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Dairy processors praised for stepping up in Grassland producer crisis

Dairy leaders say milk processors put competition aside to help the farmers no longer selling milk to Grassland Dairy Products.

Dairy Business Milk Marketing Cooperative President John Pagel tells Brownfield Wisconsin’s processors quickly stepped up.  “What’s kind of neat is a lot of these people are in competition, but yet when it came time to join together to find a solution for the industry, then everybody let the competition lay low and worked together to take care of the people inside the industry.”

During the processor meetings, Pagel says they did talk about possibly asking farmers to hold the line on production. “There has been some discussion about that.  Things like, don’t make any more milk than you did the year before unless the processor has got (the) capacity to process it.  I think that’s the direction that we’re going to go, but I don’t want to make too strong a statement there until we hear what the other ideas are.”

Fifty-eight farms producing about one million pounds of milk per day were told they would need a different buyer as of May 1^st after Grassland lost its ultra-filtered milk buyers in Canada.

State Ag Department officials say a few of the producers chose to exit the business. All of the remaining farms now have a buyer for their milk, but Pagel says some of them are temporary deals and more work needs to be done to find a permanent solution.

The Dairy Business Milk Marketing Cooperative, the Dairy Business Association, and Wisconsin Farm Bureau yesterday thanked processors and the state’s Farm Center for helping producers find a home for their milk.