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Missouri dairy group “very disappointed”
The Missouri Dairy Association director says it’s very disappointing the legislature narrowly failed to override Governor Jay Nixon’s veto of an ag bill that contained a provision to help Missouri dairy farmers. Dave Drennan tells Brownfield Ag News, a lot of work has gone into the dairy bill, “You know this has been an accumulation of efforts probably for a couple of years. We’re so close, I tell – our dairy farmers are very resilient people. Even though they’re disheartened today, we’re going to redouble our efforts to educate our legislators about the importance of our industry.”
Drennan says legislative leaders roped the captive deer provision into the bill – the provision Nixon said was the reason for his veto of the bill, “So, they determined that course of action. The majority ruled and that’s the cards we were dealt with. And, so, that’s what we were working with. We were also educating legislator that this issue about the deer was completely overblown because the Department of Agriculture here in Missouri already does the testing for all the deer in the state for Chronic Wasting Disease.”
Drennan says folks overlook that farmers, especially dairy farmers, are price takers, not price makers. He tells Brownfield, “We’re whip-sawed by not only world prices collapsing, economies collapsing and then having two years of drought in 2011 and 2012. There’s no other industry that depends on the weather like agriculture except maybe for golf.”
The Missouri Dairy Revitalization Act would have provided a dairy producer insurance premium assistance program for producers who participate in the federal margin protection program. Until similar legislation is passed, Drennan says, Missouri will continue to lose dairy farmers.
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