House passage of new farm bill disappoints dairy farmers

Effort to key milk prices to production costs fails

By TOM KANE

WASHINGTON, DC — Dairy farmers in our local area are expressing dismay that the U.S. House of Representatives has passed a new Farm Bill that ignores the plight of the small dairy farmer.

“They have changed nothing but are keeping the status quo,” said dairy farmer and journalist John Bunting. Bunting is the writer for Milkweed Magazine out of Brooklyn, Wisconsin, a magazine very close to the pulse of dairy farmers.

Several Congressional representatives from the Northeast put forward an amendment to the farm bill that presented a solution to the disparity between the price farmers get for their milk and the costs of production. The amendment laid out a formula that linked the two together, which would put more money into the hands of the dairy farmers and reduce the pressure of always losing money each year.

According to many local dairy farmers, 2006 was the worst year in a decade. Several dairy farms in the region have closed down over this disparity.

Each year the costs of feed, fuel, electricity, equipment and many other needs have been rising. From 2001 to 2006, the cost of gasoline and fuel had increased by 100 percent. The cost of feed has increased nearly 20 percent and the cost of fertilizer has increased over 40 percent, according to statistics from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

“The chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, Collin Peterson of Minnesota, squelched the amendments put forward by members from the Northeast because of the pressures from the big milk processors, the co-ops and the large retail stores,” Bunting said. “If the amendment was allowed to appear in the bill and if it were to pass, these large companies would lose a lot of money. All these years, they have been taking money that should have gone to the farmers.”

“There’s nothing in this bill for the dairy farmers,” said dairyman Joe Davitt of Milanville, PA. “And I don’t expect there to be anything in the Senate version either.”

“This is one of the few, if not the only, industry that ignores the disparity between what the business person gets for selling his or her product and the costs of production,” said Nelson Hector, president of the Sullivan County Farm Bureau. “The auto industry couldn’t work that way or the food industry or any industry. It doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

The Senate is scheduled to pass the farm bill in the fall after summer recess. Two weeks ago, Senator Arlen Specter and Robert Casey of Pennsylvania offered a version of the Farm Bill that established a connection between the price a dairy farmer gets for his milk and the costs of production.

“We don’t expect the Senate to be any different from the House,” Bunting said. “The pressure from the big dairy companies is too great.”

Bunting criticized several professors of agriculture from land grant colleges who have ignored the plight of the small dairy farmer in their recent pronouncements. “Those colleges get one third of their money from the public, one third from other sources and one third from the dairy industry,” Bunting said. “They can’t displease those industries.”

States need to step in to relieve the small dairy farm, Bunting said. “We’re talking about market failure,” he said. “It’s one of the main reasons for government intervention but the government doesn’t want to intervene unless pressure is put upon them from the public.”