Dino Giacomazzi

3 bills by dean florez that are tremendously devastating to your local dairy farmer are being heard in the Assembly Ag Committee in Sacramento this Wednesday.

You can help the California dairy farmer by hopping on a bus, taking a free ride to Sac, placing your butt in a chair for an hour or two, then come back home. You can even speak if you want.

Please consider this an opportunity to directly influence the legislative process with your warm body, (which, by the way, is 10,000 times more effective than email)

Here is the information on the trip. Hope you will plan to attend. If you plan to attend or have any questions please email me directly to: dino at giacomazzi dot US.

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Get on the bus for pooling bill hearing Wednesday in Sacramento – - Legislation to amend the Gonsalves Milk Pooling act will be heard by the Assembly Agriculture Committee on Wednesday, July 1. The hearing on SB362 by Senator Dean Florez (D-Shafter) will be held at 1:30 p.m. in Room 126 of the Capitol. Western United Dairymen is organizing a bus ride for producers interested in attending the hearing to voice their opposition to the bill, which if passed would have a significant adverse impact on producers. The bus will begin in Visalia and make stops to pick up members in Fresno, Merced, and Modesto. SB362 is being actively opposed by WUD, the Dairy Institute of California and the Alliance of Western Milk Producers, & California Farm Bureau Federation. Three other bills by Florez will be heard that day, all off of which will impact agriculture.

Bus schedule:

7:15 a.m. Depart from Holiday Inn, 900 West Airport Drive, Visalia

8:10 a.m. Depart from Radisson Hotel, 2233 Ventura Street, Fresno

9:20 a.m. Depart from Hampton Inn, 225 South Parsons Avenue, Merced

10:15 a.m. Depart from Doubletree Hotel, 1150 Ninth Street, Modesto

The bus will arrive in Sacramento at approximately 11:30 a.m., allowing time for lunch before the hearing begins at 1:30 p.m. The hearing is expected to last until about 4 p.m. June 26, 2009

To contact the reporter on this story: Jeff Wilson in Chicago at jwilson29@bloomberg.net

June 22 (Bloomberg) — Dino Giacomazzi, whose great- grandfather started the Giacomazzi Dairy in Hanford, California, in 1893, said he had no choice but to sell 100 cows, or 11 percent of his herd, in the past four months. Rising feed prices and a world surplus meant it cost as much as $17 to produce $10 of milk.

“Producers are in an absolute state of panic,” said Giacomazzi, 40. “To spend 100 years building a dairy business and see much of that equity disappear in a year is very troubling.”
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Click here to fax Secretary Vilsack

Since December 2008, the price that farmers are paid for the milk they produce has dropped over 50 percent — the largest single drop since the Great Depression — to a point far below the cost of production.

Already banks across the country are cutting off farmers’ access to credit and at least two dairy farmers have committed suicide in California. The latest estimates are that the crash in domestic prices might lead to the loss of up to 30 percent of the remaining dairy farmers by the end of this year — as many as 20,000 family dairy farmers could be off the land by the end of this year.

The loss of this many family farmers across the country will have a devastating economic impact on rural America, erasing over $52.7 billion of economic development in less than one year. Even worse, the loss of domestic supply will also create a serious gap in U.S. food safety as the DFA and others dramatically increase foreign milk protein concentrate (MPC) imports from countries such as Mexico, India and China — countries which have much lower food safety standards than we do.

Today we’re asking that Secretary Tom Vilsack, head of the United States Department of Agriculture, halt this injustice and adjust the price of milk paid to farmers to “reflect the price of production” by invoking his authority under Section 608c (18) of the Agricultural Marketing Agreement Act of 1937. This legally mandated “floor price” should be at least $17.50 per cwt (a cwt is the standard measure for milk producers).

Send a free fax to Secretary Vilsack today to let him know that you support America’s family dairy farmers. We must stand by them so they can continue to produce a safe product that not only nourishes our children, but also our rural communities. Without a fair price for their milk, they can do neither. Now is the time to embark on meaningful reforms in dairy pricing to ensure that a disaster like this never happens again.

I am reprinting an article by Trent Loos on the movie Food Inc. I think Trent has done a much better job of articulating my opinion of this movie than I possibly could so here is his article. If you find what Trent has to say interesting you can find more info about him at these following links:

Loos Tales
Feedstuffs Foodlink
Faces of ag
Trent on Twitter @trentloos

Trent Loos issues Food Inc. Challenge
reprinted from Examiner.com without permission

The absolute best opportunity to talk about modern food production has arrived thanks to Robert Kenner, Executive Director of a movie just released in a theater near you called “Food Inc.” It could quite possibly be the most misleading bit of information I have ever witnessed about American Agriculture but it has everyone interested in what is really going on with today’s food system. There is one little catch: it is only an opportunity if you are willing to stand up and set the record straight. The American food system, starting at the farm, is the envy of the world in that no one else feeds and clothes their nation with a higher percentage of domestically produced foods with fewer resources impacted to get it done. As one individual put it, Food Inc is the most selective portrayal of information ever generated. The question is: Are you going to fill in the blanks?
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