Mark Stephenson, Director of Dairy Policy Analysis for the University of Wisconsin College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, was one of many exceptional dairy professionals who spoke in front of international audiences during the 2015 World Dairy Expo.
“Policy has been pretty important for us in the last couple of years as we had a Farm Bill approaching,” he said at an interview during the expo, “There’s always a biding interest in dairy markets and outlook.”
Stephenson spoke with groups from the United Kingdom, Brazil, the Netherlands, and Germany during this years expo, as well as several different domestic groups.
“People want to talk about a variety of different topics,” he said, “Some of them are export market opportunities, some of them are thinking about outlook for prices ahead, others are just looking at structural change in the US dairy industry: what’s been going on, why we’ve been seeing milk that’s being lost in the Southeast versus growth up here in the older traditional areas of
dairy like Wisconsin and the Northeast.”
This year’s international collaboration of industry professionals was especially important to Stephenson and other policy directors, as it occurred while the Transpacific Trade Agreement(TTP) was simultaneously beginning to come to surface.
“We’re right at the culmination of the Transpacific Trade Agreement, and that has a lot of provisions in it for the dairy industry,” he said, “We may have to open our markets up a little bit to imports of dairy products from other countries. There are going to be some tradeoffs, but on a whole, I’d say it’s a good thing for dairy.”
Listen to my interview with Noah here:
Interview with Mark Stephenson, UW Extension
View and download photos from the event here: 2015 World Dairy Expo Photo Album
