Dairy News & Insights for Progressive Farmers

168 Steers. One Closeout. $33,000 Riding on the Sire Sheet You Ordered Last Fall.
A 480-cow Panhandle dairy pulled its full-year beef-on-dairy closeout this spring. The verified load grading alongside it cleared $33,000 more. Same p […]
Kansas Added a Vermont’s Worth of Cows – and the $16.82 Milk Math Is Ugly
Kansas added ~47,000 milk cows in twelve months and now sits near 234,000. A modeled 5,000‑cow Edwards County build needs $19.07/cwt to clear DSCR. Ap […]
Holstein’s $40,500 Inbreeding Bill – and the USDA Bulls Your Stud Isn’t Selling You
99.84% of active Holstein AI bulls trace paternally to two grandfathers. Penn State proved the lineages we walked away from in the 1980s still work. S […]
$137.50/Cow and a June 11 Deadline: USDA Just Yanked 10 Lenders
On May 11, your REAP biodigester deal is penciled at 4.75% FSA money. On May 12, your lender lost OneRD approval. That's $137.50/cow on a 400-co […]
A 1943 Land Girl Cost More Per CWT Than Your 2026 Crew. The H‑2A Math Explains Why.
Inflation-adjusted, a 1943 6‑cow British dairy and hired labor lands in the mid‑single‑digit dollars per cwt. Your 2,000‑cow neighbor on H‑2A pa […]

Paul Detwiler moved the world’s elite dairy embryos safely for 30 years. Dies in a tractor accident at 60. The dairy industry lost one of its quiet builders Sunday afternoon. Paul Detwiler — the man who built Select Sires' direct-transfer embryo business in the 1990s and then ran the…
Holstein Inbreeding Hit 9.99%. Genomics Didn’t Fix the Chief/Elevation Trap – It Built Bell 2.0. Lactanet just clocked Canadian Holstein heifers at 9.99% inbreeding — climbing 0.25% a year, more than double Jersey. On 1,500 cows, that's a modeled $180–250K hit. The fix? A toggle…
Holstein’s $40,500 Inbreeding Bill – and the USDA Bulls Your Stud Isn’t Selling You 99.84% of active Holstein AI bulls trace paternally to two grandfathers. Penn State proved the lineages we walked away from in the 1980s still work. So why aren't they in…
$80M on Her Land, $0 in Carbon Credits: Inside Curtis Creek’s RNG Trade An $80M Sedron Varcor nutrient-recovery plant now sits on Curtis Creek ground, alongside the dairy's separate anaerobic digester and RNG operation. The farm keeps about $250K/year in avoided costs —…
Kaarmona Bosa Buoy 15: How a $54,000 Jersey Took 32 Years to Build A Northern Victoria dispersal just rewrote the Australian Jersey record book — and turned a 32-year cow family into one of the most-watched genetic estates in the country. Kaarmona Bosa…

$3,010 Heifers and the $40,000 Calf Program Math You’re Not Running
On a 500‑cow herd with 220 heifer calves a year, even 4% pre‑weaning mortality buries about $27,000 in lost heifers alone — a […]
World Dairy Expo Is the Benchmark. These 10 Other Shows Are Worth Your Passport.
WDE draws 53,000+ from 95 countries. The Royal matches its class‑for‑class. Japan's Grand Prix runs once every five years. Ei […]
Burt Haugen Came Home From Vietnam in ’68 to Milk Cows. He’s One of the 0.4%.
Haugen runs an organic dairy across the highway from Joint Base Lewis-McChord. 9% of U.S. farmers served. Just 0.4% of them m […]
Maughlin Storm Built the Modern Holstein Cow. He Also Hid a Killer in Her Pedigree.
One $4,400 heifer calf in 1987 became the most copied type sire of his generation — and a 1.3kb APOB insertion that reached 1 […]
$60 Silage, $220 Delivered: The 28% Hidden Premium on a 500-Cow Bunker
A 500-cow Southwest dairy booked corn silage at $60/ton. Shrink-adjusted, the cows ate $220/ton DM. Same pit, same lab sheet, […]

Stud Wars April 2026 — The Empire Strikes Back STgen owns 36% of the proven TPI top 100. Select Sires took 29.5% of the genomic top 200. United Sires — an independent breeder partnership founded in 2024 — grabbed…
How Albert Cormier Rewrote the Rules of Global Holstein Business – and Made the Whole Industry Catch Up Summer 2005, Lylehaven Lila Z on the block, gavel falls at $1.15M — first Holstein past seven figures in 20 years. But the real disruption wasn't the price. It was…
The New FMMO Rule Costs a 500-Cow Dairy $97,750 a Year – Before a Mile of Freight One of North Dakota's last 18 Grade A dairies just got directed to a new milk market twice in 30 months. The nearest plant that'll take the load sits five…
Roxy, Dellia and The Mothers Who Built the Breed Roxy, Dellia, Blackrose and seven more didn’t just make famous pedigrees. They built the cow families still showing up in bull books, embryos and your best heifers. R554 Roxy, Dellia…
Maughlin Storm Built the Modern Holstein Cow. He Also Hid a Killer in Her Pedigree. One $4,400 heifer calf in 1987 became the most copied type sire of his generation — and a 1.3kb APOB insertion that reached 17% of Canadian heifers and 4.4% of…