NORWICH – President Obama’s Super Committee was supposed to have addressed new agriculture policies that would have helped dairy farmers earn a price for milk that is comparable to the cost to produce it.

Like other taxing and spending plans and reforms designed to cut the $15 trillion deficit, however, milk pricing reforms failed to garner enough bi-partisan support.

The plight of the dairy industry has been a long-standing crisis. According to South New Berlin dairyman Ken Dibbell, a steadfast advocate for New York’s dairy farmers, the current system has coincided with the idling of four-fifths of the nation’s dairy farms, or 450,000 down to 50,000 operating farms over the past two decades.

Rural economies, like Chenango County’s, that were once bolstered by the nation’s 400,000-plus farms are now “in absolute shambles,” he said.

“Let’s stop the squabbling and get something done and done soon for all our dairy farmers. Tomorrow will be too late,” he wrote this week in a plea to farmers, government officials and taxpayers asking them to contact their region’s Senators in Washington to support new legislation called the Milk Marketing Improvement Act.