USDA offers additional aid to dairy farmers and producers
June 26, 2021 3:37 PM Kade Overton
Updated:
(WKBT) – The USDA Recently announced additional aid to dairy farmers and producers as part of the USDA Pandemic Assistance for Producers initiative.
The plan would include $400 million for the new Dairy Donation Program to address food insecurity and mitigate food waste and loss.
Additional pandemic payments targeted to dairy farmers have demonstrated losses that have not been covered by previous pandemic assistance.
About $580 million is going for supplemental Dairy Margin Coverage for small and medium farms.
“We had a huge market disruptions during the pandemic,” Senator Tammy Baldwin (D) Wisconsin said. “We had virtual shutdown of food industry purchases, cheese for example.”
When a fire destroyed their barn, these dairy farmers saw it as an opportunity to modernize their operation. It’s hard to tell who loves the changes more — the farmers
Today a sty for stately suburbs, Sussex County was once a bastion for swine.
Roughly 30,000 pigs – four for every three people – lived in the county in 1850, U.S. Census records show. Sussex County farmers that year claimed to have shepherded 8,300 sheep, harvested 21,000 pounds of beeswax and produced 1.8 million pounds of butter on 245,000 acres of farmland.
While milk cows and the grain to feed them once reigned supreme, Sussex County is now home to a wide variety of farming from llamas and rabbits to sweet potatoes and sunflower seeds. The total farmed acres nonetheless total less than 60,000. The hogs number fewer than 550.