Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman has promised he'll recommend a veto if Congress approves a bill now before the House that changes the way USDA prices milk from the farm. The bill seeks to overturn USDA's milk pricing option and replace it with one that many analysts believe will mean higher farm milk prices.

Arguing in favor of USDA's pricing option, Glickman, in a letter to Rep. David Obey, says the department's proposed system "is superior policy to the present system: it more accurately reflects current market conditions, is fairer to farmers and consumers alike, modernizes and reforms an antiquated system sorely in need of streamlining and revisions, and USDA's newest analysis demonstrates that if the reforms had been in effect over the last year, dairy farmers would have been better off than they were under the current milk marketing order system."

If the USDA option, known as Option 1B, had gone into effect a year ago, says Glickman, dairy farmers would have earned 87 cents per hundredweight more for Class I milk than they did; the all-milk average blend price under Option 1B would have earned dairy farmers 15-20 cents more per hundredweight. "In sum, the increase in the Class I price under the reforms would have more than offset the changes USDA has made to modernize the Class I differentials."

Glickman says he does support one part of the House bill -- to extend the milk price support program a year -- but the bill's main provisions "remain unacceptable..dairy farmers will be better served under USDA's reforms than by the current program." So if the bill goes to the White House in its current form, "I will recommend that (President Clinton) veto it," he warns.