(Host) Dairy farmers from around the country plan a “summit” meeting this week in South Burlington to discuss what they describe as a crisis.
Prices paid to farmers have fallen well below what it costs to produce milk and many farms are struggling to stay in business.
A group called ‘Dairy Farmers Working Together’ says it’s time farmers came up with a solution. Amanda St. Pierre is a farmer in Berkshire and is an organizer of the event.
(St. Pierre) “Our purpose as a dairy farmer group is to engage other dairy farmers in saying how can we unify. Let’s have more meetings. Let’s further develop the plan. We might come out of this meeting with an idea of where we want to go but let’s get folks engaged in the beginning so whatever plan we come up with it might not be the perfect plan but it should be better than what we have now and it’s better than what we’ve accepted over the past 10 years.”
(Host) The group has invited government and industry leaders to a meeting Friday to begin to develop plans.
St. Pierre says there will be representatives from California, Idaho, the Southwest and New England.
Farmers currently are being paid about $11 for every hundred pounds of milk they produce. But they say it costs closer to $17 to produce that amount of milk.
Organizers of Friday’s conference say they need to find ways to get rid of the wide swings in the price of milk.