Host) Republican U.S. Senate candidate Richard Tarrant says he believes the best way to insure the future health of the state’s dairy industry is to move toward a free market system and to reduce government involvement in the pricing of milk.
Speaking last night on VPR’s Switchboard program, Tarrant said it’s difficult for dairy farmers to survive because the price of milk is so volatile. The solution, according to Tarrant, is to eliminate complicated government pricing mechanisms and to phase out the current system of price supports:
(Tarrant) “The government has been too involved in that and I think over time farmers would do a lot better if the government got the heck away, especially Vermont farmers. Vermont farmers are ingenious, but to give them a business to run that’s virtually impossible to predict the revenue stream is nonsense. The government got our farms into it. The government’s got to help get our farms out of it.”
(Host) Tarrant says there’s no doubt in his mind that dairy farmers would be much better off without a lot of government intervention in the pricing of milk:
(Tarrant) “This is typical government stuff. They keep making it more complicated, change the pricing, put floor supports in, change the northeast from the midwest from the southwest. It’s nuts. It’s typical politics getting involved in something that could be a good business if you let farmers run it.”
(Host) Tarrant faces Greg Parke in the GOP Senate primary on September 12th.