The nation’s dairy producers had a rough year in ’09 and they’re not out of the woods yet. USDA statistics this week show more than 21-hundred dairies, most of which had 100 cows or less, stopped operating but milk production only slowed three-tenths of one-percent. Missouri Dairy Association director Dave Drennan says the herd retirements didn’t have the impact that was hoped for, “CWT cannot keep up with the milk production if it doesn’t go off, we took out a good number of cows nationwide, yet it wasn’t enough to keep up with the increasing milk production. Milk production just didn’t drop like everyone thought it was going to.”
Plus, Drennan says there’s a greater supply of heifers becoming available, which means more milk production.
He says Missouri dairies had their worst year in 25 years, some say in 40 years. Turnout at the MDA’s Dairy Profit Seminars across the state this week is good where Drennan says there’s a sense of cautious optimism among producers, “We’re optimistic, but the signals out there don’t tell us to get too optimistic for the immediate future.”
Drennan says Missouri lost at least 30 dairies and more than six-thousand cows, an 84-Million dollar hit to the state’s economy. He says many economists indicate it likely won’t be until this fall when prices begin to show improvement. The theme of the Dairy Profit Seminars this year is “Strategies for Financial Recovery.”
USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) – Dairy
Missouri Dairy Association – Profit Seminars
AUDIO: Dave Drennan, Executive Director, Missouri Dairy Association
Latest: 
Herd retirement programs such as CWT are a “non-solution” to the milk surplus problem. The herd retirement programs eliminate a few more family dairy farms and the be mega-dairies staffed with cheap immigrant labor pick up the slack in milk production. Putting payment limits on emergency relief for dairy producers thereby pressuring the mega-dairies to cut back scale of production would have been far more effective at cutting production as raising prices.
CWT is a cruel joke(?) being used against dairy farmers and consumers who don’t realize that while dairy farmers are paying to eliminate hundreds of thousands of U.S. dairy cows (and heifers) “deals” have been made with American Dairy Inc to set up ten -ten thousand cow dairies in China! More melamine ,anyone? Check out China/melamine/milk,Sanlu,Fonterra,American Dairy Inc,Cooperative Resources International(CRI),Flying Crane,and ask your own dairy cooperatives,”What’s going on?” Check also on the upcoming trade ageements! Is dairy going to be free traded away again? Who is really “creating” dairy surpluses and who is really profiting?