06/28/07 Exporting Dairy

Exporting Dairy. I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture. We've always been taught to work together. The cooperation of individuals and businesses results in great things and that is the case with CWT or Cooperatives Working Together. CWT is made up of dairy cooperatives and individual dairy farmers and the end result is better prices and better movement of product. CWT has been working to find export markets and according to Chris Galen it has been very successful. GALEN: Well we've been doing this every week now for probably the last year and a half and that is announcing that CWT's member cooperative have been using financial assistance from the organization to help facilitate the export of primarily cheese and butter to foreign markets. Most of those markets are overseas, we really don't do much with Mexico or Canada and so what we are doing is helping to tighten up the domestic market by exporting quite a bit of our cheese and butter products. Galen says that in the first three years, the program has help producer prices significantly from not just the export program. GALEN: It's increased farm level process about 42 cents a hundred weight and that's by doing both, our export assistance program as well as our herd retirement program. We just competed out fourth herd retirement this spring; we removed about 1 billion pounds of milk and so yes, both the herd retirement program which removes milk production and our export assistance program which removes finished product from this market place  both of those together help to improve farm level prices. Over 40 cooperatives and over 500 individual dairy farmers make up CWT and each makes their own contribution. GALEN: A cooperative must take product that it owns and if it has an overseas buyer for that product it can apply to CWT for an export bonus. Basically that bonus is money that bridges the price between the U.S. price and the oversea price. In other words if cheese is worth a $1.50 a pound here but the overseas buyer only wants to pay a $1.30 a pound, then we'll pay roughly 20 cents plus whatever the cost of freight is so that that buyer overseas can buy the product at the lower price and the cooperative is made whole. The program plans to continue according to Galen. GALEN: We are hoping that the program will continue through 2008. Our CWT committee met earlier in June and they basically pledged that at the end of this year they should re-up and start the program again at the current 10 cent per hundred weight membership assessment level in 2008. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.