Geoff Vanden Heuvel
Director of Regulatory and Economic Affairs
Last week I wrote about additional pandemic aid USDA will be providing dairy farmers, including an idea that payments should be targeted to producers who were impacted by lower Class I prices and the record high price of cheese stimulated by massive government purchases. In the clip below, USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack briefly discusses a program aimed at such relief, stating:
“We are creating a program to help reduce the differential that occurred between Class I and Class III milk pricing because of the disproportionate number of purchases of cheese during the Food Box effort. That distorted the market and it caused a lot of harm to smaller producers. We’re putting resources in to reimburse those producers for some of the loss they incurred.”
