ADSA® Presidential Report.

It was an honor, experience, and pleasure to serve as president of ADSA over the past year. This was my fifth year on the ADSA board and I am entering my sixth and final year as a voting board member, so I want to share my perspective on our association with all members. The American Dairy Science Association is in good shape financially and functionally. It remains true to its mission, a mission to which it has adhered faithfully since its inception over a century ago. Our mission has always included aspects of on-farm animal management and post-harvest food processing, allowing for an integrated approach to dairy science as a whole. My appreciation for my former and current fellow board members runs deep. They devote numerous hours trying to understand the diverse issues facing us as a society. Board members clearly listen to and engage with each other in the process leading up to decisions that affect ADSA. Board members are an important source of input from members to the leadership, but also from the leadership to members. In addition, our FASS service providers can always be relied on to have a “can-do” attitude while providing us feedback and advice on what may be an optimal path to improve existing functions and create new services. The decision to maintain FASS while working with the American Society of Animal Science (ASAS) and the Poultry Science Association (PSA) to allow their withdrawal as co-managing societies of FASS was not a simple one; however, the clear benefit was retaining an excellent FASS staff with strong institutional knowledge of how ADSA functions best. This historical knowledge, combined with well-developed specific and relevant skills and willingness to explore new options, allows the ADSA Board to delegate to FASS the execution of its priorities with little trepidation about obtaining a professional result. The quality of the 2017 ADSA Annual Meeting and the production values of the Journal of Dairy Science are the most obvious proof of FASS's competence, but they serve us well in many ways and are a pleasure to work with. The final ingredient for a successful society like ours is volunteer service by our members. The hours and effort that go into meeting organization, journal reviews, student development, awards programs, and many other functions cannot be easily accounted, but the value is huge and essential to our existence. Without volunteers who willingly and faithfully execute their duties, our association cannot work. It is crucial that all members make every effort to answer the call to service when asked. Many hands make for light (or at least lighter) work. If you want ADSA to succeed in meeting its mission, then try to be as involved as you can and encourage your colleagues to do the same. It is also essential that these volunteers be recognized for their efforts by ADSA leadership and ADSA members, and that informational and staff support for their efforts is maximized by the leadership to best leverage the volunteers’ professional expertise and valuable time. In our system of positions that usually rotate annually, volunteers are faced with steep learning curves with respect to duties, deadlines, and procedures, so excellent staff support is critical. As a scientific society, we face a few critical challenges. Many members are concerned and unhappy about the end of the Joint Animal Meeting (JAM). In addition to the changes in FASS “ownership,” this is another case of increasing distance between ADSA and ASAS, and to a lesser extent between ADSA and PSA. Finding new ways to work together is essential as we share many common concerns and needs. One positive example is the progress being made on the newest revision of the animal care guide. Previous editions of this publication were written under the FASS structure uniting the three societies; therefore, new processes had to be developed to proceed with the latest revision. While the guide is still not ready for publication, the three societies have, with some effort, managed to engage in a mutually beneficial and respectful approach to organizing and funding this important set of animal care guidelines. In addition, a co-location option for the 2021 meetings of ADSA and ASAS was initiated in 2016 and is proceeding, but, again, each new shared effort requires sometimes lengthy discussion, negotiation, and planning between the societies. Co-location will be quite different from meeting jointly in the JAM format; it will involve a shared location with some overlap on a common day. This type of meeting coordination provides some real benefits to exhibitors, access to networking across societies, and some platforms for shared scientific exchange. It can also reduce travel costs for people who would otherwise attend both meetings in separate locales. It will probably not reduce registration fees, which are higher when attending two separate meetings versus one common meeting, even if the two separate meetings are coordinated and co-located. In addition, compromises needed to make the meeting work may modestly increase some costs to ADSA in some areas compared with an ADSA-only meeting. Our member surveys continue to show strong support for some sort of combined meeting model, but