2-26 IAN Williams Chat

2-26 IAN Williams Chat

 A cheesemakers perspective on the dairy industry in Idaho.

 I talked with the president and CEO of Glanbia foods recently and found him very engaging. “We export about 10% of our cheese into foreign markets and we intend to grow that so that gives opportunities to our farmers to expand but they are not going to expand unless it is profitable. Idaho land through a pretty rough patch and had one time we were at, as very farmers  call it, at ground zero in terms of milk pricing and economics but we have clawed our way and there are a few places that are worse economically, such as California and the Southwest but there are a lot of places that are better too. Those places that are closer to the feed supply. What will happen here continually is that farmers will look for a different way to put a ration together that may be does not require as much corn from the mid-West to be their cows because that is where the real expense comes in. I do not want to go down the whole road of ethanol because is getting into politics but it is crazy me that we earned 40% of our corn crop for fuel. The statistics that I have seen show that it is more expensive to burn corn for fuel particularly as we look at becoming the world’s largest oil producer by 2020.”

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