Year's Day, and it seems no one is happy with the outcome so that means it must be as fair as it can get.

   The dairy legislation was what spurred action because Congress did not want the consumer ire of $7 milk dictated by the 1949 Farm Bill. While the latest congressional action averts the "dairy cliff," it also postpones dairy policy reforms that were sought by the National Milk Producers Federation and approved last summer by the U.S. Senate and the House Agriculture Committee.

   Interestingly, the Dairy Security Act was in both the Senate Farm Bill and the House Ag Committee Farm Bill-but was totally eliminated as an alternative solution to the $7 milk problem by Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell who negotiated the compromise.

   What was passed was an extension of the 2008 Milk Income Loss Contract-but was weak in its ability to protect farmers from low dairy prices and high feed costs-which could be the scenario for the next 9 months of the 12 months it will last.

   Farm policy reform did not make it into the rest of the Farm Bill that was extended earlier this week.  Although nearly all sectors wanted to abandon direct payments, that was the program that was extended through September 30-the deadline for Congress to settle on new farm policy. 

Read the full blog post here.  

Related article, "Kicking the Milk Jug Down the Road, click here. 

   "You don't put money in your pocket from the milk price, but from the margin," says Kevin Bernhardt, University of Wisconsin-Platteville and the UW-Extension Center for Dairy Profitability farm management specialist. It's the margin between milk price and input cost that counts. "That's where you make your money," he adds.

    Today's dairy producers need skills in three areas to accomplish this, he says. These are:

*  Production management to get cows to produce quality milk.

*  Cost management to handle how much you spend to get that milk.

*  Marketing as a way to create margins between the first two.

   Knowing how to balance between these three - or at least not to get too stressed out when doing any of them - is the key. "If you take the risk away, you're taking opportunity away," Bernhardt says. "That's the way risk works, and the way risk-management works."

   So, how can you manage your exposure to pricing risks? You have to use the futures market to lock in milk prices, as well as input prices. He encourages producers to do so on both sides of the ledger, realizing that you also need to be able to live with the fact that you won't always be buying at the lowest price nor selling at the highest price.

   "It's about your mind-set," he explains. "Good producers hate to be wrong, but good marketers need to get used to being wrong." The point is to protect your business and follow your marketing protocols so that you act when your trigger is tripped. You can't wait around for "what if?"  

   In fact, there are hundreds - if not thousands - of "experts" on the Internet more than happy to inform you that in this modern age of iPhones and iPads, eating is just too dangerous. Further, you should be aware that the food you're eating is not just killing you and your family it's killing the planet, too.

If you were hoping that 2013 might bring some sanity into the discussion about the safety and sustainability of the food American farmers provide, New York Times columnist - and self-proclaimed foodie - Mark Bittman dispelled such notions with his first column of the New Year. 

   "Heart disease, cancer, stroke and diabetes kill more than a million people a year - nearly half of all deaths - and diet is a root cause of many of those diseases," Bittman wrote. "And the root of that dangerous diet is our system of hyper-industrial agriculture, the kind that uses 10 times as much energy as it produces."

Wow. That part about agriculture using "10 times as much energy as it produces" without any attribution stopped me dead in my tracks. I guess folks are just supposed to swallow that whopper whole, but Bittman doesn't stop with the criticism.

   He says our food system has "been a major contributor to climate change, spawned the obesity crisis, poisoned countless volumes of land and water, wasted energy, tortured billions of animals...I could go on."

   There you have it - agriculture is the root of our nation's health and environmental problems. If we believe half of what Bittman claims, those of us who have ever driven a tractor or bucked a bale of hay should feel guilty about contributing to diabetes, heart disease and the melting polar ice caps.

Bittman, however, cares not a whit about whether you or I feel guilty. His objective is to use half-truths, twisted logic and emotionally charged rhetoric to convince gullible Americans that our only source of salvation is to build an organic garden on the balcony of every high-rise in Manhattan, and start eating beef from 5-year-old steers that have been read a bedtime story every night. 

   Livestock production is one of Bittman's primary targets, as he calls on Americans to "un-invent this food system." Specifically, he calls for a movement to improve the living conditions of livestock.

   "Well-cared-for animals will necessarily be more expensive, which means we'll eat fewer of them; that's a win-win," he wrote. "They'll use fewer antibiotics, they'll be produced by more farmers in more places, and they'll eat less commodity grain, which will both reduce environmental damage and allow for more land to be used for high-quality human food like fruits and vegetables." 

Join the tremendous Extension resource, DAIReXNET for this session on Genomics to hear Dr. Dechow review genomic technology and implementation, comparisons of early genomic predictions to actual daughter proofs, a discussion of inbreeding, and how genomics can be used as a herd management tool.