Next Steps for Revising the Federal Milk Marketing Order

The Federal Milk Marketing Order system revisement public hearing has concluded National Milk Producers Federation Senior Vice President of Member Services and Governance, Chris Galan.

“The process that began more than two years ago. National Milk had some deliberations internally. And then we had a number of our member cooperative experts meet in 2022, in the first part of 2023, to come up with some proposals, and those were submitted to USDA last spring. And here we are now almost a year later. And at least we've reached the point where USDA has just completed its public hearing process to hear ideas from our group, other cooperatives from other trade associations from processors about what needs to happen to revise and update the milk pricing system.”

After starting in August. This hearing concluded at the end of January wrapping up after a five-month duration.

...Gonna happen now there's a quiet period where a group like ours have 60 days to submit additional comments and some summaries of everything that we heard we presented. Those are due April 1, and then we would expect probably by mid-summer, USDA will come out with what's called a recommended decision. It's not a final decision, but it's basically their recommendation about what needs to happen.”

Galen is in hopes that final recommendations will be issued within a year.