Supporting Dairy Growth

We believe that dairy farmers should be able to operate free of government-mandated limits on their milk production. Farmers should instead be able to choose for themselves how much milk they want to produce, and how quickly they want their operations to grow. After all, they know best their particular area of the dairy industry.

The U.S. dairy industry has a prime opportunity to grow into new markets around the world and develop innovative dairy products that consumers here and abroad will enjoy. We believe that any controls on the milk supply will create unnecessary barriers to that growth and in so doing hurt today's dairy producers, and potentially future generations of dairy farmers and processors.

According to Bloomberg News, U.S.dairy producers “have every incentive to keep producing and expanding supplies whenever they can,” said Michael Swanson, a Minneapolis-based economist at Wells Fargo & Co., the largest U.S. agricultural lender. “With the weak dollar and growing Asian demand, we can sell all this milk that we’re producing at these prices or even better.”

In April, the dairy herd expanded to 9.186 million head, up 1.1 percent from a four-year low in December 2009, and the highest since July 2009, USDA data show. On average, each cow produced 1,814 pounds of milk in April. That’s down 1.9 percent from 1,849 in March, which was the second-highest ever.