It's less than a year and a half old, but the USDA's new Dairy Revenue Protection program has already led farmers across the U.S. to hedge an estimated 12% of the national milk supply.

Blimling and Associates' Phil Plourd, Tiffany LaMendola and Katie Burgess join Ted and T3 to explain how this price risk management tool works and discuss why quick adoption of the program bodes well for the industry.

Anna: Welcome to The Milk Check, a podcast from T.C. Jacoby & Company, where we share market insights and analysis with dairy farmers in mind.

T3: Hello everybody, this month on The Milk Check we have another guest on our panel, Phil Plourd is President of Blimling and Associates. And he and his team are here to help us learn about DRP or the Dairy Revenue Protection program recently created by the USDA to help dairy farmers protect downside milk price risk. Well, we're excited today to be here with Phil Plourd, Phil's got two other members of your team that have joined us.

Phil: Yes. So we have on the line today Tiffany LaMendola, who's the Vice President of our risk management practice and she is based in the Modesto, California area. And also Katie Burgess, who is one of our Risk Management Leads. And the two of them have spent a lot of time over the past year working on the DRP insurance program. So been out in the field, working with dairy farmers and getting them enrolled and getting them going in the program.

T3: So what I thought today would be a great topic to discuss with Phil in town was the dairy revenue protection program, which is a great program that's been set up for dairy farmers, but a program also that I have to admit I don't know a lot about.

Ted: And I have to concede, I don't know anything about it either.

T3: So I thought we'd go ahead and have Tiffany, and Katie, and Phil, kind of give us their view of what the program is all about, how it works. And Dad, you and I can just ask questions, and it's gonna be an educational experience for us as well as for the farmers that listen.

Ted: It can't help but be educational for me.

T3: Phil, Katie, Tiffany, what is it?

Tiffany: It's a relatively new program for dairy producers to manage milk price risk. It was first rolled out in October of 2018. There was a slight delay while the government was shut down. And so it really is quite new. So don't feel bad if you don't know much about it. We're finding actually a lot of producers are still learning about it themselves. At its simplest terms, it is the ability to buy a milk price floor at subsidized levels, it's very customizable by... So, you know, obviously different producers in different regions have different milk price risk, you know, based on how their milk prices are determined. And this allows a producer to go in and sort of do their best to mimic how their milk is determined with some combination of Class III and Class IV. And look out into the future and set milk price floors kind of based on where the markets are at, at a quarter-by-quarter. And really kind of dial in as close as we can to, again, how their milk price is determined. It is offered through the Risk Management Agency of USDA as a crop insurance program. So you do have to buy essentially the program through a crop insurance agent, so producers kind of across the U.S. will be working with crop insurance agents to access this program.

Ted: So where are these agents located, in the local extension service?

Tiffany: They're kind of all over. So we have agents on our team. You know, we'd like to think we have the dairy expertise piece of it that's been quite important.