04/30/08 Dairy's take on new Farm Bill

They may have a budget agreement but House and Senate conferees are still working on the final details of the new farm bill. The National Milk Producers Federation is watching with interest. Chris Galen says the dairy price support program needs to be revised and both the House and Senate propose to do that. Galen says another issue is the size of the Milk Income Loss Contract program. The Senate version calls for more money, expands the payment rate and has a bigger budget impact than the House. And then there's the fate of the dairy import assessment which was in the 2002 farm bill but never implemented. The House has included the checkoff assessment on imports similar to the 15 cents per hundredweight that US dairymen have been paying for the past 25 years. Galen calls it a matter of fairness. GALEN "Importers benefit from this market, the largest consumer market for dairy products. Imports are growing and yet if you bring in imported milk protein concentrate or cheese or some of the other products they don't pay anything to promote the market. We think that is unfair. Most of the other commodities that have checkoffs like beef and pork and cotton where you have a lot of imports they have a checkoff on the imports. Dairy is the exception." Galen says an import checkoff assessment could raise between ten and eleven million dollars annually for promotion of dairy products. Today's Idaho Ag News Bill Scott