USDA Proposals After 49-Day FMMO Hearing
With California Ag Today, I am Haylie Shipp. This is the Ag Information Network.
We’re taking a deep dive into milk marketing in your ag news today.
Late last year and into the start of 2024, the USDA held a 49-day Federal Milk Marketing Order hearing and listened to hundreds of hours of testimony, which resulted in reform proposals released this week. Roger Cryan, chief economist with the American Farm Bureau, says the changes have some positives…
“It increases the value returned to farmers for bottling milk, but most important, it restores the higher of the cheese or butter powder values in the bottling milk price instead of the average plus price formula that was used since 2019. And there's some not so good stuff. The biggest issue is there's substantial reductions in all the class prices to allow for higher processing costs, and the problem with that is that we don't really have good data to demonstrate higher processing costs.”
Cryan says a couple of key Farm Bureau ideas didn’t make it…
“We thought there was a really good argument to increase the differential on the Class Two milk. USDA disagreed with that. We thought it was important to add 640-pound blocks of cheddar cheese to the product price survey that sets the cheese milk price, because in five or 10 years, there won't be enough 40-pound blocks to set a fair price. And USDA disagreed with that.”
A comment period is open on the final rule, and Cryan said Farm Bureau will be submitting a number of ideas. We’ll get into those right here tomorrow on the Ag Information Network.
