The National Milk Producers Federation began sponsoring a program in 2003 to reduce the supply of milk in order to increase the price dairy producers receive for their milk. The program is called CWT, which stands for Cooperatives Working Together. Under the program, members of participating cooperatives and other dairy producers who join the program contribute 10¢ per hundredweight (cwt.) of milk they send to market. (Initially, the contribution was 5¢ per hundredweight.) Currently, 70% of the nation’s milk supply is paying into the program. The fund is used to pay producers who agreed to send their dairy herd to the slaughter market.
The six previous herd retirement program conducted by CWT retired 276,000 cows representing 5.2 billion pounds of annual milk production.