By Stephanie Hoff
With a current debate around funding cuts, industry representatives are speaking up for dairy research. We’re catching up with a dairy industry veteran who says university research, like what comes out of Wisconsin, has played a huge role throughout his four-decades-long career.
Mike Brown serves as the vice president for dairy market intelligence at T. C. Jacoby & Company. He’s an expert on milk pricing policy, having worked for both farmer-owned cooperatives and proprietary businesses for nearly 40 years. Throughout his career, Brown has been a big proponent of university research. He says it has assisted him in work ranging from FMMO reform to whey surplus.
Brown says university research has provided him with the facts and tools to be creative and try new things.
“One, I trust it. It’s peer-reviewed, it’s good work, and it is generally very objective. It’s not being spun by someone who’s not working in the public realm,” he says. “And the second, it’s available. I mean, a big part is when you work for organizations like I have, we don’t have budgets to do our own research. We rely on folks like UW… to provide us that information, and so why not take advantage of that?”
When it comes to the UW Dairy Innovation Hub specifically, Brown jokes – in part – that every state should have one.
“It gives you a competitive advantage… and I see particularly some of the sustainability work, which isn’t always popular — it’s absolutely crucial long term, he says. “Particularly as we grow international markets, international markets look a lot more at the sustainability issues than the U.S. generally has. It makes us much more competitive selling into those markets.”
Funding
As the federal government works to streamline and “rightsize” agencies, such as the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Brown says he’s worried about funding cuts.
“They’re a key part of research because UW, like every big land-grant university, does a lot of work that spreads far beyond the walls of Wisconsin,” he says. “Even if we have a change in philosophy in Congress and the White House, how much can we recover, and how much expertise will we lose in the meantime when people leave academia and go to industry?”
Brown says he’s concerned about a lack of “next generation” to take key research positions in agricultural economics and dairy market economics.
“For getting unbiased discovery, that really concerns me,” he says.
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