Ag News: MPP Dairy Enrollment
**Milk producers can start signing up next week in the newly overhauled Margin Protection Program, which should provide better payments to dairy farms during periods of low prices than the original version.
The USDA says the enrollment period will run Monday thru June 1st.
Agri-Pulse reports producers already signed up for MPP this year will be required to re-enroll. Coverage will be retroactive to January 1st.
This comes as dairy margins have sunk to a 20-month low.
**Members of the Budget and Appropriations team are still combing through the massive spending bill signed into law recently.
USDA and FDA programs will receive about $23.3 billion in discretionary spending through September, about $2.4 billion more than fiscal 2017 levels despite the Trump administration's calls for cuts.
According to agrimarketing.com, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as SNAP or food stamps, receives $74.01 billion in mandatory dollars, slightly more than the $73.6 billion in fiscal 2018.
**Ag Secretary Sonny Perdue is clarifying the USDA’s oversight of plants produced through innovative new breeding techniques.
He says under its biotech regulations, USDA does not regulate or have any plans to regulate plants that could otherwise have been developed through traditional breeding techniques as long as they’re not plant pests or developed using plant pests.
This includes a set of new techniques increasingly used by plant breeders to produce new plant varieties, like genome editing.