A nationwide shortage of milk has pushed the prices paid to farmers to $22.10 a hundredweight, almost $5 a hundredweight more than the federal pricing order has set for a bottom-line price and more than $10 a hundredweight more than they were getting during the recent two-year dairy crisis.

“Maine farmers are not dancing a jig,” Julie Marie Bickford of the Maine Dairy Industry Association said Monday. “They feel fortunate to have made it out alive.”

Farmers and producers know the shortage is likely to be short-lived. It was triggered when the U.S. government closed the Canadian border to all beef imports, which included heifer replacements, because mad cow disease was found in a Canadian beef herd. As older cows are “retired” when their production falls off, there are no new ones to take their places.

“When those borders are opened up again, we will see a crash,” Bickford said.

For now, the higher prices are providing Maine farmers with ready cash to plant spring seed, repair equipment and pay taxes, she said.

In local supermarkets, prices have crept up slightly over the past two months, ranging from 5 cents to 30 cents a gallon. Last year, farmers got about $1.10 from each gallon of milk sold in a store. Because of the shortage, they are now getting about half of the gallon’s store price, approximately a 15-cent-per-gallon increase.

What goes up in agriculture, however, most certainly comes down, and producers are praising a state safety net bill that will provide relief when prices drop, while carefully watching a national bill that could replace a former, highly successful dairy support program.

During the past two years of the New England dairy crisis, Maine lost more than 10 percent of its farms, dropping to below 400 for the first time in its history as a state. Nationally, milk production had risen 7.4 percent, while it stayed at about 2 percent in Maine, where fewer farmers were producing more milk.

Bickford said that Maine lost 32 million pounds of milk last year, and this year, 5 million pounds already have been lost to lower production. Maine produces about 60 million pounds of milk a year.

“Fluid milk gets priority,” Bickford explained. “It is diverted from cheese and butter, and as the supplies of cheese and butter drop, well, the prices there will rise as well. The current pricing situation demonstrates the extreme volatility of the dairy market.”

There are two programs that will come to the aid of Maine’s dairy farmers when prices dip again. The state program will provide cash payments to farmers when the price drops below $16.94 per hundredweight.

On the federal level, a bill that would replace the former Northeast Dairy Compact has been stalled in a House of Representatives subcommittee for more than a year.

The dairy compact expired two years ago, when the 2002 Farm Bill took effect. It required milk bottling plants in New England to pay farmers a minimum price generally higher than farmers were paid in other areas. The floor price was $16.94 per hundredweight.

Two years ago, Congress replaced the dairy compact with the Milk Income Loss Contract program, which still requires farmers to be paid $16.94 per 100 pounds, but the federal government makes up the difference between the target price and the market price.

But the MILC program has come under criticism because it places a cap on large farmers and has cost taxpayers more than $4 billion more than estimated, or three times what was predicted, due to low prices.

Maine Agriculture Commissioner Robert Spear is hoping to see the stalled legislation enacted. The regulation, titled the Dairy Consumers and Producers Protection Act, would create a series of compacts in five regions across the country.

The regional compacts would be similar to the Northeast Dairy Compact and also would return the payment responsibility to the marketplace, not the taxpayer.

Spear is joined in his support of the DCPPA by every New England agriculture commissioner.

“Without this act, this [regional New England] milk shed will dwindle and milk would be brought in from greater distances and at greater costs,” said Spear. Those greater costs have been estimated in the range of 20 cents to 67 cents per gallon.