Milk Producer - May 2009 - (Page 4)

EDITOR’SNOTES By Bill Dimmick THE MILK PRODUCER is published monthly by Dairy Farmers of Ontario 6780 Campobello Road, Mississauga, Ontario, L5N 2L8 EDITOR: Bill Dimmick ASSISTANT EDITOR: Sharon Laidlaw Co-ordinated by Communications and Planning Division, Bill Mitchell, Assistant Director. Change of address notices should be sent to: THE MILK PRODUCER 6780 Campobello Road, Mississauga, Ontario L5N 2L8. Subscription rates: $25.20 for one year, $46.20 for two years and $63.00 for three years in Canada (includes GST), $36 per year in the U.S., $36 per year overseas. Single copy: $2.50. Make cheques payable to Dairy Farmers of Ontario. Canada Post Publications Mail Sales Product Agreement No. 40063866. Return postage guaranteed. Circulation: 10,000. ISSN 0030-3038. Printed in Canada. ADVERTISING REPRESENTATIVE James Fitzgerald and Associates, 257 Huntingdon Avenue, Stratford, Ontario N5A 6P7. Toll-free advertisers only: 1-888-460-6212 Phone (519) 273-9369/Fax (519) 273-9289 E-mail: jfitzger@milk.org Opinions expressed herein are those of the author and/or editor and do not necessarily reflect the opinion or policies of Dairy Farmers of Ontario. Publication of advertisements does not constitute endorsement or approval by The Milk Producer or Dairy Farmers of Ontario of products or services advertised. The Milk Producer welcomes letters to the editor about magazine content. Phone: (905) 821-8970 Fax: (905) 821-3160 bdimmick@milk.org slaidlaw@milk.org Website: Go to publications at www.milk.org E-mail: World price collapse One more reason to extol supply management’s virtues magine your farm income shrinking to $17,000 this year from $115,000 in 2008. Well, if you’re an average New Zealand dairy farmer shipping your milk to Fonterra, the near-monopoly co-operative, that’s all you would have left in 2009 after paying expenses, mortgages and taxes, according to media reports in that country. They’re far from alone. Using the Internet, you can easily find media reports detailing what’s been happening to family dairy farms worldwide. Since international prices began collapsing last fall, their returns have been taking a hammering. In some countries, simmering anger over the collapse has burst into seething public protest. In Ireland, where the major co-operative recently cut prices, dairy farmers stormed into European Commission offices in Dublin. More than 2,000 gathered around co-op plants to protest the cuts. The price they get paid fails to cover their production costs, much less deliver a profit. Similar stories have been reported elsewhere in Europe. Thousands of angry dairy farmers swarmed into Madrid, Spain to demand a collective increase of more than $1 million a day for their milk just so they could break even. An estimated 8,000 producers protested low prices—again below production costs—in Prague, Czech Republic. German producers rallied around processing plants to press the same point. While there have been no reports of mass rallies in the U.S., dairy farmers there are struggling through similar hard times. Their returns are half what they were a year ago, and well below production costs for most operations. Amid this economic turbulence in the rest of the world, we still have thinktank academics in Canada calling for our government to dismantle supply management, the one marketing plan that rewards hard work from the marketplace, not through public subsidies. I would direct you to page 16 in this month’s Dairy Update section where we’re featuring a guest column that addresses this continuing debate. Written by Barry Wilson, the column pokes fun at some of these academic musings. If you farm west of the Ontario-Manitoba border, you’re likely familiar with Barry’s work in The Western Producer, a top-notch weekly newspaper that mainly covers farm issues in the four Western provinces. It has a following among Eastern farm readers, too. I’ve known Barry for many years, and have long respected his integrity in reporting the news. He also has a knack for getting to the nub of an issue. As this column amply demonstrates, he can use humour with devastating effect to point out absurdity. If the think-tank types had their way, we would drag Canadian dairy farmers down to the same desperate level as producers in New Zealand, Europe and the U.S. To me, it makes more sense to lift others up to the Canadian level. I 4 | May 2009 | MilkPRODUCER http://www.milk.org

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Milk Producer - May 2009

Milk Producer - May 2009
Contents
Editor's Notes
DFO Chair's Message
Dairy Update
DFC Promotion
Farm Finance
Environmental Issues
Canadian Cow Scooped Up By Processors
Research
Applied Science
Ruminations
Markets
New 'N' Noted
Back Forty

Milk Producer - May 2009