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Organic Valley leader suggests additional dairy risk management tool

A leader with Organic Valley says recently-created dairy risk management tools need to stay in the next farm bill.

Travis Forgues tells Brownfield the Dairy Margin Protection Program as offered now has tiers that work and premiums are scaled appropriately, so it’s good for the farmers that can utilize it. “It’s not, you know, a perfectly-aligned tool for our organic farmers but it is helpful, and of course, we’re a big believer in stability and protection for farmers, and so we think that it needs to, you know, the changes they’ve done recently have been positive and we want to see those continue into the future.”

Forgues says he would also like Congress to consider a risk management tool his smaller farms could utilize. “We would support work on it to do maybe something that would create a threshold to trigger a per-cow payment for a number of cows to address other costs the farmers are incurring in the current environments, and that could help, especially with small farmers.”

Forgues says Organic Valley also supports the Healthy Food Milk Initiatives proposed by the International Dairy Foods Association.