09/12/07 Milk Producers On The Issues

Milk Producers On Issues. I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture. With the Senate set to begin work on the Farm Bill, many Ag industries are weighing in. The National Milk Producers Federation doesn't expect to see a new bill before the old one expires according to Chris Galen, NMPF Senior Vice President of Communications. GALEN: Well the current Farm Bill expires in less that 3 weeks and it's very unlikely that the Senate is going to pass a Farm Bill by the end of September. They haven't even had what they call a markup on it to debate specifics like dairy policy. So in all likelihood we're going to have a short term extension, a period of a month or two, perhaps three or four. The same goes for a lot of the annual appropriation bills which Congress has also yet to pass so they're going to have to roll up a lot of key programs including farm programs into a short term extension. Galen says they are happy with the House bill. GALEN: We're very happy with the bill the House passed earlier this summer. It contains just about all of National Milk's priorities for dairy policy in the coming 5 years and so we really need to make certain the Senate passes a similar bill, it's just going to take longer than we had hoped. When it comes to the needs of the dairy industry, Galen says they are looking for some specific items to be included. GALEN: When it comes to dairy policy we want to make certain there is a usable producer safety net and actually there are going to be two things in there it would appear right now, one is having a revised dairy price support program, one that no longer supports the price of milk but that supports specific product prices like cheese and butter and non-fat dry milk and ultimately those determine what the price support level is anyway. The other thing is it looks like there will be an extension of the milk income loss contract. The National Milk Producers Federation has recently completely redesigned their website to include more information on these issues and more like the immigration issue and milk prices. GALEN: It has a whole bunch of information that is designed to appeal to our primary audience and that is dairy farmers. This isn't a consumer oriented site, it's not designed to tell people exactly where milk comes from or how cheese is made or anything cute like that, this is oriented towards policy. Visit the site at nmpf.org. More tomorrow with Chris Galen. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.