A group of dairy producers is buying cheese to help boost milk prices.
Robin Berg and Tom Olson founded the Dairy Pricing Association in 2009 with an idea… create another buyer in the dairy market that pays what producers need to make a profit. Berg tells Brownfield the association buys carloads of cheese above the Chicago Mercantile Exchange price. “We feel confident in the way that we’re doing this that we’ll raise the price of milk to our dairy producers by at least two dollars. If they understand how the marketing system works and how small that market trade is in Chicago, that having them as a new market with a disappearance program like this, that they’ll immediately return their ten cents because a penny move in the (cheese) market will get ten cents back.”
Berg says more producers are joining them saying government programs like the Margin Protection Program have failed. “Last year their comment was, ‘I can’t afford it because of the price decline.’ Today, they’re saying we’ve got to do something and this makes sense.”
More than 400 members in eleven states are now part of the Dairy Pricing Association.
The Dairy Pricing Association uses producer dollars to make purchases as soon as they have enough money, which is about once every two months. Berg says the goal is to buy enough dairy products to force the prices up.
The purchased dairy products are donated to food pantries and distributed to needy families.
The Dairy Pricing Association’s purchases are ongoing and self-funded, unlike the USDA one-time purchases of cheese made last fall.
Source:Brownfield
