Editor:
Dairy farmers across the nation are once again left without effective farm bill legislation. Another year of hard work by dairy farm groups to develop and promote their policy ideas has been ignored by Congress.
There can be no excuse for the way Congress is treating our nation’s dairy farmers. I wonder how much longer dairy farmers will put their trust in Washington to address their pricing problems.
We seem to be caught between a rock and a hard place. We have a do-nothing Congress on one hand and giant foreign-owned processors on the other.
The good news is we don’t need to depend on either one as much as we have in the past. Dairy farmers acting together in the market can gain the prices they need to cover their costs and make a reasonable profit.
Dairy farmers own the milk first. This is their biggest advantage in the marketplace. Now, more than ever, all dairy farmers must use their legal rights to work together and fairly price milk at the farm level.
Brad Rach
Ames, Iowa
(The author is National Dairy director, National Farmers Organization.)
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