Baldacci mulls dairy relief cost Legislature to see plan after governor reviews fiscal impact

AUGUSTA – Gov. John Baldacci is waiting to see what the cost of his task force’s recommendations to help the state’s ailing dairy industry will be before he forwards any plan to state lawmakers.

Informal estimates put the total between $5 million and $10 million, and the governor is expected to make final recommendations by the end of this week.

Meanwhile, Maine’s farmers continue to struggle.

“We saw another drop of a dollar or better [per hundredweight] for January,” Dale Cole, president of the Maine Dairy Industry Association, said Sunday.

Cole said that although milk prices were at a high of $15.21 per hundredweight for November, they will drop to $13 for January. Even though that is better than farmers have been receiving, Cole said prices crashed two years ago and never rebounded to a level that would allow dairy farms in Maine to be profitable.

It is estimated that it costs $21 per hundredweight to produce milk in Maine.

The 20-member Governor’s Task Force on the Sustainability of the Dairy Industry met for more than six months last year to research the current dairy crisis and provide recommendations. The group logged more than 1,000 hours of research and discussion, and their final report was forwarded to Baldacci’s office in early November.

Baldacci’s spokesman Lee Umphrey said the final report was good, but was missing fiscal notes for some of the suggestions and was “sent back to the Department of Agriculture to be tidied up. Obviously the fiscal impact is a sticking point considering the state’s fiscal situation.”

One of the report’s 17 recommendations called for a three-tiered support system to help Maine’s remaining 398 dairy farmers weather the dips in milk prices. Farmers have assessed the system as being meaningful to them while still being palatable to Maine’s consumers.

With milk prices paid to farmers plummeting to a Depression-era low, Maine has lost 900 farms in the past 20 years, with another 100 more estimated to leave the industry in the next five years. Since 2001, highly volatile milk prices resulted in farmers being paid a low of $11 per hundredweight.