The deadline to submit feedback on the FARM Program’s third update to its reference manual has been extended by nine days to January 15, 2016. The reference manual, which outlines best management practices central to the program, is reviewed and reissued every three years.

Last fall, NMPF’s Animal Health and Well-being Committee approved edits to the manual suggested by the FARM Program Technical Writing Group, comprised of academics, veterinarians, producers and co-op staff who reviewed the latest research, discussed feedback received from FARM Program evaluators and sifted through recommendations from dairy customers.

The committee’s draft includes both minor and substantive edits to all 11 chapters of the manual. Those interested in providing comments on the draft Animal Care manual should utilize the FARM website comment form.  All comments must be submitted to Emily Meredith, NMPF Vice President of Animal Care, by Friday, Jan. 15.

Cooperatives Working Together assisted member cooperatives in winning 36 contracts to sell 9.072 million pounds of cheese, 175,370 pounds of butter, and 11.155 million pounds of whole milk powder in December. The product will be shipped from December 2015 through June 2016 to customers in Asia, the Middle East, Oceania and South America.

These sales bring the 2015 CWT contract totals to 57.1 million pounds of cheese, 25.8 million pounds of butter, and 49.9 million pounds of whole milk powder. CWT-assisted transactions will move the equivalent of nearly 1.5 billion pounds of milk on a milkfat basis to customers in 36 countries on five continents.

Developed by NMPF, CWT’s export assistance program is supported on a voluntary basis by dairy farmers across the nation. By helping to move U.S. dairy products into world markets, CWT helps maintain and grow U.S. dairy farmers’ share of these expanding markets which, in turn, works to improve dairy farmer milk prices.

Renewal of the CWT program for the period 2016 through 2018 is underway. All cooperatives and dairy farmers are encouraged to add their support to this important program. Membership forms are available here.

The new federal Dietary Guidelines for Americans deliver an emphatic message that Americans should consume more dairy products – an important endorsement of the irreplaceable role that dairy foods play in American’s diets.

The eighth edition of the guidelines, released Jan. 7, revealed that more than 80 percent of the U.S. population is not consuming the recommended amount of dairy. The government recommends that a healthy eating pattern include three servings a day of fat-free or low-fat dairy foods such as milk, yogurt and cheese. The guidelines also defined milk as a nutrient-dense food, one that improves bone health and decreases the risk of heart disease and obesity.

Last May, NMPF had provided extensive testimony to the advisory committee that compiled the guidelines, reminding them that key nutrients missing from Americans’ diets, such as calcium, Vitamin D and potassium, are found in abundance in dairy foods.

“The 2015 dietary guidelines give Americans an easy New Year’s resolution for 2016 to improve their health: consume more dairy foods,” said Jim Mulhern, president and CEO of NMPF. “These guidelines reinforce that dairy is the answer to a healthier diet.”

NMPF, National Dairy Council and several other dairy organizations released a joint statement Thursday affirming the “unrivaled contribution made by dairy foods.” The statement added that “the good news for people across the country is that dairy foods taste great, are accessible almost anywhere, contain essential nutrients and come in a variety of options from lactose-free to low-fat, fat-free or lower sodium — all at a reasonable cost.”

The DGA serves as the basis in developing federal food, nutrition, and health policies and programs, including the National School Breakfast and Lunch Programs. It is also the basis for federal nutrition education materials designed for the public and for the nutrition education components of HHS and USDA food programs.

The year-end spending and tax legislation approved by Congress in the waning days of 2015 contained three crucial items that NMPF had been pushing Congress to include in the measure.  All of the items will help improve the economic conditions of the dairy industry in the New Year.  They include:

• Resolution of the WTO Country-of-Origin Labeling case for beef and pork, which threatened to generate new tariffs on U.S. dairy products exported to Canada and Mexico unless portions of the U.S. law were repealed by the year-end package;
• A permanent extension of the Section 179 tax credit, which allows farmers and other small businesses to write off capital purchases immediately, instead of over time. The Section 179 provision will permanently allow a business to expense up to $500,000, up from a limit of $25,000;
• A five-year extension of the 50% bonus depreciation, which allows companies to lower the cost of capital for investment in qualified assets while increasing the cash flow for their businesses.  The bill extends the bonus depreciation for property acquired and placed in service during 2015 through 2019.

