Happy new year. If your first week back was spent covering three shifts instead of your usual one, you are not alone — and the market data backs up what your schedule already told you.
Cheese and butter opened 2022 firm. Block and barrel cheddar climbed through the first weeks of January, and butter pushed toward levels that would have looked unusual a year ago, before drifting back down later in the month. For members selling into wholesale, that early firmness is welcome after a bumpy back half of 2021. For members buying milk to make that cheese, it is a mixed blessing: strong finished-product prices help the margin, but only if you can actually staff the make room to hit them. Federal forecasters are also projecting feed costs to stay elevated through the year relative to what was already an expensive 2021, which narrows the gap between a good sale price and a good margin more than the headline number suggests.
The national dairy herd is part of that backdrop too. The most recent count going into January showed slightly fewer milk cows nationally than a year earlier, a small enough shift on its own but one more data point suggesting supply won't loosen quickly if demand holds. None of that is something an individual creamery controls, but it is useful context for pricing conversations with your own buyers this quarter: if a wholesale account pushes back on a price increase, you can point to the broader supply and feed-cost picture rather than just your own cost sheet.
That is the part of the January story that will not show up on a spot-market price sheet. A wave of respiratory illness moving through the country this winter has been keeping people home sick in numbers most of our members have not seen since the earliest pandemic months — not just on your line, but at your co-packer, your trucking partner, and the distribution center that was supposed to pick up Tuesday's order. If a pallet sat an extra day at the loading dock this week, this is almost certainly why. Build in slack where you can: confirm pickup windows a day ahead rather than assuming, and let your buyers know early if a delivery is going to slip, rather than after it already has.
The Dairy Margin Coverage window is open now
For members who milk cows directly rather than buying milk on contract, the federal Dairy Margin Coverage signup for program year 2022 opened in mid-December and stays open into February. DMC pays out when the gap between the national milk price and an estimated feed cost falls below a level you choose when you enroll — it is not a subsidy for low prices generally, it is specifically a feed-margin backstop. If you enrolled last year, your coverage does not roll over automatically; you have to re-file each program year. If you have never enrolled, the Education Committee can point you to plain-language guidance on how the tiers work and what the paperwork requires — reach out before the window narrows rather than in the last week.
What we are watching
None of this changes what your make sheet should say this week. But if your finished-product prices look better than your feed and labor bills feel, you're reading the same market everyone else is. Two things worth flagging to your team: confirm your carrier and co-packer contacts are still current, since a lot of people made staffing changes over the holidays, and if a shipment is unusually late, ask whether it's a paperwork problem or a people problem before you assume the worst about either.
If you want to talk through how the margin coverage numbers apply to your specific operation, the Membership & Outreach Committee keeps office hours most weeks — details are on the member portal.
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.