Katie Couric's recent two part series on CBS News exploring the potential for antibiotic use in livestock to promote drug resistance forms of disease in humans was professionally prepared and presented and (to most lay observers) avoided the appearance of one sided, "gotcha" journalism that is so common today. Any reasonable consumer or producer should have been concerned by the contents of her reports.
The temporal context for CBS' series (as well as the recent ABC nightline report on animal abuse on a dairy) is to create a negative public perception about animal agriculture in an attempt to promote Obama administration supported legislation that would prohibit, restrict and regulate much of the antibiotic use current available in livestock. Bills are moving forward in the Senate and the House now - with briefings and hearings occurring weekly. Unfortunately, CBS highlighted only a few carefully selected items of interest and suppressed a large body of science and research that contradicts the point of view they wished to promote. They were even less careful to correctly and scientifically interpret the information that was presented. For a "fair and balanced" evaluation of the report and the underlying facts, a document prepared by Dr. Scott Hurd of Iowa State. He reviewed the first CBS segment and highlighted the statements where the facts don't match up with the story. You can also find this information at http://vetmed.iastate.edu/news/isu-associate-professor-and-former-usda-deputy-undersecretary-food-safety-responds-cbs-news-seg. You might find this information useful as background if you need to respond to questions and concerns that might be expressed by friends and neighbors who saw the TV reports. This Methane Digester science is really hard to understand, and we've been working hard for the last 17 months trying to figure out why our digester, which is supposed to produce about 800 KW on two generators, can only produce 550-600 KW total. Early on we realized that these super generators are designed to be more effecient at the upper levels of electric production. So while it appeared there was enough gas to produce 800 KW, when we started both engines up we could only get about 250 KW on each engine, totalling 500 KW between the two engines. This occured because the engines dropped down into the inefficient production curve, so our challenge became to produce enough gas to get the engines up into a more efficient part of each engines power curve.
This week for some unknown reason, the Digester gas pressure leaped! We we're generating 575 KW, the highest KW we are willing to run one generator without putting undue stress on it. Amazingly, we also maintained 8" of water column on our pressure guage, which is the point at which the emergency gas release valves open to prevent damaging the structure of the Digester. It took us all day yesterday to get the programming done and generator 2 ready to run, but after everything lined up we started running both generators yesterday around 8pm and maintained 625 KW all night long! This an all new record for Bridgewater Dairy. We hope that this continues to increase slowly, and maybe some day soon we will be producing our much longed for 800 KW, 400 KW per generator. Oh yeah, the best part is the question, what did we do differently. The answer: We have no idea! Some friends of ours with digesters have said that after about a year and half of running their digesters, things just got better, well maybe thats what happened to us. Who knows, but lets hope this continues!! 2009 was a year to be remembered or maybe forgotten for both the Dairy Industry and the Farming Industry. We heard all too many local farmers say "the best part of 2009 will be when it is behind us," and we definitely agree. But despite the challenges, we are happy to say we are excited to see what the future brings to Bridgewater Dairy Farms. Below is a review of challenges and successes of 2009 for both the farming and dairy operations.
Bridgewater Farming With a new set of equipment, a new style of farming, a new management team, and a new set of employee's we went into 2009 with the knowledge that it was going to be a tough and interesting year. But Mother Earth piled on wet spring conditions that pushed planting into June. This was followed by a drought in mid-june and what seemed an approaching drought failure. Thankfully, as fertilization took place on the corn planted the latest it rained and rained. It appeared we were finally headed towards an average year. Then as harvest approached we realized it wasn't going to be a normal harvest. We started quesitoning our mold (vomitoxin) levels and had some concerns about getting the crops off in the mud with out ruining the fields. With the help of a couple of neighbors, we were able to get Soybean harvest out of the way and proceeded to focus on Corn. It was the first time in our history for two things, we only used one forage harvester for 1600 acres and 31000 tons of Corn Silage. The cool weather kept the plants from drying down too quickly and made for a long 4 weeks of silage harvest. The other first in Bridgewater history was the abiity to make High Moisture Corn. This is a product we plan to produce yearly, but rarely will we have the ability to make almost 100,000bu in the havest window we would see normally. In the end, we had the second best farm yields in our history and the fears of mold in our corn due to the cool fall vanished as we tested the crops and everything was at a reasonable level. Bridgewater Dairy The dairy had its own set of challenges this year, by now everyone knows that the Dairy Industry was faced with some of the lowest milk prices and highest feed costs in decades. Those prices were so low that by now, we have all almost forgotten the extremely cold weeks we had in January 2009. There were days I came in at 2am to help repair something, and was just grateful I had employee's willing to milk cows when it was 29 degree's below zero out. But despite the weather, the dairy still had to focus on cost cutting techniques and management techniques to make the best of the year. We lowered our cow inventory a little, and we cut our specialty feeds in order to cut our overall feed costs. We knew we would have to lower our staffing level, but decided to do that through normal turnover rather than lay people off. It seemed that if there was a stone to turn over that would cut our costs we looked at it. But we also knew we had to continue to strive for high quality milk. We put a new emphasis on milk quality and animal health, re-trained employee's and even did a couple of trials to see if by changing some minor protocols we could improve the health and sustainabilty of our cattle. In the end, the dairy is relieved that 2009 is over as well. We did see a marked improvement in our milk quality, and feel we are treating our cows in the best and most humane way we know. We also saw some record milk production levels for the year mostly attributable to a cool summer, but also from a change in nutrition philosophy. As the dairy looks to 2010, we look to a long recovery. Milk prices have rebounded, but we are cautious as these prices appear very unstable. All in all 2009 was a challenge, but we looked at the challenge and chose to fight. We have an awesome group of individuals here, and without them these operations would not be profitable. |
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