In addition to these measures that were included in the $18 trillion spending and tax package signed into law on December 18, a new multi-year highway transportation bill approved December 3^rd contained an NMPF-backed measure to allow states to permit milk haulers to increase their truck weights beyond interstate highway system limits. This will allow milk trucks in some states to carry more product without being forced to offload portions of it at state borders. The truck provision, fought for by NMPF and its members, means fewer vehicles will be needed to transport milk, cutting costs for both farmers and consumers.

NMPF worked particularly hard on fixing the Country of Origin Labeling, or COOL, program. As the threat of higher tariffs on U.S. exports loomed larger, NMPF led dairy industry efforts in asking Congress to prevent the loss of millions dollars in exports to two of the U.S.’s leading markets.  Canada and Mexico were permitted by the World Trade Organization to retaliate against the U.S. because its meat labeling program was in violation of international trade rules. The repeal prevents new tariffs on U.S. dairy products at a time when global dairy markets are already depressed.

The two tax measures were especially beneficial in a year when farmers’ profits have been squeezed by low milk prices. According to NMPF president and CEO Jim Mulhern, “Making the Section 179 credit permanent is a very welcome outcome after several years of Congress enacting a series of short-term extensions of the credit.”

Left out of the year-end legislation were several other issues that NMPF was seeking, including a federal preemption of mandatory state GMO labeling laws; changes to child nutrition programs to ensure increased access to dairy products in schools; an enforcement ban on the Environmental Protection Agency’s controversial Waters of the U.S. (WOTUS) rule; and a proposal creating a manure nutrient recovery tax credit.

Mulhern said NMPF will work with Congress in 2016 to address these and other measures important to dairy farmers. Senate farm leaders have already pledged to work on the reauthorization of the child nutrition programs early in the year. Implementation of the WOTUS rule is suspended nationwide pending the outcome of a court challenge. Regardless, it is likely to face continued opposition in Congress.

The start of a new year is a great opportunity to reflect back on the accomplishments of the past 12 months and focus on important goals to achieve in the coming year.  That effort is as relevant to organizations such as NMPF as it is to individuals.  So, here’s a quick review of 2015’s highlights, and some of the items that National Milk has on its to-do list for 2016.

The reality in Washington is that, given the current partisan divide between the White House and Congress, few new major policy initiatives have any chance of being enacted into law.   That was true last year and, as the presidential campaign season really gets underway next month in Iowa and New Hampshire, it will be even more so in 2016.  Thus, despite NMPF’s determined efforts to advance comprehensive immigration reform, the window of opportunity to make it happen didn’t open in 2015, and is not expected to this year.  Ensuring farmers have an adequate labor supply is a critically important goal for NMPF, but political gridlock in Washington continues to block any significant reform of immigration law.

While major tax reform also wasn’t on the table last year, we were ultimately able to persuade Congress to pass important tax relief for farmers and other small businesses last month. The tax extenders package approved at the end of the session included key NMPF priorities, such as a permanent extension of the Section 179 credit, and a five-year extension of the bonus depreciation tax measure. NMPF and its member co-ops fought hard for these important provisions and were ultimately successful in including them in the tax package. We also worked hard to get Congress to include a tax credit in the package for investments in manure separation technologies, but came up short.  That effort will continue in 2016.

We were also successful in convincing Congress to fix the Country of Origin Labeling program for meat, which headed off efforts by Canada and Mexico to impose new tariffs on our dairy exports. NMPF, the U.S. Dairy Export Council and the International Dairy Foods Association led the dairy industry effort to resolve the COOL conflict, repeatedly urging Congress to head off retaliatory tariffs and working with Senate Agriculture Committee leaders on the repeal effort.

