Letter to Tom Vilsack, Secretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture - More Information Needed for Small Dairies to Utilize New Dairy Insurance Program

Letter

Dear Secretary Vilsack:

I would like to commend you on your early efforts to begin the implementation of the Agricultural Act of 2014 also known as the 2014 Farm Bill, as it is of great importance to our rural economies and nation's farmers. I would like to bring to your attention the importance of adequately educating our nation's dairy farmers about the new dairy margin protection program that farmers in New York and across the country will be enrolling in the coming year.

As you know, the Farm Bill included $100 million for implementation of commodity support programs. Of that the bill dedicates $3 million to state extension

services for education and another $3 million for online web tools to assist farmers with deciding how to best utilize the new farm commodity support programs. The 2014 Farm bill includes an entirely new dairy support program that requires farmers to make considerably more individual and complex decisions when enrolling than in the previous Milk Income Loss Contract (MILC) program. In light of this, I urge you to dedicate significant resources targeted specifically at dairy farmers during implementation. This should include targeting state extension education, FSA outreach, and building web tools tailored for dairy farmers to assist in making important decisions on how to best utilize the new program. It is important that these resources both address the challenges dairy farmers face when enrolling in the new program and are distributed equably among states.

Dairy farmers will have to make decisions on how much of their production base to insure and at what margin level to elect coverage under the new program. These decisions will largely be based on each individual farmer's business model. New York's dairy farmers are primarily small family farms with an average herd size of around 120 cows. I encourage USDA to deploy significant resources to assist farmers, as many of New York's small farmers do not have access to extensive financial planning tools and will rely on USDA to provide guidance and technical assistance. It is important that farmers have been given the proper time and resources to fully understand how to best utilize the new dairy margin protection program before USDA discontinues the MILC program, which is set expire Sept. 1st, 2014.

Again, I commend your efforts to implement many of the important provisions and programs in the 2014 Farm Bill and urge you to direct significant resources to assist dairy farmers so that they may best utilize the new dairy margin insurance program. Thank you for your attention to this important matter.

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