Milk Pricing Matters for the Sustainability of Dairy Farmers in the Northeast

For dairy farming the core of the sustainability issue is regional differences in cost of production and prices received for raw milk. Consumers are always going to drink milk. The critical question is where is it going to come from? This paper will not address regional cost of production differences.1 Here the focus is on regional price differences, which are often ignored and assumed to be unimportant for the survival of the Northeast dairy industry. Nothing could be further from the truth. The organization and the performance of the farm to retail milk marketing channel and the role of state and federal policy nationally as well as in regions, are critical determinants of the prices that Northeast farmers receive