When Congress last revised the nation's milk-pricing laws in 2008, groups representing dairy farmers and the companies that buy their milk struck a rare deal that sounded counterintuitive: buyers and sellers should be able to agree in advance to prices lower than what the federal government says farmers must be paid. Farmers aren't biting, the latest numbers from the U.S. Department of Agriculture suggest. Participation in the government's forward contracting program for milk is so meager that the USDA has stopped actively tracking it and has no immediate plans to collect the sort of data that would help Congress decide whether to extend the program in next year's rewrite of federal farm policy.
No farmers in the Northeast have signed on to forward contracts since November 2008, the USDA reported. In the upper Midwest, where participation is greatest, just 70 farmers out of 2,000 eligible have tried the option, the department reported.
Dairy cooperatives, which act as middlemen between farmers and plants, are allowed to strike such deals under the program, as are individual farmers who sell to plants — although relatively few plants buy from independent producers anymore. The law applies only to milk used in cheese, yogurt or other manufactured dairy foods, not beverage-class milk.
