Farm Aid Urging You to Take Action to Save Dairy Farmers
Posted: April 29, 2009
Willie Nelson and his Farm Aid foundation is urging everyone to take action now to help dairy farmers by sending a letter to U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack. According to the Farm Aid website: “America’s dairy farmers are rapidly disappearing, and we need your help to make sure they don’t lose everything they’ve ever worked for. Sign our letter to Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack and urge him to take bold action to help save our dairy farmers.” Click here to sign onto our letter urging Secretary Vilsack to take swift action to help dairy farmers today.
In the last few weeks, the dairy crisis in the U.S. has gotten even more desperate. Dairy farmers from California to Vermont are losing their farms and their livelihoods, struggling to survive while the bottom falls out of the industry. Things are so bad that we may immediately lose up to 20,000 of our nation’s dairy farmers and billions of dollars from our rural economies, which are already hurting.
But there’s something you can do to help right now to make sure we don’t lose one more dairy farmer: Send a message to Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack urging him to take immediate action to save dairy farmers. He’s the one person who can help change the fate of thousands of hard working families — and he needs to hear from you.
The causes of the dairy crisis are complex — including foreign imports and price manipulation by dairy processors — but the immediate solution is simple. To keep dairy farmers from losing their farms from coast to coast, the price of milk paid to farmers must be altered to reflect the farmers’ cost of production. On average, our farmers are currently being paid less than half of what it costs them to produce milk — and Secretary Vilsack is the only person with the legal authority to set a fair price for farmers.
Setting a fair price for milk won’t fix all the problems that led to the current crisis — but it may be the only way to keep thousands of dairy farmers on their farms this year. Unless Secretary Vilsack takes immediate action, huge areas of the United States may be left without any local dairy farms at all.
Joe Said,
May 5, 2009 @ 4:41 am
You have to be kidding
Its relying on government that get farmers into these messes. nobody was complaining when milk went to $20, it was farmers who ramped up production to more than the market could drink, so the price had to drop.. It was the government that got the biofuel thing going which pushed up corn prices, and it was the government who for years have underwritten farming to produce whatever you want regardless of the market. Get Governmant out of farming and let prices work and US agriculture will be stronger for it
Most of the processors are farmer owned, they have to face the market for farmers, they are not manipulating prices down, they are getting them higher than farmers can do on their own. I have never seen any foreign milk in the US, but ive seen a lot of US milk powder in foreign countries, all put there by Government subsidy, .This is not complex. if you are producing milk at a loss, stop producing it, then watch the price go up real quick.
online shopping Said,
June 6, 2009 @ 7:23 pm
Wow that comment seem bitter. Got Milk? Great marketing, the challenges that face diary farmers today is more complex then they where 20 years ago and the fix is bigger then a great slogan. Our government, hmm are they really trying to help anyone?
Take a look at the banks, MFG. and yes the farmer. It appears every time the government sinks its hook into an industry they destroy it. Yea the farmer is in deep. We need a government that helps them out with out becoming farmers.