Missouri Dairy Business Update | |
Volume 4, Number 11 | |
November 2004 |
COOPERATIVES WORKING TOGETHER ACCEPTS 378
HERD RETIREMENT BIDS TOTALING 931 MILLION POUNDS OF MILK ARLINGTON, VA – Cooperatives Working Together (CWT), the farmer-led
economic self-help effort for America’s dairy producers, announced
Wednesday that it has accepted 378 bids from farmers seeking to retire
their milking herds, representing approximately 51,700 cows. Those
retirements will remove 931 million pounds of milk, or 0.55% of the
nation’s supply, helping to stabilize farm-level prices that have
been declining in recent months. Jerry Kozak, President and CEO of the National Milk Producers Federation (NPMF), which is operating CWT, said that just like last year’s program, the 2004 Herd Retirement effort will surpass CWT’s initial goals for this year. “We set out with the intent of reducing milk supplies by 870 million pounds, and in fact, we will exceed that target by 7% without adding to the budget for the program. We also exceeded our target for cow removals by nearly 2,700. What’s more, we will again honor our regional safeguard limits, meaning that no region of the country will suffer a disproportionate loss of milk supplies,” Kozak said. Under CWT’s guidelines, safeguard thresholds have been established for five separate regions of the country, limiting the total milk withdrawals possible in each. The limits are strictest in the Northeast, Southeast and Midwest, and looser in the Southwest and West. The totals for each region in 2004 include: In order to ensure the integrity of the herd retirement process, those farms whose bids have been tentatively accepted will soon be contacted by CWT field auditors, shortly before those auditors visit each of the farms. That process will continue until all the farms have been audited, and the herds have been tagged for removal. Farmers must send their animals to slaughter shortly after that auditing and tagging process is complete. Kozak said that specific bid information, including the range of
accepted bids and the average bid, won’t be released until mid-December.
By that point, all bidders will be notified of their status. For more on CWT’s activities, visit our Website at www.cwt.coop. |