It's hard to picture Vermont without cows and dairy farms.

After all, the state is the biggest dairy producer of the six New England states and dairy farms generate nearly 80 percent of Vermont's agricultural sales.

But this bounty is also a curse. No other state in American has so high a percentage of its agricultural income resting upon one commodity. When wholesale milk prices fall as steeply as they have over the past few months, it's a major crisis for the state's 1,046 dairy farms.

Farmers are getting about $12 per hundredweight for conventional milk, or about $7 below the cost of production. This clearly unsustainable economic situation has forced at least 32 Vermont dairy farms to close since the beginning of 2009, and more are going under by the month.

This year has been particularly tough on Vermont farmers. A combination of lack of credit availability, high feed and fuel costs, wet weather slowing corn and hay harvests and continued overproduction by megafarms in the Western United States have put the state's dairy industry on the brink of collapse.

The Ranney Farm in Westminster West, which has been in operation since 1796, is one of the latest casualties of the current dairy crisis. Philip Ranney, the seventh generation of his family to run the farm, told us this week that he was losing money with every shipment of milk he sent out. That's why he's putting his 50 Jerseys up for sale and getting out of the dairy business.

Certainly, the federal commodity pricing system for milk is outdated and unfair to smaller New England farmers. But the recession is also hitting organic dairy farms, as decreased demand has sharply driven down wholesale prices. Organic dairying was pitched as a potential godsend for Vermont farmers, but these farms are now in the same boat as conventional farms.

Vermont's congressional delegation has pressed Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack to see what federal aid is available.

But, according to Vermont Secretary of Agriculture Roger Allbee, the federal government has already dumped surplus dairy reserves into export and nutrition programs to whittle away the dairy product glut blamed for low milk prices.

Allbee also said a national effort to buy off milking herds, similar to what was done in New England in the 1980s, would also help to relieve the glut.

Rep. Peter Welch, along with Sanders and Sen. Patrick Leahy, advocate doubling the payments to farmers through the Milk Income Loss Contract (MILC) program, which is supposed to help even out wide swings in prices.

Currently, MILC payments are between $2 and $3 per hundredweight, which is not sufficient to cover the severe losses that Vermont farmers are going through.

Allbee said this week that restructuring the MILC program could provide immediate financial relief, but it would be equally important to come up with programs to forgive portions of federal loans or defer loan payments to help farmers stay in business.

"What's hard for farmers to understand," Allbee said, "is how come the government can spend so much on a stimulus package and put so much into the banking sector, and there isn't anything being done to offer immediate help to the dairy industry."

Other state agriculture commissioners throughout the Northeast have also petitioned Congress to do something about prices. But there is little support -- particularly from the big dairy states such as California and Wisconsin -- for changes to federal dairy price policy.

In testimony before the House Agriculture Committee this week, Welch said Vermont needs help soon or we could "very well see a wholesale failure of our entire ag infrastructure, forcing out of business, feed dealers, equipment suppliers, processing plants, farm creditors and many more."