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SW Wisconsin | This would put you in a lot more control of your income than you are right now. $0.05/cwt/% isn't a ton of money, just enough to give the bank pause when considering an expansion loan. If milk is $18 and you increase production by 10% you'll still get $17.50. Right now if we as an industry increase production by 10% prices will tank, but if you or I increase by 10% we get about 9.99999% more in the milk check. My system just takes the macroeconomic signals to the industry and applies them to individual farmers.
Big farms getting around it is the biggest issue I haven't completely figured out. There would have to be a provision preventing shared ownership, so maybe you could give your kid a farm and they could start out with no cap, only if you got no benefit from that farm. Merged farms would have a single primary owner if both had milk production history, no merging of base production figures.
You're absolutely right I would like to keep dairies small, although I would prefer to use mild economic incentives rather than a hard cap like the Canadian system. I don't believe that it's inherent to farming that farms get bigger every year, that's a product of the economic system that we have. As I mentioned above, there's never an incentive under the current system to slow production growth. If we put that incentive in, and limited production growth so that it matched demand growth, we may never get back to supporting a family on 25 cows but we absolutely could get back to supporting a family on 60-100 cows. Otherwise the trend is toward few enough and big enough farms that a single farm can respond to market pressure for decreased production and alone address national overproduction. That is bad for all sorts of reasons. | |
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Dairy forecast
