Popular dairy insurance program
Washington Ag Today July 8, 2011 Congress has made 20 million dollars available a year for all USDA livestock insurance programs. Murphy: “The popularity of a newly designed dairy program exhausted these funds in March, halfway through the fiscal year.” That is USDA Risk Management Agency Administrator Bill Murphy talking about the Livestock Gross Margin Dairy Program. He says historically his agency has only spent three to four million a year of that 20 million dollar annual allocation since the year 2000. Murphy: “What changed this year is that the dairy industry requested through the developer of that program to make two changes. One of them to provide a subsidy, which was not in there before. And they also requested that the premium payment be changed from the beginning of the insurance period to the end like the rest of our crop insurance program. And we put it out four months ago and growers were extremely interested in the program. They have used up all the funding that we had available for dairy, which was about 75 million of that 20-million.” Also on the dairy front, next week, Tuesday July 12th, will be that meeting in Olympia where the dairy policy reform program proposed by the National Milk Producers Federation’s Foundation for the Future will be discussed. That will be a three-hour meeting from 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. at the Red Lion Hotel in Olympia. There will be a presentation by Jerry Kozak along with other staff of the federation. Pre-registration is required and can be done through the National Milk Producer‘s website. I’m Bob Hoff and that’s Washington Ag Today on Northwest Aginfo Net.