Meanwhile, there are a number of things that didn’t get done on Capitol Hill in 2015 that we will continue to push this year. Here are some of the big-ticket items:

First, Congress needs to pass a law establishing a voluntary, national standard for the labeling of foods with GMO ingredients.  Vermont’s mandatory GMO labeling law will go into effect this summer if the federal government doesn’t preempt such laws – or if courts don’t enjoin it, which the legal system has so far not done.  The food industry is already dealing with a plethora of confusing marketing claims regarding purported health benefits.  We don’t need states adding to the confusion with a hodge-podge of their own mandated GMO ingredient labels.

Second, we will continue to push Congress to intervene in the Waters of the U.S. regulation to avoid the uncertainty of the murky status quo.  The new law, which went into effect last year, is still too confusing to farmers about which of their waterways are regulated under the Clean Water Act.  A court injunction suspended implementation of the regulation for now, but court roadblocks are a less desirable defensive approach than a strong action from the House and Senate to halt the EPA from moving forward with WOTUS.

One of the biggest achievements for the dairy sector we were able to achieve last year was the goal-line stand to prevent an unbalanced Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement.  America’s dairy farmers had a great deal riding on whether any new access to our market granted to New Zealand would be balanced by new export opportunities in Japan and Canada.  While a detailed assessment of the final, negotiated package is still in the works, we were able to prevent the worst-case scenario of a wildly-imbalanced outcome, which is a big relief for the U.S. dairy sector.

Now the question is whether Congress will tackle the TPP deal in 2016.  The signs from Capitol Hill are still unclear as to whether the House and Senate will vote on the TPP prior to November’s elections.  This is yet another indication that the agenda in Washington this year will be driven by political forces outside the Beltway.

In the nutrition arena in 2016, we’re expecting the federal Dietary Guidelines to be released any day now.  The hope and expectation is that the guidelines will maintain – and perhaps even upgrade – the current recommendation to consume 2-3 servings of dairy foods per day.  And at some point, the ongoing revelations we’ve seen in the past few years about saturated fat not being the bogeyman in our diets will be reflected in federal food advice, even if not in the 2016 Dietary Guidelines.

NMPF also will continue working with Congress this year to update the Child Nutrition Act, which authorizes the school lunch and other federal feeding programs.  We want to use this legislation to increase the availability of flavored milk in schools.  That’s an important objective we hope to achieve in 2016, and it will have a positive effect on milk consumption.

Our export-focused Cooperatives Working Together program had a busy and productive year in 2015, exporting the equivalent of nearly 1.5 billion pounds of U.S. milk into world markets.  In a year of depressed world dairy market prices, CWT helped keep America’s dairy industry in the game – tightening the supply-demand balance in the domestic market and improving farm milk prices beyond what they would have been if that milk had been sold domestically.  Let’s hope that world dairy prices improve this year; whatever happens, because of the foresight and commitment of CWT member co-ops and many individual farmer contributors, CWT will be there to help.

Lastly, 2016 will be a watershed year for NMPF because this is the centennial of the organization’s founding.  It was a century ago that dairy farmer leaders gathered in Chicago to forge a new means of cooperating to tackle the policy challenges they faced.  While the specific issues have changed, the nation’s dairy farmers still face challenges. National Milk has fought hard for the dairy producer community on issue after issue during the last 100 years, and we will continue to lead our industry forward throughout the 21^st century.

We will be commemorating our centennial this year in a variety of ways.  In fact, we’ve already produced a booklet that offers highlights of the past 100 years.  Two-thousand-sixteen represents not just a new year, but a new century for NMPF.  And by working together, farmers and their cooperatives involved in NMPF have the ability to achieve much more in the coming days and years.

ARLINGTON, VA – Several crucial items for dairy farmers were approved by Congress in a massive year-end spending bill adopted Friday, including permanent tax relief for agricultural equipment purchases and the prevention of retaliatory tariffs on U.S. dairy products, the National Milk Producers Federation said today.

