09/18/08 Some Washington dairy herds retired

Washington Ag September 18, 2008 Cooperatives Working Together, CWT, has completed the farm audits of its fifth dairy herd retirement round conducted earlier this summer. The result is the removal of nearly 25-thousand cows representing 436 million pounds of milk. The average accepted bid was $6.10 a hundredweight. As has been the case with its previous herd retirement rounds, most of the cows removed were in the western regions of the U.S. There were at least three Washington dairies involved in this latest herd retirement. The operators were Carol Miller of Burlington, Sid and Emma Top of Sedro-Woolley and Richard Van Dam of Enumclaw. Chris Galen of the National Milk Producers Federation says this fifth retirement round also offered a bred heifer option but there weren't many takers. Galen: "We only removed 275. A lot of that is probably the price we were offering was modest. It just over $1000 per animal. And I would imagine that most producers who had bred heifers chose to sell them otherwise. Another factor says Galen may have the requirement that all bred heifers had to be offered, not just some of them. By the way, Cougar Gold, Washington State University's signature cheese, earned a second place award in its category this summer in the 2008 American Cheese Society Competition I'm Bob Hoff.