As time runs short to reauthorize the Northeast Interstate Dairy Compact, the region’s members of Congress need to restate the case for keeping this valuable support. For a relatively small price – far smaller than the added cost that has been passed to consumers since the compact began in 1997 – the compact is helping to preserve a way of life important to farmers and to their many neighbors in the Northeast.

Congress created the compact among New England states in 1997 to help the region’s small (as compared with the giants of the Midwest) dairy farms stay in business, worth an annual total of some $100 million to Maine. Although the program, which makes payments to farmers when the wholesale price of fluid milk drops below the federal minimum, has not been in place long enough for a full assessment, there is evidence that it has at least halted the exodus from dairy farming. Like agricultural supports across the nation, the dairy compact helps keep not only farmers in business but keeps the grain dealers, truck drivers and farm machinery salespeople going too. Local dairy farms connect the region to an important part of its food supply and account for 1.3 million acres in New England, providing much-needed open space in the southern part of the region.

This has come at a relatively low price. Although the average price of a gallon of milk in the region rose by 29 cents during the compact’s first three years, a University of Connecticut study earlier this year concluded that only 4.5 cents can be attributed to the surcharge; the rest to price increases imposed by supermarkets and processors, gouging the UConn researchers traced to the exercise of market power by those ever-consolidating links in the food chain. The recent settlement of an antitrust case brought by the New England attorneys general against Suiza Foods Corp., the nation’s largest milk processor, adds strong evidence that higher milk prices are due to anti-competitive practices and not to the compact.

The Senate and House Agriculture Committees each have just one person from New England – Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Rep. John Baldacci of Maine. Fortunately, they have the support of members of Congress from the approximately 20 other states that would like to be part of the compact. Their strategy is a sound one: get the compact reauthorized next month, then try to expand it to include the additional states in next year’s agriculture bill. That would give New England allies actual experience with the compact and demonstrate to consumers over a much wider area that this agreement is well worth the extra few cents a gallon of milk.

Congress has only until Sept. 30 to keep the compact in place. A $5.5 billion farm bill passed both the House and Senate recently without the needed reauthorization, which might now be attached to a supplemental appropriation next month. But unless this region and its neighbors lobby hard against Midwest farmers, food processors and retailers – who all oppose it – the five-year effort to keep Northeast dairy farms healthy will collapse. That would be a loss of far more than dairy farms and one more blow to the weakened economy of rural Maine.