By MELISSA HART

Michigan Correspondent

MARSHALL, Mich. — The Dairy Together Movement attempted to gather steam at recent meetings throughout Michigan discussing the dairy crisis and how farmers can organize for change.

Sponsored by the Michigan Farmers Union (MFU), dairy producers were invited to listen to a presentation on the Canadian dairy supply management system and to initiate a productive dialogue on how to adopt a supply management system in the United States to ensure a more stable farmgate milk price.

Ralph Dietrich and Will Vanderhost, representatives from the Dairy Farmers of Ontario (DFO), presented the history and the advantages of the Canadian dairy supply management system and encouraged producers to begin to look for ways the system could be adopted in the U.S. in one form or another.

“Cycles don’t exist in the supply management system,” Dietrich said. “Our farmers don’t experience the wild fluctuations that U.S. farmers do, and that’s really the essence of our system.”

Vanderhost pointed to the age-old problem in the U.S. that when the price of milk increases, dairy producers add cows, flood the market with milk and the price decreases. In the Canadian system, producers can’t increase the number of cows at will, so the supply of milk stays steady and so does its price.

“When processors need milk, there is only one place to get it, and that’s Dairy Farmers of Ontario, so they don’t deal with individual producers, they deal with DFO and our staff. There is one seller of milk in the province,” Dietrich explained.

Each dairy producer must be licensed in order to buy quota, and that means they need to meet quality standards similar to those standards of the USDA.

“Before you can get a license, the DFO board has to approve it, and we will not approve a license with a corporation name on it until we see all the shareholders’ licenses, and the shareholders have to be farmers or else we will not approve it – and if you don’t have a license, you cannot ship milk,” Vanderhost said.

He and Dietrich stressed that their exact system doesn’t have to be replicated in the U.S. to improve the pricing system, but unifying and adopting some of the pieces of the system may be beneficial.

The MFU encouraged producers to continue the dialogue as the 2018 farm bill is under construction. In the new bill, the organization would like to see an emergency relief provision for dairy farmers, a practical dairy supply management that includes both farmers and processors and stable prices for farmers.

In 2017, several dairy farms lost their milk contracts because the processing plants had too much milk. Since then the blame for the dairy crisis has been laid that the feet of the U.S. milk glut, trade issues with Canada and large dairies producing too much milk.

The MFU sees the biggest failure of the U.S. dairy industry as the inability to control the supply of milk and match it to market needs. They believe it’s important for American farmers to see that it is possible to have a dairy system that benefits them, processors and consumers.