Dairies rely on buyers, not Fed

By Michael Marsh

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The Bee ran an editorial (June 8) suggesting that dairy farmers should not expect a government bailout. Good news! California dairy families don't expect one and haven't asked.

California dairy families, just like other families, are struggling through the worst economic crisis in generations. Soaring jobless claims, corporate bankruptcies, massive numbers of home foreclosures, a global credit crisis, cities, counties and states furloughing workers and cutting back on services, unstable currency exchange rates, consumers hunkering down and not spending money in fear over the next round of bad news, are all a part of the background that our family farms face today.

California's dairy families toil long hours in tough conditions working with animals they respect and sustain. They harvest a highly perishable crop two or three times a day, 365 days a year. Unfortunately perhaps, these living creatures have no easily accessible off switch to pull when the vagaries of a global economy turn things topsy turvy.

Dairy families are in the economic battle of their lives. They've worked all of their lives to save enough money to invest in their cattle and their barns. California dairy families have seen their lifelong investment disappear in a matter of months. Their dreams of perhaps being able to afford to send their kids to college, or to retire from a lifetime of 18-hour workdays or simply to provide their children with a better life than they had, are evaporating.

Markets for dairy products, similar to markets for other products, seem cyclical at times. Prices go up and prices go down. The heat storm in 2006, coupled with low prices, forced many farmers out of business.

Strong global markets for dairy in 2007, due in part to a prolonged drought in Oceania, allowed the California dairy families that were left to recoup much of the money they lost in the prior year, even as operating margins were squeezed due to much higher costs for feed and tractor fuel.

And, although the farmer's milk price (which, by the way, lacks correlation with the price consumers pay at the store) for the first seven months of 2008 was good, it cost him more to produce a gallon of milk than he was paid for the rest of the year.

If 2009 prices continue the pattern seen through June, California farmers will have had their paychecks cut in half from last year while their costs have continued to soar. For every

84 cents the farmer receives for a gallon of milk he produces, that gallon is costing him about $1.68 to make.

Dairy families are in a crisis. That's why you hear rumblings here and there of plans to align milk supply with the remaining demand. These family operations are struggling, hoping, praying that this generation of dairy farmers on the family farm is not the last. With all of the pummeling California farmers are taking, it's disappointing that The Bee would take such a cheap shot.

The help we need has to come from the market. We realize that and we hope that California consumers realize that as well. When folks go to the store or if they can afford to go out to eat, we would hope that they would protect their locally sourced milk supply and ask for dairy products made with Real California Milk.

Marsh is CEO of Western United Dairymen, a voluntary membership organization representing more than 60 percent of the milk produced in California.