As Congress continues working on the 2023 Farm Bill, the California dairy industry has several priorities for lawmakers to consider. Director of Regulatory and Economic Affairs for the California Milk Producers Council, Geoff Vanden Heuvel highlights the dairy safety net as being particularly important. During farm bill listening sessions held in California, Vanden Heuvel has said there have been significant changes to the program over the past 20 years. In moving from a price support program to more of an income support program, it has begun to favor certain producers over others.
“It’s a pretty good program if you’re milking 200 cows or less. If you’re milking as most dairies in California by necessity need to be – which is substantially larger than that – 1,500 to 2,000 cows and up, it only really covers a small percentage of your production,” Vanden Heuvel explained. “It’s a safety net for one type of farmer, a small farmer, but it is not much of a safety net for the farmers that produce the vast majority of the milk.”
While supporting smaller operations is an understandable goal, Vanden Heuvel said it could create rifts between producers. Also, providing the same type of generous support to all dairy producers would be much too expensive.
“When we look at this next farm bill, from the West and from the California perspective, we certainly don’t want to hurt any other dairy farmer in the country,” Vanden Heuvel noted. “But we don’t want this safety net to get any more generous than it already is because it creates competitive issues between our region and other regions.”
Another safety net program under a different title within the farm bill is the Dairy Revenue Protection. The program came into effect towards the end of 2018. Vanden Heuvel said the California dairy industry is supportive of continued backing of the program in the next farm bill. “We look at that as being a very valuable addition to the government’s safety net for dairy,” Vanden Heuvel explained.
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