Milk - General
A Navy SEAL with Ag Committee seniority faces a dairy farmer who lived the economics that forced her family to sell after 150 years. Both want your vote.
Two accidents. Two recoveries. Two back braces hanging on an office wall. And one lesson a California dairy nutritionist learned the hard way: “Professionally, we’re all replaceable. But family? That’s different.”
On September 11, 2001, Dan Baginski should have been at his desk on the 78th floor of the World Trade Center’s South Tower. Instead, he was 3,000 miles away — milking cows at the Washington State Fair.
The semi arrived in October 2005 to take our 100 dairy cows. With them went decades of 5 a.m. alarms, my father’s identity and a way of life that defined our family.
As the U.S. dairy industry races toward fewer than 20,000 farms by decade’s end, the economics of overhead, the psychology of scale and the power dynamics of vertical integration are rewriting the rules of who survives — and who thrives.
As Silicon Valley hunts for rural land and water, Wisconsin dairy farmers face a $23,000-per-acre crisis that threatens to price the next generation out of their own family heritage.
At MVP Dairy, two fourth-generation farm families with more than 100 years of farming history have come together to build a system where every decision is made with the next generation in mind.
Jordy was more than a pet; he was a partner, coworker and the steady soul of our farm for 10 years. We honor the legacy of a dog who lived for the work and loved us through every season.