By Laurie Fisher
As America celebrates its 250th birthday, two comments during a recent Senate Ag Committee hearing captured what many dairy farmers have been living for years.
Sen. Jim Justice (R-W.Va.) said agriculture needs “a great big plan” to solve its fundamental riddle.
Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) summed up that riddle in one sentence: “Our farmers create an immense amount of wealth, they just don’t get any of it.”
USDA’s Economic Research Service reported in June that Americans spent a record $2.51 trillion on food in 2025, yet food accounted for just 9.7% of disposable personal income, down from 10.4% in 1997. Consumers are spending more than ever on food, but it takes a smaller share of their household income vs. nearly three decades ago, and the USDA’s Food Dollar data show that just 3.3 cents of every consumer food dollar gets back to livestock production, including dairy, and 2.5 cents to crop production.
Dairy provides another example. According to USDA’s Milk Production, Disposition and Income Summary, dairy farmers marketed nearly 5.8 billion more pounds of milk in 2025 than the year before. Yet dairy farm cash receipts declined by $1.9 billion.
American farmers continue creating more wealth with every seed planted and every calf born and raised. The challenge is ensuring they can keep enough of it.
As we begin America’s next 250 years, American Dairy Coalition believes successful farm policy should not just provide opportunities for growth and innovation but strengthen profitability, competitiveness, and long-term viability of independent dairy farms. That same principle also applies to the value farmers create through their data—it should work for farmers, not simply flow downstream through the supply chain.
Our nation’s agrarian roots built America and are essential to keeping America fed and free. Securing our nation’s independence means ensuring independent farmers can continue producing food, strengthening rural communities, stewarding land and natural resources, and confidently passing their farms on to the next generation.
USMCA review puts dairy back in the spotlight
The Trump administration announced July 1 it will not renew USMCA in its current form, triggering the agreement’s annual review process while keeping all existing trade provisions — including dairy tariff-rate quotas and rules of origin — in force. The move does not disrupt current dairy trade but keeps long-standing issues, including Canada’s dairy market access, on the negotiating table.
Interestingly, one week earlier, while speaking June 24 at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) conference, Three Nations, One Table: North American Agriculture Under USMCA, Gregg Doud, president and CEO of the National Milk Producers Federation and former U.S. chief agricultural negotiator under the first Trump administration, described dairy as one of North America’s most integrated industries.
“I think one of the most fascinating conversations on integration is dairy between the U.S. and Canada. I mean, we have facilities on both sides of the border, very close to each other, and there’s stuff going back and forth all the time, which makes it really complicated to know what the real trade is,” Doud said.
His observation reveals a challenge ahead. While the U.S. operates under a market-oriented milk pricing system built around Federal Orders that are benchmarks, not guarantees, and Canada relies on administered pricing through fat-based milk production quotas, dairy manufacturing has become increasingly integrated as it straddles the border with investments in the U.S. by Canadian-based companies, including at least one prominent Canadian-farmer-owned-cooperative company operating and expanding state-side.
As negotiations move forward, policymakers will be weighing not only market ‘access,’ but also where value is created and where it lands in an “integrated” North American supply chain and what else is being integrated in terms of ‘sustainability’ definitions, metrics and data collection. In today’s ag and dairy economy, the question of what crosses the border is much more complicated than it was six years ago.
Laurie Fischer, known for her tenacious efforts on behalf of dairy farmers, is the founder of the American Dairy Coalition.