| Senator Gillibrand held a conference call today on what's being done about the current situation that our dairy farmers find themselves in. Those of us in the rural counties (partiularly Wyoming County, with more cows than people) probably already know that there's a big problem with the dairy industry, but a brief summary and clarifiation of the problem is in order.
Milk pricing is set according to rules established by the federal government, a system set up back in the 1930s to help alleviate the effects of the Great Depression on farmers. Now, however, the system has become antiquated, and the price a farmer gets for milk is substantially lower than the average cost to produce it. Of course, that low price (roughly 97 cents a gallon) isn't being passed on to customers at the grocery store. |
| The feds have a safety net program for situations like this called Milk Income Loss Contract, or MILC. Basically what this does is when the price of milk is below a certain trigger level, the government makes up part of the difference. However, the pricing is so low that MILC isn't making a substantial difference to the farmers--and as Senator Gillibrand pointed out during the press conference, this program is intended strictly as a safety net. When you're using a safety net full time, it's no longer a safety net.
In that light, the Senator is introducing two new bills in the coming days to provide some temporary relief and assistance for farmers. Bill number one would double the amount of assistance provided by the MILC program, up to 90% of the difference between the trigger price and the actual sale value. Bill number two is a longer term measure to index the MILC trigger prices to inflation, rather than having Congress have to adjust them manually. Both bills may be passed before the Senate breaks for the summer--if not, the Senator says, then September.
In the much longer term, Senator Gillibrand talked about the need to create a new system for the overall pricing of milk to replace the current 1930s system. This, she said, would require input from all the parts of the current system including farmers, processors, retailers, etcetera, to insure fair pricing for everybody. For this and other reasons, the Senator doesn't expect this to come to pass until the next Farm Bill, which is in 2012.
Senator Gillibrand also announced that on that subject, she's going to be holding an agriculture hearing right around the corner in Batavia this August. No date was given, but it will probably be set later. |
