By Eric Jenks, Special to NEAFA
NEAFA hosted its annual 2025 Annual Meeting February 4th and 5th, 2025 at the Albany Marriott Hotel in Albany, NY. The theme this year focused on “Growing Our Industry,” and featured presentations outgoing NEAFA President Jenny Mills, NYS Department of Agriculture & Markets Deputy Commissioner Elizabeth Wolters, a dairy markets update and outlook from Chris Wolf, research updates from Kristan Reed and Joe McFadden, Vermont and New York Legislative updates from Emma Shouldice and Matt O’Connor respectively, an update from AFIA VP of Public Policy and Education Leah Wilkinson, and a keynote from Kim Bremmer.
“We declared three years ago that advocacy would be the key driver for NEAFA,” said outgoing NEAFA President Jenny Mills. “In NY, we’re pleased with the relationship that we’ve made with Hinman Straub, and the relationships that we’ve made with legislators up and down the state that we haven’t had before. More of our committees are in touch with the Department of Agriculture, which is very important, and we’ve recently established relationships with the Department of Labor as well, with workforce initiatives that include transportation, and I’m proud of the work that NEAFA has done there… We can take pride in the collaboration that NEAFA has with Cornell, Pro-Dairy, or our friends at NEDPA. Collaboration with groups like this help us spread our voice and make sure that legislators understand what’s happening in our industry.”
Deputy Commissioner Wolters focused on the importance of Dairy for New York agriculture. “Dairy allows New York to rank in the top 5 states for agriculture,” said Wolters. “We’re dedicated to helping NY farmers to grow, and adapt with the goal of making New York the most sustainable dairy farmers and processors in the country. New budget lines are in place to help with that. (NY) Gov. Hochul has made strides to expand dairy processing, with applications opened for NY Dairy farmers to expand on farm milk processing and help with dairy storage and transportation. There are over 300 world recognized dairy processing facilities in the state. We continue to look to the horizon, and are focused on building a stronger, sustainable workforce. We want to continue to help farmers address aging infrastructure and housing, with more money in the budget towards meeting those goals. NY is committed to helping our farmers get through the challenges ahead.”
Wolters also touched on grants available to NY farms looking to reduce their carbon footprint and to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. “We’re in our 8th round of funding,” said Wolters. “Over $49 million of applications were submitted, with $33 million given out. I’m excited about that. We keep putting more money out and we get more requests. It shows the dedication from our farmers to reduce their carbon footprint.”
Chris Wolf, Ph.D, and the E.V. Baker Professor of Agricultural Economics in the Dyson School of applied Economics and Management at Cornell University, gave an update on Dairy Markets, and an outlook for 2025. “2024 started poorly, but had a good recovery in the fall,” said Wolf. “US Milk Production was a bit down by 0.5% year over year (yoy) in December 2024. That’s not the real story however. When you look at components, butterfat was up 1.47% in 2024… butter stocks were up 11.6% yoy in warehouse storage. Butter consumption has been strong, but it may be plateauing. Nonfat dry milk stocks are also up 19%, but we had low inventories a year ago.”
Wolf also addressed the needs that new processing centers may have in 2025. “New milk sources are necessary for new capacity,” said Wolf. “There are four new processing centers in NY alone, really big ones. There’s also a big investment in a cheese plant in South Dakota, as well as big ones in Kansas and Texas. Is there enough supply to fill these plants? Historically, they’ve figured it out. But if we’re going to produce that much more cheese and products that go with it, we have to figure out where it goes, including exporting. It takes a while to ramp up these big plants, they won’t immediately be producing a lot of cheese every day. It’s also a question of if other smaller plants will be shutting down. It’s good to see co-operatives in the northeast investing and revitalizing for the future.”
For 2025, the main concerns for Wolf are related to HPAI reducing production in the US, bluetongue in Europe reducing production there, and the potential impact that tariffs could have on trade going forward. “Trade is a big deal for dairy,” said Wolf. “18% are exported, more protein components than fats. 43% of exports went to Mexico and Canada. Tariffs in 2018 to 2020 with China lead to a decrease in exports there. US Dairy exports eight billion dollars’ worth of trade annually, about four percent of all agriculture. Potential trade wars could effect corn and soybean prices, and we currently get 80% of potash from Canada.”
Kristan Reed, Ph.D., spoke on the RuFaS Model that she works on as the Scientific Director. Her position at the USDA was unfortunately terminated 2/14/2025. RuFaS, short for Ruminant Farming Systems, “is a next-generation, whole-farm model that simulates dairy farm production and environmental impact. We are using modern, modular coding and development practices to build a flexible, adaptable, interoperable research and decision-support tool for sustainable ruminant production,” according to the RuFaS website. “We’re currently making sure that RuFaS can handle the diversity of farming practices across the country,” said Reed. “No two farms are alike. So we’ve developed methods for collecting inputs. The model was challenged, but after many iterations, it works, and we’re very happy with how it works. There are a wide range of foot prints that aligned with previously reported values, and emissions trends also followed expected patterns in response to production and management factors.”
Joe McFadden, Ph.D., the associate professor of dairy cattle biology and the NEAFA Faculty Fellow in the Department of Animal Science at Cornell University, gave an update on Methane Mitigation. “There are 100 people working in the lab now,” said McFadden. “We have Post Docs in the lab, graduate students, and we’ve been hiring more senior staff. The focus for 2025 is on infrastructure development. Our animal respiration chambers are active and climate controlled, we’ve acquired five GreenFeed units and we have 68 Galan gates ready for use. We’re gathering daily emission data on 68 cows. We’re running 40 tests a day along with a manure greenhouse gas analyzer.”
McFadden and Cornell have also been focused on establishing the program in India. “The interest there is because they produce a lot of methane,” said McFadden. “I’ve spent three years working to gain trust, negotiate with and talk to people there. We’re taking a holistic approach; improve veterinarian health, understand the barriers to implementing productive strategies, and what is unique about foraging there. Maharashtra has the same number of cows as the entire US. We have the support of the government there to work with NGOs to bring down methane 30%, and then the goal is to scale that out across all of India.”
Emma Shouldice, of William Shouldice & Associates LLC, and Matt O’Connor from Hinman Straub gave updates on legislation in Vermont and New York respectively, including on neonics and the ramifications of the bill passed in Vermont. For more in-depth coverage, look for articles from Shouldice and Hinman in the upcoming newsletters.
Leah Wilkinson, the Vice-President of Public Policy and Education for the American Feed Industry Association, gave an overview of upcoming AFIA events, studies, and legislative work on the national scale. Upcoming events include an AFIA 600 course focused on designing, implementing, documenting an animal food safety plan. The next dates for the course are March 11th to April 15th, and September 16th to October 21st. There will also be a PCQI refresher course December 9th and 10th. With regards to legislation, “The 119th Congress To Do list is long and growing,” said Wilkinson. “They have to process nominations, raise the debt ceiling, tackle Trump Tax Extenders, and work on appropriations for FY 25 and 26, the National Defense Authorization Act, the Farm Bill, etc. The tariff conversation isn’t done, but we currently have to sit back and let the dust settle to see where things fall.”
The Annual Meeting wrapped up with a presentation from keynote speaker Kim Bremmer of Ag Inspirations, LLC. Bremmer focused on the need of agribusinesses to get positive messaging about agriculture out to the public more, since misinformation and context is often missing from organizations and legislators outside the industry.