Dairy Defined National Milk Producers Federation

Dairy farming continues to advance in sustainability and animal welfare as technology and scientific understanding evolves, ensuring better care for the planet and for animals, said Jamie Jonker, NMPF vice president for sustainability and scientific affairs.

While success is never guaranteed, we at NMPF see we’re gaining critical momentum needed to make 2020 a breakthrough year in the long-running fight against dairy imitators who misuse dairy terms on their products.

Despite trade headwinds, U.S. dairy producers are seeing real export gains that are crucial for supporting milk prices now and in years to come, said Tom Vilsack, president and CEO of the U.S. Dairy Export Council, in this week’s Dairy Defined Podcast.

Election years always pose challenges for getting things done on Capitol Hill, but dairy is well-positioned to make gains in 2020, according to Paul Bleiberg, the National Milk Producers Federation’s vice president of government relations. 

U.S. milk prices ended 2019 at their highest in five years. And while 2020 may see those gains cool off a bit, they should stay high enough for many producers to start recovering from the doldrums they faced in the second half of the 2010s.  

To understand how dairy can be a part of climate solutions, it’s important to be clear about the role it plays in greenhouse gas emissions in the first place, said Dr. Frank Mitloehner, a professor in animal science at the University of California-Davis.  
“Comparing cows versus cars is a major flaw” in how climate impacts are measured, he said, because agriculture is part of a carbon life cycle, rather than an extraction of resources that have been in the ground for millions of years. “We know every detail about the impact of dairies on greenhouse gases, on air and water pollutants, and so forth. We know what these impacts are, and we know how to further mitigate those,” Mitloehner said.