Producer Review Board Meeting Report

The Producer Review Board (PRB) held a meeting on Monday, February 2, 2026. It was a virtual meeting, and it started a bit late due to technical difficulties. The main purpose of the meeting was to consider 16 hardship requests that had been either carried over from a prior meeting or were submitted more recently. See the agenda meeting packet here.

The PRB membership is down by three since the last meeting in September of 2025. Former PRB members Frank Konyn and Ted De Groot and former alternate board member Joe Vander Poel are no longer part of the Board. This leaves nine regular members and one alternate. There were two members absent, Chuck Ahlem and Tony Nunes III, leaving a voting total of eight members: Chairman William Dyt, Fred Fagundes, Cal De Jager, Alex De Jager, Dominic Assali, Travis Kamper, Fred Leyendekker and alternate Darlene Lopes.

Before getting to the hardship cases, the Department announced it had recently discovered that the amount of money left over from the State Order Pooling Program and Dairy Marketing Program is different, and less than had been previously believed. When those programs ceased to operate because California entered a Federal Milk Marketing Order, the remaining money was not separated out, but rather remained in a single bank account that collects all of the funds for the various checkoff programs administered by CDFA. Apparently when those folks were asked how much money was left over from the prior programs, they simply looked at the balances in the account and gave an answer. But that account also held other checkoff money. CDFA discovered this situation since the September meeting of the PRB and did an internal audit of those funds going all the way back to 2018. The amount of left over Pooling money is actually $2,053,000, not $3.5 million as previously believed. And the leftover Dairy Marketing money is $2,600,000, not the $3,500,000 previously believed. There were lots of questions about why and how this happened. There was some staff turnover and clearly some confusion about how the money actually flows through the Department. CDFA is now convinced they have it correct, but is asking for an audit from outside the dairy branch to confirm the new totals. Meanwhile, the question is how to get this pooling money back to producers. Last September, the idea CDFA had was to cut a refund check to every producer of about $3,000. The PRB at that time objected to that idea because the money in the fund has always been collected on a per cwt. fee basis. Now CDFA has a new idea which is to transfer the remaining Pooling funds into the QIP administration fund. This would allow the QIP administration assessment to be suspended for about a year and a half. That sounded good to the PRB, and they passed a motion recommending that separate accounts be set up for the various checkoff funds and that the remaining Pooling money be transferred into the QIP admin fund.

As for the remaining Dairy Marketing money, the $2,600,000 was originally contributed by both producers and processors. There was a virtual meeting later on Monday where the rest of the industry was informed of this different amount. All of the various producer and processor groups in California have jointly asked CDFA to refund that money to the California Dairy Research Foundation to advance the industry’s research activities. CDFA is working out the details of how that might be accomplished.

Then the PRB meeting turned to dealing with the hardship cases. Right off the bat, the CDFA lawyer recommended that the PRB table hardship requests from four dairies whose owners were part of a lawsuit against some of the PRB members individually. The basis for delaying consideration of those hardship requests is the fact that not all the PRB members who have been sued have secured legal counsel, and forcing them to make a decision on a hardship of a producer who is also suing them creates an unfair dilemma. The motion to table those four was made, seconded, and passed with 6 yes votes and 1 no vote. (One of the existing PRB members did not vote since his hardship request was one of the four).

The first hardship request that was considered was from Raw Farm LLC and carried over from the September 2025 meeting. Owner Aaron McAfee narrowed his request for this meeting to being relieved from being charged a QIP assessment for the nine months his farm was impacted by bird flu. Raw Farm LLC’s original hardship request asked for relief from all fees being charged to Grade A market milk dairies with the contention that raw milk should not be treated like regular market milk. After a lot of discussion, a motion was made to deny the hardship request. That motion passed 5-2 with one abstention.

Next, an attorney spoke up who had just been hired by three dairies to represent them in the hardship requests. He asked that those three be tabled so he would have time to review and prepare their requests. A motion was made, seconded, and passed to table those three at the request of the applicants’ attorney. Two more applicants also asked that consideration of their hardships be tabled. The PRB passed motions to table those hardships.

Next, an attorney representing a producer spoke on behalf of their hardship request. The attorney’s comments focused on the broad definition of what a hardship is. The actual QIP language defines a hardship as “‘Hardship’ means a challenge to the management and operation of a dairy due to the operation of this Plan.”  That is it. Maybe that is the reason why there are so many hardship requests and why this is such a difficult issue for the PRB to deal with. A motion was made to deny the hardship request which passed with one no vote. (By this time, a member of the PRB had left the meeting. He indicated that he would vote to support all of the hardships if he were able to stay and vote).

Next, there were four hardship requests that CDFA had deemed as incomplete. A motion was made, seconded, and passed with one no vote to deny those four requests because they were incomplete.

This left one remaining hardship request, but the PRB had a hard time stop for the meeting, so a motion to table the last hardship was made, seconded, and passed with one no vote.

There was a public statement made by Craig Gordon, and a quick motion to suspend the QIP administrative assessment, which passed unanimously.

There were some final comments by chairman Will Dyt about his desire to have the PRB consider new language for the QIP that would tighten up the definition of a hardship. There was brief discussion of this with a public comment that a hardship definition fix was part of a compromise proposal considered by producers in a recent referendum. That referendum vote failed to pass. Finally, the meeting adjourned.

I suppose it was only coincidence that the meeting was held on Groundhog Day. If you remember the 1993 film, it tells the story of a cynical television weatherman covering the annual Groundhog Day event in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, who becomes trapped in a time loop, forcing him to relive February 2 repeatedly. This PRB meeting felt like that.

Geoff Vanden Heuvel

Director of Regulatory and Economic Affairs