June Dairy Month continues as dairy producers here in Wright County and throughout the country are saluted for their role in the production of delicious, wholesome dairy products.
Charles Krause, a dairy producer in rural Buffalo, is also the Board Chair for Midwest Dairy, and also chairs the National Checkoff Board of the United Dairy Industries Association. Krause says a small checkoff amount from a large group of producers means the funds are there to accomplish some very significant marketing…
“24 thousand farms are members of it, so everybody pays into the dairy checkoff. So both of these boards oversee how that 15 cents the farmers pay for this checkoff gets spent and used for research and promotion and all the other great things that we do.”
Krause says he is honored to be able to represent a group as hard-working as the dairy industry…
“It’s always good to be in contact, local, state and national, and everyone of them plays a part. You look at the national scale of dairy, and you’re looking beyond our borders. You’re looking at the export market. Right now we have 17 – 18 percent of our dairy products are going overseas or over borders. So we try to advocate for free trade agreements, and anything that we can do to make it easier for dairy products to be sold all around the world.”
He says the dairy industry is very interesting in that it consists of product marketing to consumers only a few miles from the dairy farm, to newly growing markets across the globe…
“There’s different ways we get it there. We do partnerships with companies like Pizza Hut, Domino’s, Taco Bell, McDonald’s around the world, and they’re all over. One of the partnerships in the Midwest, Associated Milk Producers that headquarters out of New Ulm, they have a partnership with Shake Shack and they’re in 800 Chinese Shake Shacks. They sell U-S cheese in China that way. So, you think, we’re right in the middle of North America, why do exports matter? Well, there’s stuff going right out of Minnesota, right to overseas in different directions, so it’s very important. Right now the U-S dairy farmer does such a fantastic job of producing that we don’t have enough people to consume it all. We have a very good consumption rate in the United States, but we still need to be exporting almost every new pound of milk we make every year.”
More information on the importance of local dairy producers in Minnesota, U-S and world trade in additional stories throughout the end of June Dairy Month.
