Helping Dairy Part 3

Helping Dairy Part 3. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Line On Agriculture.

Dan Newhouse, Director of the Washington State Department of Agriculture along with Oregon Ag Director Katy Coba has been working diligently to help boost the dairy industry in the northwest. They have sent a letter to USDA Secretary of Agriculture and members of Congress from their respective states in support of a plan proposed by the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture.

NEWHOUSE: I feel good that we had an impact on the final proposal and it’s been accepted, I got to tell you very well by everyone we’ve been shopping it to. Here locally we are getting support from our Senate Ag Committee, I made a presentation there a couple of weeks ago and they are willing to solicit support for the proposal from our congressional delegation, the Governor is willing to do that as well. I think Katy is having similar success in Oregon.

Newhouse is honest when he says this isn’t an end all, be all dairy industry fix.

NEWHOUSE: I don’t know if this is a perfect solution. It needs to be coupled with some supply management. You know this is only going to be a temporary boost if it works and I’m optimistic that it will. It won’t be a long term solution; there are other things that need to be explored to really address the bigger picture.

Of course this has not been just a regional issue. The dairy crisis has extended across the U.S. and even globally.

NEWHOUSE: We’re having a lot of farmers as you know that are going out of business. Certainly losing money at an alarming rate that’s impacting not only them but communities and others that are associated with the dairy industry in a big way and so we felt that it was certainly an important enough issue to take this kind of action.

In the first nine months of 2009, 39 Washington dairy farms and 16 Oregon dairy farms have terminated their licenses. Washington currently has 498 licensed dairies, while Oregon licenses 261 milk producers.

NEWHOUSE: The imminent problems of bank foreclosures and people going out of business and probably once you lose dairy farms it’s difficult to reestablish so a shrinking industry, it was just something that we felt was imminent enough that action needed to be taken.

That’s today’s Line On Agriculture. I’m Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.