Past,Present, Future. Read our Past, Present, Future feature starting on page 13 of the 2nd section!
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Y E A R S
June 24, 2023
“All dairy, all the time”™
Volume 25, No. 9
Dry days of spring carry into summer Flash drought causing problems for area farmers By Jan Lefebvre jan.l@star-pub.com
SPRING GROVE, Minn. – Darin Bratland was 6 years old when the drought of 1976 hit his family’s farm. He was a teenager when an even bigger one made its mark in 1988. “I do remember the talk about the centennial year being really dry, but the summer of 1988 between my junior and senior years of high school, I can remember how bad it was,” Bratland said. “Then we just baled hay; we didn’t make any
baleage. Basically, we got a rst crop of hay and that was about it.” However, Bratland said he does not remember ever experiencing such a fast and early drought like the one that arrived this May. “For this time of the year, nothing (in the past) has been even close,” Bratland said June 13. “This is by far the driest.” Bratland and his brother Duron milk 110 cows near Spring Grove in southeastern Minnesota. They also farm 525 acres of corn, 320 acres of soybeans, 111 established hay ground acres and
MARK KLAPHAKE/DAIRY STAR
DJ Hemmesch checks his soybean eld June 17 at his dairy farm near Albany, Minnesota. Dry condiƟons have made for patchy germinaƟon in parts of his elds.
60 acres of new direct-seeding alfalfa. They pasture milk cows, heifers and most youngstock. “Pastures have really changed this week; they had been pretty good until the last week whereas they are not recovering now and turning around,” Bratland said. “As far as the crops, no-till soybeans, if we even have a 60% stand, that would be it. I don’t think the soybeans that aren’t coming are dead; they just haven’t germinated yet. I think if we’d get rain, they’d still come out of the ground.” Minnesota assistant state climatologist Pete Boulay calls this spring’s sudden drought a ash drought. “We’re getting used to these ash droughts now,” Boulay said. “We had a really sharp drought, a deep drought, in 2021 in the north (Minnesota). Then
Turn to DROUGHT | Page 7
Expanding the dairy market in Southeast Asia
Krause visits Singapore through USDEC By Jan Lefebvre
jan.l@star-pub.com
BUFFALO, Minn. – Until this spring, Charles Krause had never left his dairy farm near Buffalo for more than six days in a row. However, June 1 he traveled for two days to reach Southeast Asia with seven dairy farmers from across the U.S. The group was on a weeklong learning mission to see what the Center for Dairy Excellence in Singapore was doing to promote U.S. dairy exports. The center is part of the U.S. Dairy Export Council, funded primarily through checkoff dollars through Dairy Management Inc. Krause, who milks 350 cows and farms 500 acres near Buffalo, said the trip had been in the making ever since the center rst opened its doors. “The center actually opened up through (the coronavirus pandemic), and we’ve tried for three years to arrange this,” Krause
said. “We nally were able to get some farmers over there to see it in person. The center had been running for those three years – about a dozen people work out of the ofce there or call it their homebase.” Krause, chair of Midwest Dairy’s corporate board, serves as secretary on the national board of dairy farmers through United Dairy Industries Association of which Midwest Dairy has six seats. The board makes up part of the larger national board for DMI. Having an exports promotion center in Singapore offers several benets for promoting dairy. “Sixty-ve percent of the world’s population is in the Pacic rim – going from China, India and Southeast Asia – so we thought that would be a good place to start to have a presence on the ground,” Krause said. “Four of our top 10 export markets are in Southeast Asia for
PHOTO SUBMITTED
Julian Cardona of DFA (from leŌ), dairy farmer Charles Krause, Victor Kan of DFA, and dairy farmers Larry Hancock, Alex Peterson and Kate Fogler gather June 5 at the Dairy Farmers of America Inc. Singapore headquarters. DFA hosted a weeklong learning tour to showcase its Center for Dairy Excellence in Singapore, which works to promote and increase U.S. dairy exports in Southeast Asia. U.S. dairy.” In Southeast Asia, the USDEC currently focuses on the
Philippines, Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam and Malaysia out of the Singapore
Turn to USDEC | Page 6