the specific JAM model of the past is no longer an option and any joint meeting arrangement must be acceptable to both societies. It is also important to note that while support for joint meetings among many ADSA members is strong, it is by no means universal. As change happens, we need to respond proactively and thrive in the new circumstances. On all counts, the 2017 ADSA Annual Meeting in Pittsburgh was very successful. This was our first standalone meeting since Memphis in 1999 (last century!). Clearly, many of our members had never experienced the smaller, more dairy-focused type of meeting. Larger meetings held across the animal sciences have many of the benefits mentioned above and, importantly, provide a critical mass to attract scientific audiences from all the disciplines that are important to dairy science. A smaller, dairy-focused meeting, on the other hand, has some advantages in intimacy and interaction. No two members feel the balance equally. Although I personally favor a broader meeting, it is good to have empirical evidence that our solo meetings can be vibrant, successful, and well attended. Hopefully, the success of the 2017 meeting will make the 2018, 2019, and 2020 meetings very successful as well. This does not mean we have to cease exploring ways to have some sort of interaction with ASAS or other partners in conjunction with our annual meeting—it just means that if we cannot do some sort of coordinated meeting, we can still expect to have an excellent independent annual meeting. This expectation is vital, as meetings are nothing if they do not attract the people who want to share their newest knowledge while benefiting from others’ recent work. A major event in 2017 was that the JDS Endowment Fund (the “superfund”) achieved a balance in excess of its financial goal of $8 million. Most of this balance growth can be attributed to complete investment in equities over a strong bull market period, but also to constant investment of “excess” annual ADSA revenues. The ADSA Board decided that we would essentially cap the Endowment Fund (allowing for inflationary growth of principal and revenue generation) and explore options for using the available funds to benefit ADSA. The journal is an important financial contributor to the running of ADSA. Even though the Endowment Fund reached its original financial goal, it has not reached a size that would allow it to eliminate page charges for member contributors to the journal, even if used completely and only for that purpose. Excess proceeds from the journal support all those administrative costs that do not have revenue streams and allow new mission-driven strategic investments to be considered, and new—potentially risky—mission-oriented enterprises to be underwritten. Journal revenues include page charges or a share of open access fees (author contributions) and a share of subscription dues (user contributions). The journal is currently far from a complete open access model, but is slowly approaching one, as more authors choose open access publication. If the journal were to become completely open access at some future date, then the revenues collected from subscriptions would need to be replaced by publication fees from authors. So, in either today's case or future possible scenarios, the Endowment Fund proceeds will enable ADSA to minimize the cost to contributing authors while providing some sort of access to non-members, but there is still a tradeoff in author cost and non-member access to be considered. I cannot close out my 2016–2017 term without thanking the ADSA Foundation Board for its continued success with Discover Conferences as well as the very large and successful Large Herd Dairy Management conference and e-book. My last comment is that I think I can claim to having been a “professional” dairy scientist for 40 years and a member of ADSA for most of those years. I cannot imagine what being a dairy scientist would be like without ADSA. There is no question that our association is at the core of my professional experience, and I am sure that is true for many long-term or shorter-term members, and it will become true for future members as we maintain a vibrant, mission-oriented, and fiscally sustainable organization. Please support your fellow ADSA members with your participation as a science consumer, a science producer, and a science supporter, as well as with member service. Here are some interesting numbers that show the continued success of ADSA over the past 10 years: Tabled 12006/20072016/2017ADSA Net Assets$2,786,687$11,127,135Foundation Net Assets$419,700$817,462Attendees at the Annual Meeting2,768 (2006 JAM*Numbers from 2006 ADSA-ASAS meeting used because 2007 meeting was a 4-society meeting including ADSA, ASAS, PSA, and AMPA.)1,909 (2017 ADSA-only meeting)Abstracts presented at Annual Meeting1,437 (2006 JAM*Numbers from 2006 ADSA-ASAS meeting used because 2007 meeting was a 4-society meeting including ADSA, ASAS, PSA, and AMPA.)1,162 (ADSA-only meeting)Attendees at Large Dairy Herd—611Management ConferencePages published in JDS5,813 (2007 volume)10,485 (2017 volume)* Numbers from 2006 ADSA-ASAS meeting used because 2007 meeting was a 4-society meeting including ADSA, ASAS, PSA, and AMPA. Open table in a new tab