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Dairy Farm Resiliency Act would expand DMC

Bipartisan legislation has been introduced in the U.S. House to improve USDA’s Dairy Margin Coverage Program for farmers.

House Agriculture Committee member Elissa Slotkin is a co-sponsor of the Dairy Farm Resiliency Act.

“It helps expand the safety net for medium-sized dairy producers,” she says.

The Michigan Democrat tells Brownfield she’s hopeful its bipartisan support will carry it through the farm bill process.

“There’s no better time than now to update this policy, make it available to more farmers, and to make sure that the numbers that they’re using for all their calculations actually reflect reality,” Slotkin says.  “We’ve got a lot of numbers that are being used from 2013/2014 and obviously the cost of inputs are way higher now than they were then.”

The legislation would increase Tier I and Tier II coverage levels from five million pounds of milk to six million and update a farmer’s average production to the most recent three-year history.

The bill is also co-sponsored by U.S. Rep. Marc Molinaro (R-NY-19), Derrick Van Orden (R-WI-3), and Abigail Spanberger (D-VA-7).