Helping NW Dairies

Helping NW Dairies. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Line On Agriculture.

It is no secret that the dairy industry is in a world of hurt. Dan Newhouse, Director of the Washington State Department of Agriculture recently joined with his counterpart in Oregon to endorse a national proposal to boost milk prices and keep Northwest dairy farms in business.

NEWHOUSE: If we go back to the last legislative session there was interest on several lawmakers’ parts to see what we could do to help the dairy industry and there was actually a part of the budget that passed the legislature to direct my agency to convene an industry meeting to do that. Interestingly the Governor vetoed that section of the budget but directed us to go ahead and essentially carry out the intent.

Newhouse said they had to do that within agency resources. He said they put together a meeting with Oregon officials.

NEWHOUSE: Actually had a meeting in Portland during the summer with representatives of both states dairy industry which I thought made more sense. You know this dairy pricing system is not a single state kind of program it’s more regional, actually more federal or nationwide. The dairy pricing is very confusing to say the least a very complicated system but certainly one state does not have control.

Those meetings included Newhouse’ Oregon counterpart, Katy Coba. They set about creating a plan to help the ailing dairy industry.

NEWHOUSE: And what the industry after long conversations with Katy and what we came up with were some ideas to kind of bolster the pricing that they are seeing in the market. Basically what it boils down to is removing product from the shelves. USDA purchasing excess cheese and milk products, making those available to our nation’s lunch programs, to the SNAP program, to the food banks.

He says that even countries like Iraq and Afghanistan are receiving exports of dairy products.

NEWHOUSE: There’s just a lot of places that there are needs for additional protein sources and we thought that this was a great combination that we could make of helping an industry and also on the other hand helping people in this tough economic time are looking for ways to keep food on the table.

Washington currently has 498 licensed dairies, while Oregon licenses 261 milk producers. More on Monday. That’s today’s Line On Agriculture. I’m Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.