Dino Giacomazzi

By Dino Giacomazzi, Giacomazzi Dairy, Hanford, CA

“Producers Voice” written for and printed in Agribusiness Dairyman Magazine, July 2010

Not exactly what Mark Twain had in mind when penning the famous quote but it pretty much sums up the dairy industry today.

The dairy industry is a unique critter. We are a group of fiercely independent, conservative capitalists doing everything we can to wrangle ourselves into socialist systems. Milk marketing orders and cooperatives are examples of such systems that developed out of need.

We aren’t very consistent in our politics. We generally display a, “get the government out of my back pocket, but they damn well better make a deposit in my front pocket” attitude. I am actually ok with these forms of schizophrenia. The problem I have is the hypocrisy of the fighting within the industry.

It appears to me that the dairy industry is at war. We are at war with radical environmentalists who want to regulate cow farts and let sardines rule the earth. At war with vegan terrorists who torture animals on video to portray us as Hitler with a milk mustache. At war with Marxist journalists who portray modern agriculture as the source of all societal ills, creating a dilemma for us omnivores. At war with unions, regulators, politicians, inspectors, monopolistic processors, oligarchic retailers, weather reporters, food burning cars, market manipulators, protein concentrators, hippies, lions, tigers, bears, and Al Gore! Oh my!

Why the heck are we constantly at war with each other? Why is it every time we show up to a battle with an outside group we come fighting with each other? We do this with processors over make allowances and environmentalists over air regulations. They show up organized, with a plan, and a message. We show up prepared to lose. I don’t blame policymakers for making the easy choice.

With all this adversity it seems like this would be a good time to come together. Let’s cease to be Western, Midwestern or Northeastern dairymen, lets not align ourselves as dairymen from ABC or XYZ co-op, let’s erase the lines between the dairymen of the red trade group and the blue one. Let’s just be Dairymen!
Ok, great, we are all just dairymen, now what? How about we talk about Milk Market Management.

In 2009 we didn’t have a supply problem we had a demand problem. Yes the price discovery system is flawed and the markets are manipulated, but that doesn’t change the fact that the economies of the world collapsed. They are still collapsing. It wasn’t just us. Like the post-911 years 2002-2003, the world melted down and we melted with it.

We need a unified dairy industry taking a holistic approach to reform doing it from a position of thoughtful reflection as opposed to panicked reaction. And we need to do it now.

The first step is to stop talking about supply management and start talking about milk market management, a comprehensive plan to reform all sectors of the industry. Reform must take place on the supply side and the demand side. Supply management is just one spoke in the wheel that will drive our industry into a brighter future.

The demand side must include a coordinated effort by every dairy marketing organization across the country to produce two simultaneous campaigns. One positioning dairy products as the healthy, natural choice over sodas and junk food. The other, a public relations campaign demonstrating that dairy families share the same values as the people voting on milk with their check book and at the ballot box. I honestly believe people have forgotten that milk is better for them than Coke. It’s time for that to change.

Demand management needs to include other reforms such as eliminating programs that stifle innovation in the industry. If the CCC quit buying powder, I have a feeling we would figure out a better use for it. We always do.

On the supply side we need reform of our price discovery system. We need a supply management plan that will efficiently send signals to the market to cut supply but not hinder domestic growth and international expansion. We need a safety net that is flexible, changes with market conditions, is equitable to all dairy farmers, and is not a burden on the taxpayer. We need to reform trade policy and definitions of dairy products so that “fair” trade wins out over “free” trade. We need to change our relationship with the processor and shift some of the responsibility for marketing and profit making to them.

There are many more issues to discuss and a lot of details need to be worked out. Honestly, I don’t have the solution to any of these problems, but I know enough to understand only a comprehensive plan will be sustainable. I cannot support a single tiered approach. The last 18 months have been hell, and the future is still uncertain. But one thing is for sure, if we don’t put our differences aside and lock ourselves in a room until we emerge together with a total solution, we won’t be here next year to fight about it. In my opinion, NMPF’s Foundation for the Future plan is a good start. Now let’s all go to work.

