Progressive Dairyman Editor Walt Cooley interviews CWT management staff — Jim Tillison, Chief Operating Officer of Cooperatives Working Together, and Chris Galen, Vice President of Communications of National Milk Producers Federation — about the program's shift toward funding export assistance instead of herd retirements.
Q. How and why did CWT first start an export assistance program?

A. GALEN: You have to go back to 2003 when CWT was first created to answer this question. There were actually three different elements to CWT in its first year.
One of the three, which lasted only a year and was dropped, was paying producers for reducing their milk output, but that didn’t prove to be cost-effective or easy to manage.
What we ended up with was a two-sided coin –one being the herd retirement program and the other being the export assistance program. And the reason that we had the export program was, and still is, because it has a more immediate impact than the herd retirement program.