A group of Vermont dairy farmers has gain momentum for a plan to help stabilize milk prices – two large California cooperatives has expressed interest in backing the plan. The proposal would call for dairy producers to pay 15-cents per hundred weight of milk sold.
A grass-roots group of Vermont dairy farmers has won backing from two California dairy cooperatives for a plan designed to bring stability to see-saw prices paid to the nation’s farmers for their milk.
Margaret Huessy-Laggis of Hardwick, a member of the Vermont-based Dairy Farmers Working Together organization, said representatives for the California-based Milk Producers Council and Western United Dairymen agreed to support the plan during a meeting last week in Chicago of dairy farmers from around the country.
The two California cooperatives represent 1,100 of California’s estimated 1,800 dairy farmers.
“It’s astounding,” Huessy-Laggis said. “We have farmers in Florida, Vermont, Wisconsin and California who all agree on one plan. I don’t think that has ever happened before.”
The plan being pushed by the Vermont group would require all dairy farmers to pay 15 cents for every 100 pounds of milk they produce into a fund that would be used to stabilize the price paid to farmers and help leverage international deals for milk products.
The group has been traveling the country and meeting with farmers to gain support for the plan, hoping the effort will lead to the plan’s inclusion in this year’s congressional rewrite of the Farm Bill. Under the plan, federal subsidies paid to dairy farmers would end.
Geoffrey Vanden Huevel of the Milk Producers Council of Chino, Calif., said Monday in an interview that his group is ready to support the plan if a Cornell University dairy economist’s report on the Vermont plan mirrors what the economist told the farmers meeting in Chicago last week. He said he dropped an alternative plan he was promoting in favor of the Vermont plan because the Vermont plan is more acceptable to the owners of large and small dairy farms. Farmers from 10 states participated in the meeting Thursday in Chicago, in person or by telephone.
Huessy-Laggis said her group hopes to pitch its plan to the St. Albans Cooperative Creamery Inc. this week and is seeking support from the Kansas City-based Dairy Farmers of America, the nation’s largest milk cooperative. A group of Vermont farmers also plans to travel to Oregon and Washington next week to talk up its plan with dairy farmers in those two states, she said.