Push to help dairy farmers is important for New York

New York dairy farmers are getting milked again — by higher costs, lower prices paid for their product and a glut of a certain dairy substance that is pouring in through a loophole in our import tariff rules.

That's why it's good that New York's congressional delegation and the U.S. Agriculture Department are pulling whatever, er, levers they can reach to improve the situation.

Though the state's image to outsiders, and even to many natives, is urban canyons and smokestack factories, the fact is that the production, processing, preparation and presentation of food sits at the top of the state's economic pyramid. Whatever threatens its health can only reverberate through an economy that has already taken enough shots.

New York State is home to nearly 6,000 dairy farms, all of them suffering from the rising costs of operation — feed, energy, health care — just as the price their milk demands on the market is tanking.

Significantly, most of those dairy farms are, indeed, homes, family operations that weigh much more lightly upon the land than the highly polluting industrial-scale milk factories found in California and elsewhere. Without help from the government, the pressure to industrialize New York dairy operations will grow, posing a huge threat to the water supplies that make our big cities possible.

Sen. Charles E. Schumer noted that it can cost a New York dairyman 27 cents to produce a gallon of milk, but right now he can sell it for only about 12 cents.

(What's that? You pay a lot more than 12 cents — or even 27 cents — for a gallon of milk? That's the markup added by each stage of the shipping, processing and retailing operations that stand between their farms and your fridge.)

So Schumer is pushing to close a loophole in U.S. trade law that is being exploited to import large quantities of something called milk protein concentrate. Foreign milk producers are churning out a lot of that because, unlike just about everything else that is made of milk, it is not subject to regular U.S. import tariffs.

The last time such rules were written, milk protein concentrate was rarely used in processed foods. Now it is, and it's underpricing domestic milk products. Closing that loophole, Schumer estimates, could boost Western New York dairy farms' income by $1.5 million a year.

Meanwhile, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack is raising the minimum price for milk products and giving more government-owned dairy products to charitable programs, lowering supply and boosting prices. Net benefit to the nation's dairy farmers is set at $243 million.

And Reps. Louise Slaughter, D-Fairport, and Chris Lee, R-Clarence, are among the members of the newly reborn Congressional Dairy Farmers Caucus, made up of those representing milk producers from Vermont to New Mexico.

It's a lot of work and a lot of money to keep our milk cows contented. But the alternatives are sour indeed.