8-24 FB Dairy Aid

 Jerry Slominski is the International Dairy Foods Association senior vice president for legislative affairs and economic policy. Jerry has a highly informed perspective on Capitol Hill discussions related to dairy and this applies to local producers.“As Idaho dairy producers who have been through some very, very tough times lately, do they have something to look forward to? Yes I believe they have a number of things that they should look forward to and some programs that we feel will really help them and do a much better job without getting the government involved in regulating our milk markets. A couple of those programs would be farm savings accounts. This is a program that allows farmers, during the good years, to sock money away and then use it in the bad years. We think this will eliminate the incentive to invest in more and more production simply as a tax avoidance policy and allows them to make true decisions and that way avoid some of the volatility with farm savings accounts. Another program that has been popular at USDA is called livestock gross management dairy and that is essentially a risk management program that uses the futures markets as a way of hedging prices. You can buy insurance based upon that, that’s a program that we think should be expanded, money should be put into it by the federal government to make it more available to dairy farmers and this combination of risk management tools, we think is much better than having the government attempt to regulate risk.