By Charlie Elrod, Bonnie Bargstedt, and Jenny Mills
This past week before the Cornell Nutrition Conference, we had the chance to continue our exploration of ways that we can work more closely with the Northeast Dairy Producers Association (NEDPA) in keeping with NEAFA’s strategic plan adopted in 2021. We joined their board of directors’ meeting for an hour of engaging discussion. This follows on Keith Kimball (Chair of the NEDPA Board) and A.J. Wormuth (Vice-chair) joining NEAFA’s September board meeting to provide some updates on their organization.
We are all in agreement that consolidation is happening up and down the dairy value chain. As member-driven organizations, our strength is in our numbers, but as the potential membership pool shrinks, even as cow numbers and tons of feed produced stay the same or increase, we must explore new recruiting methods and potential efficiencies to be gained from working together.
The collaboration between NEAFA and NEDPA has grown tremendously over the last four years. On the advocacy front, we have jointly held two transportation summits, a transportation lobby day, and are in the midst of planning a New York City lobby day with NEDPA, NY Farm Bureau, NY Vegetable Growers and the NY Horticulture Society. Our two lobby groups, Hinman Straub and Ostroff Associates are similarly close in planning our lobbying activities and ensuring that our messaging to legislators is constructively focused and consistent. Both organizations share a high degree of support for the land grant universities where so much truly progressive research and extension originates.
One area where we could pick up some efficiency, share our resources and engage with each other’s’ members is holding our annual, or in NEDPA’s case biennial, membership meetings together. This could take the form of two parallel tracks for our meeting sessions, or some overlap of programming during the meeting. As one of our bigger annual outlays, the chance to share the planning, funding and holding our annual meeting with a close collaborator is appealing.
Four years ago, the NEAFA strategic plan envisioned a day when the two organizations might merge as a strong unified dairy alliance. The NEAFA and NEDPA boards both feel that day is still some way into the future, if it ever happens at all. But, just as happened twenty years ago when the Eastern Federation of Feed Merchants merged with the New England Feed and Grain Council to form NEAFA, there may well come a time when the reasons for us to join forces far outweigh any downside. In the meantime, we will continue our close collaboration and build on the strengths of each organization to support a thriving agricultural ecosystem in the Northeast.