Editor

Letter to the Editor

In response to last week:

To the Editor Last week Mr. Andrews praised Congressman Tiffany for his work supporting Wisconsin’s dairy farmers. While any support is appreciated, Tiffany’s Milk Act isn’t as great of a deal as Mr. Andrews has been led to believe. Tiffany is using dairy farmers to score points with his uninformed and unsuspecting supporters as evidenced by Mr. Andrews misplaced praise. Tiffany is well aware that most of the milk produced in Wisconsin goes into cheese and other dairy products, leaving about ten percent in fluid milk sales.

Fluid milk sales includes sales from grocery stores, convenience stores, restaurants and schools. And here is the target of Tiffany’s milk market, grade school children who would be offered unflavored milk. He hopes to increase milk sales by insuring kids be offered flavored milk. That is a very narrow market.

At the local convenience store, they charge about $1.20 for an eight ounce bottle of any flavor milk. There are 16 eight ounce servings in one gallon of milk that equals $19.20 per gallon. There are 8.8 gallons in 100 pounds of milk, the unit of measure that farmers are paid for their milk, that equals $168.96. Farmers are currently making about $17.00 for one hundred pounds of milk. Who stands to gain the most on these increased sales?

The USDA, regardless of who the president is, knows the nutritional value of milk. They also know the economical value of milk, after all, it is the USDA who will fund farmers when milk production expenses exceed prices paid to farmers.

If Tiffany wanted to help farmers,he would be working to secure increased exports or better yet he could introduce legislation to insure farmers got a greater share of the market value of dairy. Instead he chooses to use dairy farmers to dupe his supporters and denigrate the President. If he is willing to treat our valued dairy farmers like this, then there is no level too low for him to stoop.