(Side Note:I did not write this article as an endorsement of the NMPF Foundation for the Future plan. I am merely suggesting this should be the basis of our conversations and foundation for total industry reform. If you find that you have an interest in this plan and are willing to start discussing it, take a moment to voice your opinion at this poll: http://poll.fm/1vhac. It would be nice to see where people really stand on this issue. FYI, the poll has been active for many months before the NMPF’s plan came into existence.)

DG

Recently I posted a list of my 10 favorite Android apps for farm productivity. Since then I have come across a couple others that I can not live without. Here they are:

Droid Light by Motorola - Free – (search android market) This is probably the most useful app in my tool box. This app simply turns on the super bright LED light on the back of the Motorola Droid so you can use it as a flashlight. It is surprisingly bright. If you don’t have a Motorola Droid you can download many other “flashlight” apps that turn all the screen pixels white. I’ve used this type of light since I got the Droid, but they pale in comparison to the LED flashlight.

Current Commodities – Free – (search android market) Current Commodities gives you prices and charts for some key commodity markets. It is not a full featured app by any means, it uses data provided by Yahoo! finance and Bloomberg which is fairly limited. But for a quick look at what the Corn market is doing, it works fine. For more indepth market information I use Futuresource.com. Future Source allows you to customize pages with charts & news. I use this on my home & office computers and use the droid web browser to check it from the phone. I have a shortcut on my phone desktop to get to the site with minimum effort.

Direct Dial Shortcuts – Free – (built in to Android) This is not an app, but it is important to productivity and worth mentioning here. One major benefit of Android over iPhone is the ability to create shortcuts and widgets on the desktop. Another is making folders. I make probably 100 phone calls a day on the dairy. I am constantly in communication with my employees, feed salesmen, parts stores, repair services, etc. I find it time consuming to always search for a contact and scrolling the list is even worse since I have 3000+ phone numbers in there. So here is a set by step guide to the most important sanitiy saving feature of Android.

1. Create a folder on your desktop by tapping your finger on a blank space and holding it there until the menu appears. Select Folders.
2. Click New Folder
3. Open the folder then click and hold on the word “folder” until the “rename folder” option appears. Rename something like “employees” or “Emergency #’s” etc. I have 3 folders, Family, Employee’s, and Dairy. Dairy contains all the numbers for frequently called vendors like feed salesmen & dairy supply companies.
4. In another blank space on the screen click and hold until the menu appears again. This time select “Shortcuts”
5. Now select Direct Dial if you want to select a phone number or Select Direct Message if you want a shortcut to send someone a text message. You can also select Contact which will allow you to select all the info from a single contact. For this example I am using Direct Dial
6. Once you have selected “direct dial” scroll the list until you find the number for the person you want to dial. Example, your spouse’s cell number.
7. After you select the number you want, an icon will appear on the desktop. Click and hold the icon until you feel the screen vibrate a little, then drag the icon into the folder you made in previous steps.
8. Repeat these steps until you have all the number you need.

Another way of getting address shortcuts to your desktop is by “Staring” contacts in your address book then place the “Starred Contacts” folder on your desktop. I have it both ways. People I want to have all their info available to me I “Star”. People whom I call regularly and use the same number, I use a direct dial link.

There you have it. Three more tools to help with on-farm productivity courtesy of google and the many people willing to volunteer their programming skills. I would like to suggest that if you find an app that is useful to you and they offer a paid version as well as a free version, use the paid version. This will ensure the continued advancement of the apps and guarantee you more productivity in the future.

I really don’t know why I would need to blog from my phone, but since worpress was nice enough to produce an app for android, I figued i’d give it a try.

It seems a pretty simple way to interact with comments on your site but I think pretty fast and can type almost as fast on the computer keyboard. I have to concentrate on typing with the motorola droid whih makes it hard to focus on the writing.

This message took me about 5 minutes to write. I really don’t have time for that.

Now that the new generation of Super Phones have arrived I have spent some time trying to find apps that help improve my personal productivity. Since I am a dairy farmer I’ve been looking for apps to help me be more productive on the farm. Most of these apps will benefit you no matter what your profession.