The must-pass omnibus spending bill for Fiscal Year 2016, coupled with a major tax package, together were used as catch-all vehicles for a number of items important to the dairy sector, including:

• Repeal of Country-of-Origin Labeling (COOL) for beef and pork, the existence of which threatened to generate new tariffs on U.S. dairy products exported to Canada and Mexico;
• A permanent extension of the Section 179 tax credit, which allows farms and other small businesses to write off capital purchases immediately, instead of over time;
• A five-year extension of the 50% bonus depreciation, which allows companies to lower the cost of capital for investment in qualified assets while increasing the cash flow for their businesses.

The House and Senate each approved the combined spending and tax bill on Friday.

“The package features key items that will help make Christmas a little merrier for the nation’s dairy farmers,” said Jim Mulhern, President and CEO of NMPF.  “In particular, the tax measures will help farmers’ budgets in a year when they’ve been squeezed financially by low milk prices.  Making the Section 179 credit permanent is a very welcome outcome after several years of short-term extensions of the provision.”

Mulhern said the COOL repeal was important “to prevent new tariffs on U.S. dairy products at a particularly challenging time for our industry, given the depressed global market.”

“Repealing the six-year-old Country-of-Origin Labeling program for beef and pork prevents the loss of millions of dollars of U.S. dairy exports that would have resulted from the World Trade Organization ruling,” Mulhern said.

The WTO said earlier this month that parts of the COOL labeling program violate international trade rules, and that Canada and Mexico could respond by penalizing U.S. exports by more than $1 billion. Both countries had indicated their intention to include American dairy products on their retaliation lists.

The spending bill omitted other important policy objectives sought by NMPF, including a federal preemption of mandatory state GMO labeling laws; reforms to child nutrition programs to ensure increased access to nutritious dairy options in schools; halting the EPA’s efforts to enforce the Waters of the U.S. (WOTUS) rule; and a proposal creating a manure nutrient recovery tax credit.

Mulhern said NMPF will work with Congress to address these and other issues in the new year.  Senate agriculture leaders have already pledged to work on the reauthorization of the Child Nutrition Act early in 2016, while the WOTUS rule is likely to face continued opposition in Congress, even as its implementation is suspended nationwide for the time being because of a federal court challenge.

###

The National Milk Producers Federation, based in Arlington, VA, develops and carries out policies that advance the well-being of dairy producers and the cooperatives they own. The members of NMPF’s cooperatives produce the majority of the U.S. milk supply, making NMPF the trusted voice of dairy producers on Capitol Hill and with government agencies. Visit www.nmpf.org for more information.

ARLINGTON, VA – In response to a World Trade Organization (WTO) decision today announcing that Canada and Mexico are authorized to apply a total of over $1 billion in retaliatory tariffs to U.S. exports, dairy producers and exporters renewed their call for Congress to take swift action to eliminate the threat to dairy exports.

“The WTO decision makes it crystal clear that Congress must act immediately to prevent retaliation against the U.S. dairy industry and others whose products could be targeted by Canada and Mexico,” said NMPF President and CEO Jim Mulhern. “At a time of overall softening in the U.S. farm economy due to a drop-off in export demand, we cannot afford further erosion in income resulting from the unnecessary loss of markets that would result from the WTO sanctions.”

The WTO decision establishes the level of retaliation tariffs that Canada and Mexico will shortly be given final authorization to levy against a wide range of U.S. exports due to a WTO finding that parts of the U.S. country-of-origin labeling law violate international trade rules. U.S. dairy products are expected to be among the mix of items targeted for retaliation.

In anticipation of today’s announcement, the National Milk Producers Federation and the U.S. Dairy Export Council last week urged House and Senate leaders to head off the prospect of damaging new tariffs hitting dairy exports to Canada and Mexico. The groups’ letter asked Congress to include a legislative resolution for the COOL dispute in the massive year-end spending bill that has been under negotiation on Capitol Hill.

