Economic challenges dominated the dairy landscape in 2009.  Harbingers of better days to come, financially speaking, are arriving, but farmers won’t be counting their chickens, or eggs, or whatever they are, prematurely.

Another thing we can be certain of is that challenges to the entire livestock  sector about what I would call the “freedom to operate” will continue to intensify.  Two key themes have emerged, and will grow in prominence.  One has to do with how animals are housed and treated; the other, the types of things they are treated with.  From just this past week’s headlines, here are just a couple harbingers of that:

First, the Associated Press runs this story nationally about how the dairy sector is responding to an assault by the Humane Society of the United States, in California and elsewhere, concerning the treatment of dairy cattle.  This particular story did a credible job of explaining the rationale behind NMPF’s new National Dairy FARM animal care program.  Mostly, the story is more writing on the wall that consumers, food retailers, and branded product marketers, are all looking for reassurances about the conditions under which farms animals are raised.  The pork and poultry people have it worse, but as the dairy sector in California learned in 2009, the deck can be stacked so heavily that there’s hardly even a battle to fight.

The Associated Press also ran this story a few days ago looking at the use of antibiotics in food animals (a topic I have broached previously this year).  This issue also galvanizes the animal rights community, and it brings in the food safety crowd as well…and in so doing, broadens the political impact of the controversy beyond just animal housing, since there are human health implications to the antibiotic use issue.  The use of sub-therapeutic use of antimicrobials in livestock is clearly a battle that will be heavily contested as a public health matter, and all of agriculture is backed into the corner.

Obviously, neither one of these trends is a good-news item for dairy producers.  I raise them, however,  because they are consumer issues that unquestionably have reached the national public policy stage this year, and will remain there in 2010.  Happy (?!) New Year.

Those old enough to remember the 1960s TV show Lost in Space will recognize the phrase “Danger, Danger, Will Robinson,” which would be uttered by the Robot when his alarm bells went off.

We had a similar signal sent Monday by the Environmental Protection Agency, when Administrator Lisa Jackson set off the greenhouse gas alarms.  Jackson announced an “endangerment finding,” which holds that greenhouse gases pose a serious threat to public health and the environment.  As a result of that finding, the EPA is moving ahead with plans to regulate significant point sources of carbon dioxide and methane – a development that may affect farms and feedlots, depending on how wide a net they cast.

Farm policy organizations like NMPF had fully expected this day to arrive; the process has been snowballing down the proverbial hill for quite some time.  In its defense, the EPA is bound by a Supreme Court ruling to do something to mitigate the flow of greenhouse gases.  The expectation was that Congress would enact a law to cut down on greenhouse gas emissions, similar to the cap and trade bill that passed the House of Representatives earlier this year, or the somewhat different bill that the Senate took up this fall.  But the prospects of a final cap and trade bill getting all the way through Congress, and reaching the President’s desk, are far from certain.

So the endangerment klaxon this week is the other shoe dropping.  If Congress doesn’t do something, the regulators at the EPA will.  As of right now, EPA says any source emitting fewer than 25,000 tons of carbon a year will not be covered.  NMPF estimates that figure represents a dairy farm of 3200 cows, of which there are maybe a couple hundred in the U.S. at most.  But the reporting and mitigation requirements may change as the regulations gush forth like a melting glacier. 

As President Obama’s presence in Copenhagen this month demonstrates, this administration intends to do something about greenhouse gases if the Congress does not.  Farmers and consumers have a great deal riding on how it plays out.