Inside Dairy 10/9/26

Susan, since joining CoBank three years ago after having a 28-year career at Hordes Dairymen, when I came to the bank, I wanted to do two things at first.

Talk about the value of genetics, and then I went on this component story.

First we talked butterfat, then we talked protein, and this is my fifth research report.

And we went through a data set of...

The dairy farms that have milk going through federal orders in multiple component pricing markets.

To listeners, that means farmers getting paid for butterfat pounds and protein pounds.

The water in the milk is not really of value at that point.

But 80% of the dairy products in this country are being eaten versus drank these days.

So components, the nutrient-dense part of that milk is so important that And what we did is, I'm going to walk through the upper Midwest data.

There were over 5,000 herds in there, and we put them in deciles.

Decile means top 10%, the next 10%, and all the way down to the bottom 10%.

And we looked at the milk components, the butterfat and protein levels.

Obviously, we're higher in the top group than the bottom group.

And we put a value on that.

The average U.S. dairy cow averages 24,390 pounds of milk.

That's a 67-pound tank average.

At 67 pounds, that top group made 70 cents per cow more per day than the bottom group.

That is a big number.