Free Republic

Washington, D.C. -- The Environmental Protection Agency has agreed to exempt dairy farmers from provisions of the Clean Water Act, U.S. Sen. Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., said Tuesday. The Clean Water Act since 1970 required dairy farmers to develop and implement plans on how to handle a milk spill -- the same sort of plan as oil companies had to develop for handling oil spills. Schumer said the EPA claimed that since milk contained animal fat -- which is an oil -- the milk spills had to be treated the same way. Schumer said he has fought this regulation because...

http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2010/February/10-at-182.html NOTE: The following text SNIPPET is a quote: FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Tuesday, February 23, 2010 Department of Justice and USDA Workshops to Explore Competition and Regulatory Issues in the Agriculture Industry to Begin March 12 in Iowa Initial Workshop to Be Held in Ankeny, Iowa, at Des Moines Area Community College, FFA Enrichment Center WASHINGTON — The Department of Justice and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced today the agenda and panelists for the first joint public workshop, which will be held on March 12, 2010, in Ankeny, Iowa, to explore competition and regulatory issues in the agriculture...

Dairy farmers in Northeast Wisconsin are feeling the pain at the pump...the milk pump that is. Mark Petersen, a third generation farmer ... tells that prices for his milk have plummeted on the market, and he's really feeling the pinch. Petersen says he's only getting around ten dollars per hundred pounds of milk produced right now. He was getting 20 dollars per hundred pounds not too long ago. And his operational costs exceed his revenue. Not good, of course. consumers have seen milk prices at the store come down, but it's not proportionate to what farmers are losing.

WAYMART - Joe Davitt's tone curdled as he discussed the trough in milk prices. "We're the only self-employed business that has no say in what we get paid," Mr. Davitt, 39, said Wednesday as he gazed at a cluster of Holstein cows feeding in the barn at his 145-acre farm. "I can't afford to quit because what the cows would bring wouldn't be enough to cover my debt." A slump in milk prices is taking dairy farmers to the woodshed. Expenses exceed milk payments at many dairy operations. "There were times before when the prices were low, but the costs...

While consumers are loving the low price of milk and ice cream, Utah dairy farmers are scared. "the perfect storm": They are being paid less for raw milk, while feed and transportation costs are unusually high. And the lines of credit that help them weather rough patches are uncertain at best as financial institutions wrestle their own economy-related demons. "I've never seen anything close to this," Kohler said. "People who had had generations of farming are losing their farms … eating equity that took years to build." the number of dairy farmers is shrinking. Utah now has fewer than 250....

WASHINGTON - In Washington, it pays to read the fine print. The Iraq funding bill is a perfect example, studded with provisions to help dairy farmers, airlines, salmon fisherman and rural counties hurt by cutbacks in federal logging. And that's just scratching the surface. Take dairy farmers, for example. They're receiving $1.2 billion in help in the Iraq bill as lawmakers clear the way to renew a subsidy program aimed at smaller milk producers. Then there are airlines like Continental and American, who won a last-minute battle with the White House over a plan that would allow them to together...

Seldom has a presidential campaign seen such bald-faced pandering as John Kerry demonstrated yesterday in Spring Green, Wisconsin. With a polling deficit nearing double digits in a state Al Gore carried last election, Kerry tried stemming the bleeding by sucking up to Wisconsin's dairy farmers. Long a supporter of the Northeastern Dairy Compact that put the screws to Midwestern producers, Kerry told the Spring Green farmers that he now has seen the light: