The 32^nd National Conference on Interstate Milk Shipments (NCIMS) was held April 17-22 in Orlando and National Milk’s Director of Regulatory Affairs, Jamie Jonker, reported one of the topics in Thursday’s DairyLine, namely a proposal for the NCIMS to support the allowance of raw milk sales across state lines.

“The NCIMS and the Pasteurized Milk Ordinance that comes out of it, are about milk safety of Grade A products,” Jonker said. “The conference felt that it (the proposal) would send the wrong message,” so it was defeated. He likened it to “playing defense,” and said that allowing raw milk sales across state lines “would have a negative impact on the industry.”

Advocates, almost with religious fervor, view raw milk as a natural elixir and believe we are hurting consumers by limiting access to raw milk but Jonker counters, “Data shows conclusively that pasteurization really is what we need to do to ensure the safety of our milk products for the American consumer.”

“Milk provides a great nutritious product for everyone in the U.S.,” he said, “But raw milk can have issues leading to illness and when we look at data from the CDC (Center for Disease Control) we see that states that have allowed sales of raw milk at some point of time over the past 10-15 years they’re more likely to have outbreaks due to raw milk consumption.” Pasteurization is almost a “silver bullet,” he concluded, “that makes milk safe for everyone to consume.”

April Federal order milk prices are announced Friday morning. Downes-O’Neill dairy economist, Bill Brooks, predicts the Class III price will hit $10.76 per hundredweight. That would be a gain of 32 cents from March but would be $6 below April 2008. He looks for the Class IV price to come in at $9.84. That would be a 20 cent gain from March but $4.72 below a year ago. We will post official prices here as soon as possible.

Over the last few years, more Americans have started to recognize exercise as a critical component of a healthy lifestyle. The International Dairy Foods Association’s, Miranda Robertson, reported in Wednesday’s “Processor’s Perspective” program that this trend “creates a huge opportunity to expand demand for milk, simply by promoting its sports recovery benefits.”

The “Refuel With Chocolate Milk” message is catching on in a big way, according to Robertson. High school, college and even professional athletes are reaching for chocolate milk after exercise, she said. “It’s a smart sports drink with nine essential nutrients not found in most traditional sports drinks.”

To boost awareness of milk’s recovery benefits and help consumers see milk in this new light, the Milk Processor Education Program (MILKPEP) and Dairy Management Inc have teamed up to support three new studies, which will add to the body of research supporting chocolate milk as a post-exercise beverage.

“The new research will help us understand more about how chocolate milk may affect muscle and post-exercise recovery,” Robertson said. These studies from top research institutions look at the benefits of drinking chocolate milk compared to traditional sports drinks for different types of athletes or non-athletes, she said.

The MILKPEP is taking milk’s recovery message directly to moms. Twelve-time Olympian medalist, mother & author, Dara Torres, is the newest face of the milk mustache campaign. She is the ideal spokesperson to deliver milk’s recovery message to moms, Robertson said. Dara unveiled her new milk mustache ad at a recent press conference and shared her secret training weapon and key to her killer abs: chocolate milk. Her ad will run in Fitness, Women’s Health, Time, Newsweek, People, Shape, and Women’s Day to name a few. To learn more about “Refuel for Moms,” www.visitwhymilk.com and for more information on the teen program, visit www.bodybymilk.com

Standard Podcast [ 0:01 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Cheese trading at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange started the week with a slip despite some positive perception from last week’s Cold Storage report and the March Milk Production report prior to that. News of a possible swine flu pandemic was raising havoc in many commodity markets according to some insiders.

Dr. Robert Cropp, Emeritus Professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, said in Tuesday’s DairyLine that he hadn’t thought of that and wasn’t sure why swine flu news would affect dairy markets.

As to why cheese prices remain so weak, Cropp said that February cheese output was fairly strong and it’s strong seasonally. He has heard reports that many plants are full and stocks are ample. The March 31 report had American stocks up 6.8 percent from a year ago and total cheese was up over 8 percent.

On the other hand, Cropp pointed out that milk production is slipping, according to the March report, and California output was off 3 percent, a “significant amount,” but he sees cheese prices remaining close to current levels for a while as we “clean out some stocks but as we move through the summer and early fall, I think you’re going to see some comeback.”

Buyers aren’t building a lot of inventory and are taking advantage of the low prices as they need cheese but he sees strength returning in June, July, and August. Don’t expect $2.00 cheese, he cautioned, but $1.30-$1.40 seems like a “reasonable number,” he said.

He does not expect cheese prices to fall to the government support level and product moving to government warehouses unless the price falls well below support so as to make it economically feasible to sell to Uncle Sam. We’re close to it on the barrels, he admitted, but he doesn’t expect cheese to move to the government.

Dr. Gary Neubauer continues his discussion on extended therapy.

Standard Podcast [ 0:01 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Dairy Profit Weekly editor, Dave Natzke, also attended the National Dairy Leaders conference this week in Denver and reported Friday that the economy and its impact on farmers’ milk prices was on everybody’s mind. He said there still seems to be some “shock” among producers on how quickly and how far milk prices have fallen.

Many western dairy farmers he talked with said that, at current milk prices, they were losing up to $3 per cow per day, or nearly $100,000 per month, for each 1,000 cows.

Regionally, Natzke reported that there was concern over the recent collapse of the New Frontier Bank of Greeley, which some estimated provided financing for up to one-third of the dairy cows in Colorado and adjoining states.

“Despite the economic situation, producers and other dairy leaders were engaged in many other issues affecting their businesses,” Natzke said, “A good sign that they do see a future in the dairy industry.”

Updating DairyLine listeners on recent developments in the ongoing rbST-free debate; Natzke reported that a U.S. district judge has denied an injunction sought by the International Dairy Foods Association and Organic Trade Association to block implementation of Ohio’s milk labeling rule that restricts use of “rbST-free” or “hormone-free” labels, ruling that such labels are misleading. Similar labeling legislation was approved in Kansas, and awaits the governor’s decision.

Meanwhile, the Oregon Physicians for Social Responsibility, which opposes use of recombinant bovine somatotropin, said more than half of the nation’s 100 largest dairy processors have completely or partially discontinued accepting milk from cows supplemented with rbST.

In contrast, Natzke reported on a study involving milk processing company executives and consumers which concluded that the dairy industry may have overreacted and acted too quickly in prohibiting rbST use by their dairy farmer suppliers. The report said the shift to “rbST-free milk” was driven by a small percentage of consumers and yielded minimal consumer response, according to Natzke, and most executives said they would not make the decision again.

Monday, we’ll learn from a California dairy producer why she’s not concerned over the talk about “sustainability” and dairy farmers and we have our weekly Pfizer “Vet Visit” in our second half.

In tandem with the publication of the entire cattle genome, a consortium of researchers led by scientists at the University of California, Davis, are unveiling the first comprehensive overview of the portion of the genome, or entire collection of genes, responsible for milk and milk production in cattle and six other species of mammals.

Findings from the study by the Bovine Lactation Genome Consortium paint a vivid picture of the molecular evolution of milk and lactation, and will be published in the April 24 issue of the online journal Genome Biology.

The paper appears as a companion piece to the landmark sequencing of the entire cattle genome, which will be published in two reports in the April 24 issue of the journal Science. That announcement marks the climax of a six-year effort to complete, analyze and interpret the cattle genome. The massive project was carried out by a collaborative of more than 300 scientists from 25 countries, including the UC Davis researchers. It was coordinated by the Baylor College of Medicine Human Genome Sequencing Center.

Data produced by the overall genome sequencing will enable researchers to identify genetic variations in cattle that are important not only for milk production and milk composition but also for reproduction, feed efficiency, meat quality and disease resistance. It will have direct application in helping to guide the selection of high-performing individuals in cattle breeding programs.

“The sequencing of the cattle genome represents a breakthrough for the study of milk and lactation,” said Danielle Lemay, the lead author on the milk genome study and a bioinformatician and nutrition scientist in UC Davis’ Department of Food Science and Technology.

“When paired with existing data, the bovine genome sequence is something of a modern Rosetta stone, making it possible to identify and interpret the significance of genes related to milk and lactation,” she said.

Researchers note that the genome sequence and the identification of sequence variation will improve the accuracy and efficiency of genetic selection in cattle by allowing the evaluation of an animal’s whole genome. The genome sequence also opens the door to the identification and description of all cattle genes and to the understanding of their function in relation to production traits. This information will be valuable in improving the sustainability of the dairy and beef cattle breeding systems.

The milk genome

The milk-genome researchers focused on cattle genes involved with milk and the lactation process because of the unique role that milk plays in the lives of cattle, humans and all other mammals.

“Milk uniquely informs us about nutrition because it is the only food that has evolved specifically to nourish mammals,” said UC Davis professor and food scientist Bruce German.

“Because milk is produced for offspring at great physiological expense to the mother, we can theorize that there are few superfluous components in milk,” he said. “Generation after generation, those animals that are able to produce more nourishing milk perpetuate their genes through the survival and reproductive success of their offspring.”

Study findings

In the companion paper on the milk genome, the researchers identified 197 milk-protein genes and more than 6,000 milk-production genes within the overall cattle genome. They dramatically narrowed the search for genes that affect milk traits by overlaying this data on existing information regarding 238 DNA segments that are known to be associated with particular traits.

“Overall, the findings of our study support the hypothesis that the biological roots of milk production in mammals are quite ancient and that the evolution of milk has been constrained in order to maximize the survival of both mother and offspring,” said Juan Medrano, a professor of animal genetics in UC Davis’ Department of Animal Science.

In the study, the researchers examined the genomes of cattle, humans, dogs, mice and rats — all mammals that carry their young for long periods in the mother’s body, where they are nourished by a placenta. This genome comparison also included the opossum, as representative of marsupials, which carry their young in a pouch after birth, and the platypus, which is one of only two species of mammals that lay eggs rather than giving birth to live young.

