Cooperatives Working Together (CWT) has tentatively accepted 194 bids in the latest herd retirement round. The bids represent 34,442 cows and nearly 653.9 million pounds of milk. There were 209 bids submitted this round so only 15 were not accepted.
CWT farm auditors will begin visiting farms next week to verify cow numbers and will then tag each cow for removal. All farmers will be notified no later than July 30th as to whether their bid has been accepted. Once accepted, farmers have 15 days to ship their animals.
As with previous rounds, producers will be paid 90 percent of their bid upon verification that all cows have gone to slaughter with the remaining 10 percent paid after 12 months providing the producer and the facility have remained out of commercial dairy production.
At 34,000 cows, this is one of the smaller herd retirement rounds although it is larger than the previous round which removed 25,000 cows. That was the final of three rounds last year which took a total of 200,000 cows and 4 billion pounds of milk out of production.
One other note of interest, we have added 21,000 cows to the nation’s dairy herd since the first of the year.
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