At this stage, after one more perfunctory approval step, the two countries could activate their tariff penalties as early as this month.

“Retaliatory tariffs would back up exports further onto the U.S. market during a time of overly abundant milk supplies,” added USDEC President Tom Suber. “U.S. dairy producers and processors cannot lose this chance to avoid considerable damage to the export markets they have invested so heavily in developing in recent years.”

“Retaliation against American dairy products would come at a particularly harmful time for our industry given the depressed global dairy market,” said Mulhern. “Multiple cooperatives have already faced an oversupply of milk this year.”

Canada and Mexico are two of the largest U.S. export markets. Together, they import more than $2 billion in U.S. dairy products annually.

###

The National Milk Producers Federation, based in Arlington, Va., develops and carries out policies that advance the well-being of U.S. dairy producers and the cooperatives they collectively own. The members of NMPF’s cooperatives produce the majority of the U.S, milk supply, making NMPF the voice of nearly 32,000 dairy producers on Capitol Hill and with government agencies. For more on NMPF’s activities, visit www.nmpf.org.

The U.S. Dairy Export Council is a non-profit, independent membership organization that represents the global trade interests of U.S. dairy producers, proprietary processors and cooperatives, ingredient suppliers and export traders. Its mission is to enhance U.S. global competitiveness and assist the U.S. industry to increase its global dairy ingredient sales and exports of U.S. dairy products. USDEC accomplishes this through programs in market development that build global demand for U.S. dairy products, resolve market access barriers and advance industry trade policy goals. USDEC is supported by staff across the United States and overseas in Mexico, South America, Asia, Middle East and Europe. The U.S. Dairy Export Council prohibits discrimination on the basis of age, disability, national origin, race, color, religion, creed, gender, sexual orientation, political beliefs, marital status, military status, and arrest or conviction record. www.usdec.org.

The highway transportation bill signed by President Obama last Friday includes a provision allowing milk trucks in some states to carry more dairy products without unloading some of their shipment at state borders – a development that will benefit dairy farmers and cooperatives.

The bipartisan amendment, supported by NMPF, was sponsored by House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee members Richard Hanna (R-NY) and Elizabeth Esty (D-CT) and championed by committee member Reid Ribble (R-WI). It gives states the option to issue permits to milk haulers to increase their truck weights beyond Interstate Highway System limits. The permits, however, would still need to comply with each state’s trucking laws.

NMPF and the International Dairy Foods Association hailed inclusion of the dairy truck amendment as benefiting consumers as well as milk producers and processors.

“This provision recognizes the specific challenges in transporting milk,” said NMPF President and CEO Jim Mulhern. “Because both the supply of milk coming from farms, and the needs of processing plants, can fluctuate unpredictably, handling requirements sometimes conflict with limits on truck weights.”

“It’s great to see Congress support something beneficial to our producers,” Mulhern added. He indicated the provision will result in fewer trucks on the road, cutting costs for producers and processors and, ultimately, for consumers.  

NMPF is currently working hard on Capitol Hill on a handful of other legislative items important to dairy producers.  The following items may also be approved by Congress in the final weeks of its 2015 session:

• Extension of the Section 179 tax credit, which allows farmers and small business to write off capital purchase immediately instead of over time.
• Consideration of a biogas and resource recovery tax credit for farms which invest in nutrient recovery technologies that will remove valuable nutrients while mitigating the environmental impact of the farm operation.
• Repeal of the Country of Origin Labeling for meat, which is threatening to trigger damaging new tariffs on U.S. dairy products exported to Canada and Mexico [see story below].
• A requirement that the Agriculture Department act to stop the decline in milk consumption in schools, which could see a return of low-fat chocolate milk to cafeterias.
• Language exerting federal pre-emption over state laws requiring the labeling of foods with genetically modified ingredients.
• Legislation blocking the implementation of the controversial Waters of the U.S. regulation that is temporarily suspended by a court ruling.

Most of these items are candidates for inclusion in a massive year-end spending bill Congress is expected to pass before adjournment for the year.