Not everyone is on board with a couple of proposals being offered to help stabilize milk prices for producers. The Wisconsin Farmers Union released an editorial on Monday slamming the measures being offered by Minnesota Congressman Congressman Collin Peterson and the National Milk Producers Federation, saying that the 'cure is worse than the disease.' The Chippewa Falls-based group says any good doctor knows you have to correctly diagnose the problem before prescribing the cure.
"The (NMPF's) Foundation for the Future plan assumes that the dairy industry's primary ailments are occasional spikes in feed costs, and occasional dips in export markets," the letter stated. "Those just happened to be the immediate factors that triggered the dairy crisis in 2009, and now NMPF is scrambling to put a band-aid on those problems. But the underlying wound that has been systematically bleeding the profitability out of dairy farms for 20 years is increasing industry consolidation and monopolistic behavior by processors and retailers."
Specifically, the WFU says four companies currently dominate the fluid milk and cheese processing market in the U.S.: Dean Foods, Kraft Foods North America, Saputo Inc., and Land O'Lakes Inc. The editorial cited numbers from 2002 which showed that the combined market share of these top four firms was 35-percent for cheese processing and 43-percent for fluid milk processing; and that the more market share they control, the more they are able to drive farm milk prices down.
To read the rest of the story, please go to: Wisconsin Ag Connection
