The National Milk Producers Federation asked the U.S. Department of Agriculture in a letter to better support dairy farmers experiencing losses from trade disputes.
The federation says the agency needs to better reflect the dairy-farm incomes lost to tariff retaliation when calculating the next round of trade mitigation payments. It cites studies saying milk producers have lost more than $1 billion in income since May. While the mitigation payments have allocated $127 million. The expected impact in the second half of 2018 is $1.5 billion dollars in lost revenue.
This comes along with a report from the Federal Reserve Bank, which says the U.S. Canada Mexico Agreement (USMCA) will not help out dairy farmers. The report says the gains from USMCA are too small and too far in the future to help dairy producers.