I love listening to Christmas music during the holiday season because it always reminds me of home. I remember when I was little, starting as early as Thanksgiving weekend, my mom would have Christmas music playing in her kitchen while she baked some of the best Christmas cookies you can imagine. Somehow listening to those…
It is hard to believe that 2023 is nearing an end. As we look back on this year, there have been lots of challenges our farm families have had to work through – low milk prices, very challenging weather patterns, catastrophic events, and even in some cases, health issues and loss of family members. Sometimes,…
Recently I had the opportunity to hear James Clear speak about what it means to get one percent better every day. He wrote about this idea in his book, Atomic Habits. Basically, the concept is to identify an area where you want to improve in your life and make an active choice to focus on…
An employee who has been with our team for nearly five years just turned in his resignation. He was the kind of employee that anyone would want. He does an excellent job in his role, works well with the rest of the team, and doesn’t take a lot of oversight. He’s going to be hard…
As the calendar flips to August, families across the country prepare to go back to school. For our family, for the first time in 11 years, we only have two children heading back to school. My oldest graduated from college this spring and is now experiencing what it’s like to work in the real world….
A phrase we hear often is, “What a difference a year can make.” As parents, we sometimes use that phrase to describe the growth of a toddler or even the way a teenage boy can grow five inches in 12 months. Sometimes it’s used to describe changes in the economy or in the weather. For…
My first job out of college was planning events for the regional Dairy Checkoff-funded group at the time. A big focus back then was on milk and dairy with school breakfast, and I would spend months working on in-school assemblies promoting school breakfast to elementary school students in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington DC, and other urban…
This is the time of year when I look out my window with a sense of dread at all the work I need to do. It’s not the field work or chores out in the barn that I see. It’s the weeds growing in the flower gardens that surround my house. Every April, it seems…
We tried something new at the Dairy Summit this year by hosting discussion group sessions on three different topics. One of those topics was employee engagement, and we asked a human resources consultant and a manager at a large dairy farm to facilitate the discussion. It was well attended, with close to 75 people in…
In January, I had the opportunity to volunteer at the Calving Corner, which is Pennsylvania’s live dairy cow birthing center at the Pennsylvania Farm Show. More than 100,000 people come through the exhibit during the eight-day event, giving our dairy community an opportunity to share an up close and personal look at what happens on…
