Letter to the Editor: Dairy farmers need $13 margin floor price

My family owns and operates a dairy farm in Wisconsin. During the last several years, the Dairy Margin Coverage program has helped us stabilize our income during some very difficult times.

For example, in April 2023, a low milk price of $20.70 provided me and my family with a much-needed DMC payment of $3.66 per hundredweight.

This past July, however, an equally low milk price — just 10 cents higher than April 2023 — paid us absolutely nothing. Same program. Same level of coverage. Drastic fall in program support.

What happened? As I’m sure you know, the DMC program depends on the margin between two numbers. One is the milk price, and the other is the feed price index.

Lower feed prices mean higher margins. Higher margins mean smaller payments. Today’s rock-bottom feed prices cancel out payments that would otherwise help us get through the struggles that too-low milk prices bring with them.

Don’t low feed costs help make up for the losses caused by low milk prices? Not for smaller family dairy farms like ours. We don’t buy our feed; we grow our own feed. And growing our own feed is getting more expensive by the day.

Looking ahead, bumper harvests and trade wars will likely continue to be a drag on meaningful DMC payments. To make matters worse, we are headed into a time of disastrously low milk prices.

We must do something, and soon, to restore the role the DMC program plays in helping family dairy farms like ours stay in business.

Here, there is some good news — simply putting a floor price of $13 on the feed price index will get things back the way they need to be. With that one change to program regulations, family dairy farmers can once again bank on the protection DMC was intended to provide.

Please help us by working with political leaders to get the DMC program back on track. The future of thousands of family dairy farms like ours hangs in the balance.

Tom Crosby

Shell Lake, Wis.