Taking a few dollars from the excess milk produced and having that money redistributed is a nice gesture but it will do very little to help producers. What needs to happen is to produce less milk in order for demand to meet supply. CWT does a nice job of taking cows out of production, but why settle for just removing healthy and random cows? This creates the perfect opportunity for us to produce a better product for consumers, improve the dairy herd as a whole, and improve our industry’s image at the same time. I vote that we need to lower the salable bulk tank SCC limit to 300,000 to get in line with the other major exporting countries across the globe. The European Union limit for shipping milk is less than half of the US, and they actually enforce their limit! I find it embarrassing that we have tried for years to lower this and there is opposition out there that we cannot lower the limit from 750,000. By incorporating this new standard, it will force all producers to cull a few of their chronic and problem mastitis cows that are not making salable milk and are putting the rest of their herd at risk. The eyesore operations that give the dairy industry a black eye will be forced out of production. In the end, we will have a better quality product to put on store shelves, and we are able to put our industry in a positive light as producers coming together in order to produce a higher quality product.

Trent Olson
taospring@hotmail.com

This entry was posted on Friday, August 14th, 2009 at 2:21 pm by sschmidt and is filed under Milk Pricing - Producer comments. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.