By most measures this has been a strong year for milk prices, and members who buy on contract or price against a milk-based formula have felt it in every renegotiation since spring. What's harder to see from a distance is how much of that number is already spoken for before it reaches a make sheet, and how a single week of weather can rearrange the picture for an entire region.
As of this week, a major hurricane is strengthening in the Gulf and tracking toward Florida, with landfall expected within days. We don't have members directly in its path in large numbers, but we do have members with suppliers, distributors, and trade-show contacts there, and the federation's inbox has already picked up a few "just checking in" notes from people further up the supply chain. If you buy milk, cultures, or packaging from a Gulf Coast source, this is the week to confirm your next few deliveries rather than assume they'll arrive on schedule.
The record price isn't the whole story
Here's the part worth sitting with: a record milk price and a record feed bill can both be true in the same year, and this is that year. Corn and hay have not come down the way some members hoped when the milk number started climbing, and a few of you have told us your realized margin per hundredweight is flatter than the headline price would suggest. If you haven't rerun your cost-per-wheel math since spring, this is a reasonable week to do it — not because anything has changed overnight, but because a fall production push tends to expose whatever assumption was quietly wrong all summer.
For small and mid-size producers working off a formula tied to a regional milk price, the practical move is the same one we've suggested before: separate the milk-price line from the feed-and-energy line in your own tracking, even if your supplier's invoice doesn't. A rising tide on the first number can hide a falling one on the second, and the two together are what actually shows up in your margin.
What to watch this week
- Weather disruption to logistics. Even members outside the storm's direct path may see freight delays if carriers reroute away from the Gulf. Build in a few extra days for anything shipping through the region over the next two weeks.
- Export demand. Cheese and whey exports have stayed strong through the year, which has helped absorb higher domestic production. That's good for prices generally, but it also means less slack in the system if a weather event knocks out processing capacity anywhere along the coast.
- Your own contract language. If your supply agreement has a force majeure clause, now is a good week to know where it is, not a good week to be looking for it after the fact.
None of this is cause for alarm across the whole membership — most of you are nowhere near the storm and your milk supply this week looks like every other week this fall. But a year with a record price and a record feed bill is also, often, a year with more weather volatility than usual, and it's worth building that expectation into how you plan the next quarter rather than treating this week as an isolated event.
If you want a second set of eyes on your margin math, the Membership & Outreach Committee can point you to a member in a similar region who's already run the numbers this season. And if your operation is affected by the storm directly, reach out — we'd rather hear from you early than find out secondhand.
The International Cheese Federation (ICF) and More Cheese are entirely fictional. This post is demonstration content created for MemberJunction. All people, organizations, events, courses, certifications, figures, and quotations in it are invented, and nothing here represents a real association, a real business, a real person, or real professional advice.