I have posted this article partly to help my friends who are moving to the Android platform. But I am also interested in starting a conversation here with other farmers about the use of mobile computing on the farm. If you have some apps you really like that I didn’t mention here, please include them in the comments. I just ask you try to relate the app in some way to on-farm productivity.

I included iPhone in the title since many of the apps I list below have iPhone equivalents. As a side note I think competition in the Android market is going to drive super phone technology and as a result all of us users will benefit. It is amazing to me how great these devices are, and they are really only in their infancy. 5 years from now things are going to look much different. I can’t wait.

I use a Motorola Droid but am looking forward to upgrading to the HTC Incredible or whatever next generation Motorola comes out with by the time I am eligible for an upgrade.

I should also mention I wrote this entire article while driving a tractor planting corn. I will post another article some day on how that works. For now I hope you find these productivity tools as useful as I do.

1. Remember the Milk – $25/Year – Free Online – RTM, oddly enough, has nothing to do with dairy or cows. It is a Things To Do list. It is a very advanced web based application that synchs to your Android phone. One thing I loved about the palm was the ease and power of its task list. I used this feature intensively. The only down side to RTM is there is an annual fee to use the Android app but I feel the $25/year more than pays for itself in increased productivity.

2. Evernote – Free or $45/year premium – Evernote is a multi-platform note taking program. You can use it on your desktop, on the web, or on the phone. I use Evernote on my laptop to take notes at meetings, keep track of important pieces of information like frequent flier numbers, tractor and equipment maintenance and parts numbers, etc. I do a lot of inputing on my desktop then access the info from the phone. I also use the voice note feature on the phone when I am driving around and want to leave myself a note for later retrieval. I currently use the premium version. I use it to synch files between my desktop computers and backup important documents.

3. Bubble – Free – (Search Android Market) Bubble is basically a bubble level. You will be suprised how often you need a level on a dairy, farm, or around the house. I used this app just the other day to level the tool bar on a John Deere 1700 Corn Planter. You need to calibrate the level when you first download it. Use a regular bubble level for calibration.

4. Target Date (lite) – Free – (Search Android Market) – Target Date is a simple program that calculates time between two dates. It also will tell you a date in the future or past by simply typing in a number. For example you can ask it what will the date be in 100 days from now. Or how many days are there between now and Dec 25. I use this to figure out planting and harvest dates and all kinds of fun other stuff. – No image available.

5. Ultra Chron (lite) – Free – (Search Android Market) – This is a stopwatch and count down timer. Basic. Useful. I use this to calibrate spray equipment. It was even used recently at our farm bureau’s candidate forum to keep time for the candidate’s speeches.

6. Weather Bug Widget – Free – (Search Android Market) – Weather Bug is a weather website. I like the Weather Bug Widget for android because the app gives you a lot of detail about the weather. Wind speed & direction, radar maps, and severe weather alerts. Very useful for planning on the farm. Especially the Radar. I also use an app called Radar Now which does only radar. It has a bigger map and higher radar resolution than most phone based radar services.



7. Calendar Pad – Free – (Search Android Market) – This is app extends the functionality of the default Android calendar which I found inadequate for the amount of use I give it. Calendar pad gives you month views that show your appointments. It also makes it easier to add entries into the calendar.



8. Real Calc – Free – (Search Android Market) – Real Calc has saved my life. This is the only calculator I’ve found for Android that does on the fly unit conversions. I use this feature a lot.. For example I want to know the number of acres for any given pass of the corn planter. I can enter (L) 1280ft x (W) 20 = 25600 sq ft. Then hold the conversion button and click SQFT then Acres. It will then return the number .587 Acres back to the calculator where I can then multiply by number of passes to get the total area. This is just one of many examples of what makes this the best Android calculator on the market. It’s a must have.



