News

National Milk Producers bring familiar priorities to the new Congress

Now that the House of Representatives is sworn in, a dairy group is bringing its legislative priorities to Capitol Hill.

Jim Mulhern with the National Milk Producers Federation tells Brownfield the next farm bill is the top priority and making minor adjustments to dairy risk management programs needs to be a part of that. 

Mulhern says the Dairy Margin Coverage program works well for small and medium-sized producers. “You’re able to insure your income over feed costs at a dollar a hundredweight more than what has been the average margin in this industry over the last ten to fifteen years. That’s substantial support, and every small to medium-sized producer ought to be in this program on an annual basis.”

And he says the Dairy Revenue Protection program that was modified in the last farm bill needs some adjustments. “We’re going to need to make some tweaks to improve those programs. The kind of changes I see are a more evolutionary, not wholesale, revolutionary change in them but sort of tweaks on the margins to make them work better.”

And, Mulhern says the ag labor issue has been challenging for more than 25 years, and the Farm Workforce Modernization act passed the House twice but stalled in the Senate. “We have to start over in this new Congress. This is one of the most important issues for dairy and it’s one of the most important issues for agriculture so the effort needs to continue. We’ve got to find a bipartisan middle ground here that addresses this issue.”

Mulhern is hopeful the divisions in the Republican party seen during last week’s battle for Speaker of the House don’t lead to less progress on the farm bill and dairy policy.