As anyone who’s spent time in Washington will tell you, politics is the art of the possible. After the soaring rhetoric and profound promises fade, what’s left are the necessary compromises that actually result in work getting done. So it has been with the 2008 Farm Bill.

After two years of hard work – the first within our membership, developing policy outlines and building consensus, and the second within Congress, forging the specifics of a package of items to benefit our industry – NMPF and its members can now look back and take a large measure of satisfaction with the final result. In fact, the new Farm Bill is one of the most consequential pieces of farm- and food-related legislation of the past generation.

The new Farm Bill moves dairy policy into the future, makes important improvements in existing programs, and strengthens the safety net underneath dairy producers. It represents an impressive array of programs that our organization sought. It also represents change, progress and results.

Now, there will be critics, up to and including the White House, who assert that the measure offers too few reforms. The word reform is completely subjective, of course, and is a political concept that some use to obscure the fact that the new Farm Bill is different than its predecessor. In fact, the overall bill does reform the status quo. Whether such reforms satisfy everyone is less important than acknowledging that the new bill is not merely a mirror image of the 2002 law (which, ironically, is what the White House was after in recent weeks as it pushed for a long-term extension of the status quo).

For dairy, perhaps the biggest reform is that the price support program will no longer support the overall price of milk. Instead, it will support the prices of manufactured dairy products, at levels essentially identical to the de facto support levels under the old system. But by shifting to a dairy product price support program, the new system should make this critical safety net more predictable: it removes the ability of the government to play politics with butter-powder tilt price adjustments. Importantly, reconfiguring the program should reduce the dairy program’s exposure under the World Trade Organization subsidy limitations.

The countercyclical direct payment program known as the Milk Income Loss Contract program is also made more reliable and predictable. Its payment level will revert back to the program’s original 45% ratio between the monthly Boston Class I price and $16.94/cwt. Even more importantly, that target price will incorporate a feed cost adjuster, tied to a monthly basket of corn, alfalfa hay and soybean prices. When feed costs explode, as they have in the past two years, that MILC target price will be adjusted to reflect the costly new realities of feeding dairy cattle.

This legislation finally acknowledges that dairy importers should help promote the U.S. market by contributing 7.5 cents per hundredweight milk equivalent to the dairy checkoff program, bringing the dairy promotion program into line with the ten other commodities that also assess imports. It’s time to move past the harsh rhetoric on this issue and accept the political and economic realities of Congress’s decision on this matter.

The farm bill also strengthens the Dairy Export Incentive Program by directing the USDA to maximize its use within the parameters of the World Trade Organization. The DEIP is a tool that has been too silent in recent years, and Congress has recognized that its dormancy is not acceptable.

It’s worth repeating that most of the money in the $300 billion measure goes for food, not farm programs. Federal nutrition programs get an extra $10 billion, with much of that going for food stamps – which should result in higher milk and dairy product sales.

Supporters of forward contracting will be glad to know that the program is revived for the life of this bill, but the measure contains several important dairy producer safeguards that NMPF had sought, including assurances that it won’t apply to the Class I market, and that no coercion of farmers will be permitted.

Elsewhere, the farm bill adds money to the Conservation Reserve Program and the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, two programs critical to improving our farms’ natural resources. It also adds resources for renewable energy programs that represent an important opportunity to build on the bioenergy infrastructure of America. And it maintains our animal health programs, including the National Johne’s Disease program first authorized in the 2002 Farm Bill.

Throughout the effort of getting this bill passed, we have striven to avoid the age-old trap of letting perfect be the enemy of good. This farm bill is more than good; it’s a great package, and dairy producers and their cooperatives should be proud to have played an integral role in getting it adopted.