9. GPS Measure – Free – (Search Android Market) – This is a very cool app that will measure distance using the GPS in the phone and Google Maps. I use this tool to measure fields, check distance traveled for water, measure corrals and shades on the dairy, etc. It is not accurate enough to build a house with, but for big jobs it does good enough. I plan to send the author a note and ask if he can make the app have the ability to measure three or more points and give you the area contained within. This would be very helpful for measuring fields. – No image available.

10. My Maps Editor by Google – Free – (Search Android Market) – All this app does is allow you to access “My Maps” in google maps. I use google maps to mark and keep track of field data. I can use this little app to access that info from my phone in the field. You can also set up lists of places for a trip on your computer then access those points from the road.

In the year 2010 there is no reason to wade through millions of headlines about Tiger Woods’ shenanigans when all you want is news that has an impact on you. Here are some easy things you can do to save time and customize your personal news experience. This information will work for anyone but my intention here is to help farmers understand social media so all the links and references are to Ag related news sources. Read on!

RSS Feeds

Most blogs and popular websites like Yahoo, BBC, MSN and Google feature RSS, but what is it?

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a really simple way to stay up to date with new content on your favorite websites.

Instead of visiting individual websites to see what’s new, you get automatic updates from many sites in one place. It’s a real time saver if you follow lots of different sites. And because you don’t have to supply any personal information to use it, RSS ensures your privacy too.

With RSS, you choose to receive updates from websites through ‘feeds’ and ‘readers’.

An RSS feed is:

• A news article, blog, audio clip, or video clip delivered strait to your reader
• simple as clicking on the RSS logo and confirming that you want to subscribe to the feed.

An RSS feed reader is:

• a central place to grab and store all feeds, so you have multiple updates in one place.

Using RSS is as easy as 1,2,3.

1. Look for sites that support RSS – this is the RSS Logo:


2. Subscribe to the feed you’re interested in
3. View the updates via your feed reader.

I suggest you use Google Reader for managing your feeds. I like using google because you can view the same information in many places. I read my news articles on my home computer, work computer, and my phone. I read mostly from my Motorola Droid but there are readers available for iPhone, Blackberry, and any phone with a mobile browser.

Most email applications double as RSS readers. Here are some tutorials on how to use popular email clients as RSS feed readers:

Microsoft Outlook
Yahoo! Mail
Apple Mail

A note on subscribing to a feed.
Most of the time when you click on the RSS icon it is going to take you to a page with a bunch of text all run together. At this point, copy and paste the URL into your news reader. For example, if you click on the RSS logo on the upper right corner of this page it will take you to a page with this URL: http://dinogiacomazzi.com/feed/ Just copy and paste that URL into your reader and you will be subscribed. Some web browsers will do this automatically for you.

Here is a list of some Ag oriented websites I subscribe to.

A Dairy Goddess’s Blog
Advocates for Agriculture
Ag – its not just a job, it’s an adventure!
American Farm Bureau: Latest News
Dairy Today
DTN Grain Market Summary
Truth Be Told – Trent Loos
Western United Dairymen
Gate to Plate Blog by Michele Payn-Knoper

You can also check all the links to news sources I have listed on the right side of this page. Many of them have RSS feeds, just look for the logo.

Google Alerts
Google Alerts is a very useful tool for searching news by keyword. Google Alerts allows you to set up searches, then whenever it finds something related to your search it will email it to you. For example, I have a Google Alert set up for my name, “Dino Giacomazzi”. Whenever my name is posted on a website or is in the news, Google sends me an alert via email. The cool thing is that it keeps track of what was sent in the past and only sends new postings.

I use Google Alerts to find news like “HSUS + Dairy”, “smelt + delta + water”, “animal welfare”, “milk price”, etc. I also use it to track pieces of legislation by number, “AB 1960″ or ‘”jobs bill” + water’.

It is important to be fairly specific with your searches or you will get hundreds of results.

Facebook
Facebook has many uses beyond looking at pictures of your friends drunk at a party. Facebook is a great place to find peer recommended news. Many people post links to news articles they find interesting. Chances are since this person is your friend or associate you may be interested in that article also.

