USDA Proposes Rule for Mandatory Dairy Product Price Reporting
July 8, 2011
On September 27, 2010, the Mandatory Price Reporting Act of 2010 was signed into law, with NMPF’s support. The Act gave USDA one year to implement newly invigorated and electronic dairy product price reporting in the collection of prices used to set Federal order milk prices. On June 10, USDA published a proposed rule that would:
- Transfer the dairy product prices program from the National Agricultural Statistics Service to the Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS), as NMPF had originally proposed;
- Require plants to report prices electronically;
- Move up the plant reporting deadline by one day, to Tuesday at noon, for products sold the week before ending with Saturday; and
- Set the deadline for publication by AMS at 3 p.m. on Wednesday.
Manufacturers who process and market less than one million pounds per year of the specified dairy products would be exempt from mandatory reporting, as they are now.
Comments on this proposed rule are due August 9; this should put AMS on schedule to implement the rule by the statutory deadline of September 27, one year after the Act’s signing.
The rule can be found online. If you have any questions about this, please contact Roger Cryan at NMPF, or USDA’s Joe Gaynor at (202) 720-9351.