By comparing the genes of these seven species of mammals, they discovered that, compared to other cattle genes, the individual milk and milk-production genes are:

• more likely to be found in all mammals, despite the wide diversity of lactation strategies;
• less likely to have changed as news species evolved; and
• evolving more slowly in cattle than in other species.

The researchers also found that the milk proteins that remained the same across species were those proteins related to secreting milk in mammals. Conversely, those milk proteins that had diverged the most from species to species were those associated with the nutritional and immunological components of milk.

This suggests that the immunological component of milk is tailored to the particular needs of each species and highlights the need for future nutrition research to examine how foods might be tailored to meet individual immunological needs, the researchers noted.

The research consortium and funding

The Bovine Lactation Genome Consortium is a team of 19 scientists with specialties spanning molecular biology, immunology, food science, evolutionary biology, bioinformatics, statistics, mammary biology, animal genetics and bovine biology. The team was born out of the International Milk Genomics Consortium, which was initiated in 2004 by UC Davis scientists and housed at the California Dairy Research Foundation to study the biological processes underlying mammalian milk genomics. More information about the consortium and its members is available at: http://lactoknow.ucdavis.edu/.

Funding for researchers participating in the bovine lactation genome study was provided by the International Milk Genomics Consortium, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, the U.S. Department of Agriculture Agricultural Research Service, New Zealand’s Foundation for Research Science and Technology, the California Dairy Research Foundation, the National Human Genome Research Institute, Genome Canada and Genome BC, the Swiss National Science Foundation, Australia’s Cooperative Research Centre for Innovative Dairy Products, and the Gardiner Foundation.

About UC Davis

For 100 years, UC Davis has engaged in teaching, research and public service that matter to California and transform the world. Located close to the state capital, UC Davis has 31,000 students, an annual research budget that exceeds $500 million, a comprehensive health system and 13 specialized research centers. The university offers interdisciplinary graduate study and more than 100 undergraduate majors in four colleges — Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, Biological Sciences, Engineering, and Letters and Science — and advanced degrees from six professional schools — Education, Law, Management, Medicine, Veterinary Medicine and the Betty Irene Moore School of Nursing.

Jerry Dryer, editor of the Dairy & Food Market Analyst newsletter and chief market analyst for Rice Dairy in Chicago, extolled the virtues of the export market in Wednesday’s broadcast. U.S. dairy exports are down significantly from a year ago, due to a struggling world economy, and, when asked if this thinking is realistic right now, he responded, “Maybe not this afternoon but it’s certainly realistic longer term.”

Dryer praised the New Zealand’s announcement Monday that it had sold about 160,000 metric tons of nonfat dry milk to China. It was probably at a “fire sale price,” he admitted, “But it means the inventory moved out and is not hanging over the market so there’s some opportunity for prices to begin firming up.”

Dryer also reported that a large U.S. cheese manufacturer will begin producing Gouda cheese and Gouda is what the world market wants, he said. World cheese supplies are not in the great abundance that butter and nonfat dry milk supplies have been, according to Dryer.

Dryer admonished U.S. manufacturers to produce what the world market wants. “The best defense is a good offense,” he said, “We’re dropping the ball there.”

A lot of people are grumbling about growing imports of milk protein concentrate and butter blends, according to Dryer, but both of them can be produced and should be produced in the U.S., he argued.

Some production has come on line, he admitted, but “We need to be producing the products the U.S. market wants as well. That’s the best way to prevent some of that imported product from coming into the U.S. Make the product here.”

Dryer says the government price support program is partly responsible for that not happening. The government is a guaranteed market for nonfat dry milk, for example, he said, and, if you can’t sell it anywhere else you can always sell it to the government.

If a company produces milk protein concentrate and can’t find a buyer, they have a problem, Dryer concluded, and “That has limited some of the innovation and competitiveness and sense of adventure that we should have had among manufacturers in the U.S.” For more dairy news CLICK HERE

John Ellsworth provides advice for tough times in this “Success Strategies”podcast.

Standard Podcast [ 0:01 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

The cash dairy markets showed little reaction to what could have been perceived as a bullish production report. The University of Wisconsin’s Dr. Brian Gould said in Tuesday’s DairyLine that the market was neutral in its response because the report was what the market had expected, yet he thought it surprising, being as this was the first down turn in production since June 2004.

He said the drop was a result of per cow output being down and a drop in cow numbers but he believes revisions will show an even larger drop in cow numbers.

He also pointed to the regional variation in milk output from the impact of current low milk prices. He cited California’s, Idaho’s, and New York’s drop and Wisconsin and Minnesota’s increase. Texas and New Mexico also registered increases, he said, and it’s “interesting as to who is being impacted by current prices. The Upper Midwest seems to be weathering this storm quite nicely.”

But Gould warned that last week’s Dairy Market News shows that the heavy culling that we have seen result from the CWT herd removals and the higher feed costs appears to be leveling out and the decline in milk output may not hold.