I am truly honored to serve as the president of ARPAS for the coming year and look forward to working with the other officers, directors, and committee members.  Thanks to John Bernard for his service as ARPAS president for the past year.

Congratulations to our newly elected officers (Al Kertz -- President-Elect; Mo Bakke – Secretary; Dana Tomlinson – Treasurer; Patrick French – ACAS President) and Directors (Dwight Roseler – Midwest; Tom Hickley – Northeast; Heidi Rossow – West; and Daniel Rivera – Southern).  I look forward to working with them and other members of the Governing Council over the next year.  Thanks to the outgoing officers and to those that were willing to run for office for their service to ARPAS.

As you are probably aware, last year a committee chaired by Dr. Bob Wettemann developed a new 5-year strategic plan for ARPAS.  As part of that Strategic Plan I have formed a committee of outstanding ARPAS members to develop Value Propositions for ARPAS and ACAS.  The committee is comprised of Mo Bakke a private dairy consultant in Ky and Ca, Randy Walker with DPI Global, Wayne Greene Dept. chair at Auburn Univ., Mike Looper – Dept Chair at the Univ. of Arkansas, and Ben Holland – Director of research for Cactus Cattle Feeders.  I look forward to seeing what they put together over the next few months.

We had an excellent meeting of the Governing Council in Knoxville in conjunction with the ADSA meeting.  We also had three excellent speakers in the ARPS symposium titled Sustainable Dairy Production.  Our Platinum Sponsors for the symposium were Qualitech, Innovation Center for US Dairy, and the ARPAS Foundation.  Our silver sponsor was One Trak by Cargill.  Contributions from these organizations made it possible to publish the proceedings in the Professional Animal Scientist at no cost to the authors.  At the ADSA meeting we gave over 40 exams, mostly to graduate students. 

Speaking of graduate students, the Governing Council voted to add a Graduate Student Representative to the Governing Council.  We have a committee working on developing the process to nominate and select graduate students to serve on the Governing Council.

ARPAS also had a booth/exhibit at the ASAS meeting held in Vancouver in July.  I want to thank all those members that took time away from the meetings and from the sights in Vancouver to help set up, staff, dismantle the booth.  At ASAS we gave 25 exams, again mostly to graduate students, and were able to get several “expired” members to renew their membership.  

Again – a big thank you to Wayne Kellogg for his years of service as editor-in chief of PAS and to Dave Beede for taking the reins of PAS this past year.  I also want to thank Kenneth Cummings, our Executive Vice President and Cornicha Henderson at FASS headquarters for all their time and help in running this fine organization.

Thanks again for electing me as ARPAS President.  I look forward to an outstanding year for ARPAS and its members.