Release Date: January 2006
Word Version
Pros and Conclaves
Jerry Kozak
President/CEO
Every child who believes in Santa Claus knows that the best way to get what you want for Christmas is to write a detailed letter to the North Pole, specifying your needs. Although the holiday season is now officially over, dairy farmers are about to engage in a similar effort this winter, with the stakes equally as high. The focus is not on Kris Kringle, but Congress.
The U.S. Congress is expected to spend a great deal of time and effort in 2006 working on the next Farm Bill. Regardless of whether it’s actually completed this year, much of the groundwork for the 2007 Farm Bill will be laid in the coming months. Already, the House and Senate Agriculture committees have started their information-gathering processes. Across town, the U.S. Department of Agriculture began work last year on its own effort to obtain public input and clarify its strategies for the next Farm Bill.
As for the dairy producer community, we’ve been biding our time, but it’s now time to get going on our wish list. And kicking off that process, later this month, will be our Dairy Producer Conclaves.
The Conclave meetings are a national, grassroots effort to get dairy farmers, and no one but dairy farmers, talking about the policy priority items they would like to see in the next Farm Bill. Toward that end, we are holding three regional sessions, in Sacramento (Jan. 30-31), Chicago (Feb. 2-3) and Washington (Feb. 6-7), to bring producer leaders around a table and ask them to achieve, where possible, a consensus on their needs and wants. We’ve sent invitation letters to all of the major dairy cooperatives, state organizations, breed associations, and other groups that are active on the dairy policy front.
The dialogue that will ensue at each of the two-day sessions will cover a wide array of topics. Economic policies, such as the need to maintain some form of farm-level safety net – and what type of net that should be – will obviously be a major topic of discussion. But so will be dairy product standards, trade policy, animal health and environmental regulations, and more. All of these issues can and often do have a bottom-line economic impact on dairy farmers, and so we need to discuss each of them.
To the extent that we can achieve a consensus on these topics, we will then pour all of that effort into a document that we can then present to Congress and to the USDA. That consensus document will be our wish list for our policymakers as they devise the Farm Bill.
The Dairy Producer Conclave process worked beautifully the first time we tried it, back in 2000. After inviting more than 400 dairy farmers from dozens of cooperatives, along with state and regional dairy organizations, we were able to create a consensus document that was instrumental in defining a path that Congress by and large followed as they worked up the 2002 Farm Bill. Just as importantly, the Conclave process helped the dairy producer community speak with one voice, and avoid the fractious battles that characterized the dairy title of the 1995 Farm Bill. That debacle was a textbook example of what not to do when you want to help influence the policy process.
The big difference between 2000 and 2006 is that the environment for writing farmer-friendly legislation has changed significantly. Back then, the federal government was flush with cash, and the 2002 Farm Bill was a generous piece of legislation. Today, the budget situation is quite the opposite. The other big pressure that Congress will have to consider is whether World Trade Organization negotiations may have some bearing on what the future of U.S. farm policy looks like. But regardless of whether the WTO trade talks ultimately result in an agreement that limits domestic farm programs, the WTO will cast a long shadow over the Farm Bill process.
Rather than worry about what the budget deficit or the WTO will do to the future of farm policy, what we in the dairy producer community need to concern ourselves with right now is what we want out of the 2007 Farm Bill. Christmas may be past, but the list-making season is still before us.
