Robert P. Casey Jr.
Milk price subsidies unfair, farmers tell touring Casey
February 22, 2007
Source: The Patriot News
By Brett Lieberman
For more than 60 years, the Kopp family has been milking Holsteins on 500 acres just off Route 283 near Middletown.
Fluctuating market prices that haven't kept pace with production costs are making it increasingly difficult for dairy farmers to stay in business, Kopp family members told U.S. Sen. Bob Casey Jr., D-Pa., as he toured their Stoneylawn Farm yesterday afternoon.
"We need to get a better way ... of pricing milk that's a little fairer to the producer," said Jay Kopp, who started working on the family farm in the 1960s.
"When I sit down and pay the bills, I don't know what the [Milk Income Loss Contract Program] payments are going to be," said his brother, Ron, who began working on the farm in the early 1970s.
The system of government payments, which subsidize dairy farmers when wholesale milk prices drop, is a contentious issue with Northeastern dairy farmers, who generally receive lower prices than Midwestern producers.
The issue is one of many that Pennsylvania dairy farmers hope Congress will reconsider when it rewrites federal farm legislation this year.
U.S. Rep. Tim Holden, D-Schuylkill County, heard similar complaints during a hearing he hosted in May at the state Farm Show complex.
Holden, the No. 2 ranking Democrat on the House Agriculture Committee, helped lead the fight for Northeastern farmers during the writing of the last farm bill.
Though the MILC payments have kept many dairy farmers afloat, Ron Kopp told Casey, a member of the Senate Agriculture Committee, that Pennsylvania farmers would do better if the market was allowed to set prices.
Milk prices paid to farmers averaged $13.14 per hundredweight, with an average MILC payment of only 61 cents last year, according to the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau. Milk is sold in units of 100 pounds.
Farmers' costs, meanwhile, have averaged $18.14 per hundredweight.
"There's no way for us to pass along those costs like other industries can," said Adam Kopp, Jay Kopp's son, who joined the business after graduating from college in 2001.
"I want to listen and learn about what dairy farmers' concerns and needs are," said Casey, adding that he wants to make sure Pennsylvania farmers are treated fairly.
"Right now we don't see that," he said.
