Dairy Expo

Dairy Expo

Rick Worthington
Rick Worthington
If you are a Dairy Farmer - there is a good chance you attended the World Dairy Expo at the beginning of October in Madison, Wisconsin.

Mark Stephenson, the director of dairy policy at UW-Madison was also a speaker at the event. He says, the event has become a must attend for nearly everyone in the Dairy industry.

"We typically are seeing something like 75,000 visitors. Obviously, that's more than all the dairy farms in this country, and in fact we usually have people from close to 100 different countries of the world who come in here for this particular event."

Stephenson says, the issue of milk prices for producers is ever-present, and now, there are industry wide concerns about immigrant labor.

"Much of the labor on dairy farms today is supplied by immigrant labor, with a lot of the concerns that we've had with trying to make sure that all labor is well documented."

Reliable estimates are that immigrant labor accounts for just over half the number of people working on dairy farms nationwide.

The industry faces challenges both old and new as it adapts to changing trends in milk production, processing and herd genetics. The critical factor of consumer demand also is shifting.

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