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Chairman Lucas details the new dairy provision
House Ag Committee Chairman Frank Lucas said one of the sticking points of the Farm Bill was the Dairy Provision. The Chairman says the old programs were no longer effective and needed to be changed.
The new program does not entail what he would call “traditional supply management”. “It’s an insurance program,” he says. “You will pay in premiums to purchase protections against a price/cost problem. If supply gets out of hand, instead of somebody at USDA sending you a letter saying you can’t put anymore pounds than this in the tank, basically your premiums will go up and at a certain point the benefits you get out of the program will go down.” The goal, he says, is to use that as a disincentive.
He tells Brownfield the other big story of the Dairy Title was getting conferees representing all different dairy producing areas to sign the report. “I think the Dairy Title, subject to how it is implemented and how it all works out, at this point might be just as miraculous as the rest of the bill,” he says.
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