First place to go in Facebook for news is the “News Feed”. This is where you get to see what your friends are posting. The news feed is a mix of status updates, links, videos, and other stuff. Facebook provides a way to filter the noise of the news feed on the left side of the page by clicking on “links”. This will show only posts from people who have included a link to another website. Much of this ends up being some sort of news…or a joke, either way you win.

Other ways to get news and information from Facebook are: becoming a fan of a page, joining a group, or joining a cause. These three options are places where people are having conversations on specific topics like Humane Watch, where people are talking about how crooked the Humane Society of the United States is, or Farm2U where consumers can ask farmers questions.

There are millions of Pages, Causes, and Groups in Facebook. Use the search box in Facebook to find things that interest you, then join in the conversation.

Here is a short list of some things I find useful in Facebook:

Save California’s Milk Supply – a Cause
I Love Farmers…they feed my soul – a Group
Animal Agriculture Alliance – a Page

This is a very short list. I am currently subscribed to hundreds of Groups, Pages, and Causes on Facebook.

Twitter

I don’t have time in this tutorial to explain what twitter is and how to use it but I will just say that twitter is a great source for news. Here are a couple of ways to find news via twitter:

1. Learn hash tags being used by people in agriculture and set up searches to monitor them. The most important hash tag is #agchat. Just type #agchat into twitter’s search box and you will see postings by hundreds of farmers from around the globe. Many of them are posting links to news.

2. Use Twitter’s “List” feature to follow people who post information your are interested in.

3. Find people tweeting links to news you are interested in then subscribe to their twitter feed with your RSS Reader.

Social News Communities

There are many websites dedicated exclusively to sharing news articles with groups. I haven’t personally gotten into these yet but I find it necessary to mention them here. The major social news sites are:

http://digg.com/
http://www.stumbleupon.com/
http://www.reddit.com/
http://www.mixx.com/

So there you have it, several options for bringing news you can use strait to you.

Now here is the most important part…once you have found some news of interest to you…SHARE it with your friends. That is what social media is all about. Sharing information.

Just came across these videos on the farm aid website about the plight of the American dairy farmer. They are definately worth a watch.

http://www.farmaid.org/site/c.qlI5IhNVJsE/b.5456909/k.390B/2009_Webcast.htm

There is an interesting irony on this website though. Two of the major sponsors of the Farm Aid Concert are Horizon Organic milk and Silk. These two brands are owned by the very corporate farm companies that are causing the farmers to be broke in the first place. There is talk in these videos about milk manufacturers posting record profits while the dairy farmers go out of business. The company they are talking about is Dean Foods, the largest dairy processor in the US. Dean Foods owns Horizon Organic. So I suppose the irony is that Dean Foods is sponsoring an event that is essentially protesting them. This is a little like the tobacco companies advertising that you should quit smoking.

Take a look at the videos, they are very good.

DG

It’s fall, the corn has been harvested and this is the time we usually spread cow manure on the fields (organic fertilizer for crops). I didn’t realize that fall was also the time when our representatives spread their special kind of manure around Washington. The manure I speak of is Senator Herb Kohl (D-WI), the chairman of the Senate Agriculture Appropriations Subcommittee, and Representative David Obey (D-WI), the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, robbing $290 million destined for cheese and dairy product purchases for food banks and other nutrition and feeding programs and spending it on direct payments to dairy farmers. This allocation to help support the struggling dairy producers started out as $350 million to buy cheese for food banks. After these representatives got their hands on it they left only $60 million for the hungry and the rest in direct subsidies to farmers. “Why on earth does this dairy farmer oppose free money from the government?” I thought you would never ask, here is why:

Simply put, buying surplus cheese for immediate distribution in the form of food aid is a triple-net win-win-win. The use of the entire $350 million included for dairies in the 2010 Agriculture Appropriations conference report to reduce surplus cheese would have produced a much greater economic benefit to dairy farmers and related industries than direct payments. Cheese inventories need to be reduced in order for farm milk prices to rebound. The second win is the recipients of the cheese. Currently a record number of people rely on food banks whose inventories are critically low. The third win would go to the US government. I would suggest this administration could use a “feel good” story right now and a program that actually shows results.

