May'19 Board Book

continued to take milk from Larson Dairy, Publix refused to take milk from the impacted dairies, including the family farms associated with each of the dairies.

“This made for some very challenging opportunities for [SMI] in marketing milk from its members but also fulfilling its contractual obligations with its buyers,” Jonker says. As milk customers were becoming more concerned about the integrity of the production systems in Okeechobee, Jonker says SMI decided to host a series of meetings across their membership. Jonker and other members of the FARM team went on a road show, conducting workshops with dairy farmers starting in Louisiana, then Georgia and finally two meetings in Florida. While the meetings were being held in Florida, the activist group released two additional videos. The group actually watched the new video together without seeing it first. “We talked about what we were seeing in the video,” Jonker says. “As we watched the videos over these final two meetings, you could just kind of feel the oxygen leaving the room. It was quite empowering for the farmers to collectively evaluate the video content to discuss what was and was not appropriate animal care practices.”

Like in most videos, he says they saw three things happening:

1. Common industry practices that are done well that activists try to demonize. That could include things like confined housing, artificial insemination, removing calves from their mothers, and other practices. 2. Common industry practices that aren’t performed well. This could be actions like poorly administered euthanasia, improper udder singeing, disbudding animals at an older age and without pain remediation, and so forth. 3. Things you never want to see.

“By combining all three of these elements, it helps spread the narrative of the activists that our common practices are bad too,” Jonker says.

Even if the dairies do all of the common practices well and enforce protocols, they aren’t completely safe from being targeted by an activist.

“This sort of thing can happen to any dairy,” says Rick Lundquist, an independent nutrition consultant who works with Larson Dairy. “I’ve seen it happen to some of my best clients. You do everything right, but things just happen.”

As far as Larson was concerned, they were doing everything right. At employee meetings they went over how well the 2,200 cows on the dairy were doing. Milk production was good at around 80 pounds per cow, somatic cell counts were under 200,000. Reproduction was great. Cows seemed to be happy.