7-19 FB Dairy Good and Bad

 It’s the old good news bad news thing, this time with the dairy industry, but it’s no joke. I had a chat with Bob Naerebout, Executive Director, Idaho Dairymen's Association and he reported to me that one of the primary issues driving the dairy economy in the state relates to feed whether it be corn or hay. Here’s part of the conversation: “Hay prices hopefully stabilizing and coming down this year, they were extremely high last year, there is a lot of carryover hay that was for sale coming into the 1st part of this year so we are looking for prices for hay hopefully to stabilize. We are also lobbying hard to continue to have government programs that impact the cost of power inputs such as ethanol and ethanol mandates to get those either diminished or eliminated. We do blame the increase in input costs on 2 things: one is the ethanol mandate where they are taking up some much of the corn and the other is the growing economies of Third World countries which are not only buying our dairy products, for which we are appreciative, but they are also buying a lot of the inputs to raise some of their own livestock products and that is increasing our costs. China is shipping thousands and thousands of heifers. Well, heifers go that way but also a lot of hay goes that way into the Asian countries so they are in direct competition.