The best part of this approach is that it benefits all dairymen equally. If the price of milk goes up a dollar, every dairyman gets a dollar for all his milk. The problem with direct payments is that they have caps. These caps cause an unequal distribution of the payments. So some dairymen get a benefit on all their milk while other dairymen get a benefit on a fraction of their milk.

Certainly an approach that treats all dairies across the country equally would be preferred but here is the real kicker to this deal. The MILC program (direct payments) actually prolongs the agony of lower prices by supporting and subsidizing the over production of milk. During a time of over supply it is in the interest of every dairy farmer across America to reduce the amount of surplus milk so that the price will go up. The idea of subsidizing dairy farmers to continue producing milk at surplus levels is counter productive.

I am a dairyman and I don’t want subsidies, I want a fair price for my milk. I believe that using the maximum amount of money available to the USDA to purchase surplus dairy products to feed the hungry is the smart, humanitarian thing to do. I believe that it will benefit all dairies equally via an increase in milk price. Do I think this is a long-term solution to our problem, no. But it is a fair and equitable solution for short term surplus management and the right thing for us to do.

I don’t want to have to answer the question when asked why I am taking welfare cash from the government when we have too much milk and people are going hungry. This is simply bad business and bad politics.

I suppose I sat down on a busy day here on the farm to express my disgust of this issue because I am tired of Washington and their constant politicizing of every issue as well as pandering to special interest groups. Yes that’s right, the mid-west and east coast dairy farmers, and the large dairy processors lobbied heavily to swipe $290 million from the mouths of America’s hungry in order to spread a few pennies amongst the dairymen and protect obscene profit margins by the processors.

It is time for all dairymen, east to west, large and small, Holstein, Jersey, and Brown Swiss to start taking a more holistic view of solving our price issues and realize that we need to invest in our entire industry and stop perpetuating these regional differences.

Dairymen in Wisconsin & New York, call your Senators and tell them that an economic analysis and USDA Cold Storage Report for August shows farmers could have gotten a better deal with a bigger cheese purchase and donation.

What’s the deal with celebrity endorsements of issues they don’t understand? It never ceases to amaze me how gullible these people can be. Take for example this article on ecorazzi.com. All these “celebrities”, including the very balanced Bill Mahr and the long time faux leather wearing Bob Barker, have signed on a letter with Farm Sanctuary supporting the “Tail Docking Bill”.

I am a California dairy farmer and I also support the bill. Tail docking is a practice that was experimented with 10 years ago or so to see if there would be a benefit to milk quality. It was soon discovered there was no advantage to the dairy farmer, the cow, or the milk so the practice soon ended.
Read more…

Here is an email I recieved from Congressman Nunes’ office regarding Hannity’s work to bring attention to this man made natural disaster. It would be great if you all could attend.

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Read more…

Please take a moment to support farmers & dairymen by telling your story or showing your support for H.R. 3524 the Family Farm Preservation Estate Tax Act (Mike Thompson, D-CA).

Take action to urge your Congressional Representative to sign on as a cosponsor of H.R. 3524. Please do this by clicking one of the links below. That link will provide you with an opportunity to write your own story or send a form letter to your congressman.

This legislation improves the business climate while ensuring farms and ranches can be passed on to future generations. If passed, H.R. 3524 will:

* Exempt farm and ranch assets from federal estate taxes as long as the operation remains as a family agricultural operation.
* Exclude land enrolled in a qualified conservation easement from federal estate taxes.

Considering the tax-reform legislation that was approved in 2001 will phase out the estate tax entirely in 2010, Congress will likely be taking up this item this fall.
Your personal stories are needed to help lawmakers understand how farming and ranching operations differ from other businesses. Help keep farming operations viable, urge your Representative to sign on as a cosponsor of H.R. 3524.

If you live in California, use this link:
http://bit.ly/1Xj8p

If you live outside of California use this link:
http://www.capwiz.com/cfbf/issue…

Thanks for your attention and please pass this on to any farmer or farm supporter you know.