A storm line moved out of South Dakota on Monday morning, gathered strength across Iowa, and by early afternoon had laid down corn and toppled grain bins and barn roofs across a swath of the Midwest wide enough that most of our members east of the Mississippi felt it either directly or through someone they buy from. We've spent the week on the phone with a few of them instead of sending our usual Monday note, and we wanted to say plainly what we're hearing before we get to the market numbers.
Some of you lost roof on a barn or a machine shed. A few lost power for most of a week, which for anyone running a cave or a cheese room is its own kind of emergency — humidity control and refrigeration don't wait politely for a utility crew. If that's you, please reach out to the Membership & Outreach Committee; part of what they do is help members find each other for short-term cold storage or shared trucking when one operation is down and a neighboring one has spare capacity.
We're not going to pretend this storm was a routine weather event. Early reports put the damage path at several hundred miles long, with wind speeds strong enough to flatten mature cornfields the way a hurricane flattens a coastline, and outages that in some counties are expected to run a week or more. If your household or your operation is still without power, please put your own safety and your family first — the cheese can wait longer than people can.
A soft block market gets a harder fall ahead of it
We'd normally lead this post with the numbers on their own, so here they are. Forty-pound cheddar blocks have been sliding for weeks and sit in the mid-$1.70s per pound; barrels are running lower still, in the high $1.30s. The federal milk price for August came in under $20 per hundredweight, down close to a dollar from July, after producers had ramped output in response to the stronger prices earlier in the summer. None of that is storm-related — it was already the shape of the market before Monday.
What the storm adds is a feed-cost question for corn and soybean growers across a large stretch of the country, and by extension for the dairy operations that buy from them or grow their own. It's early to put a number on it; initial estimates on affected cropland run into the tens of millions of acres, concentrated in the counties hit hardest. If you contract feed regionally, this is worth watching over the next month rather than reacting to today. A soft milk price is uncomfortable on its own; a feed-cost spike on top of it is the combination that actually squeezes a margin.
It's also worth separating what you can control this week from what you can't. You can't move the block market and you can't reroute a derecho. You can look hard at whether your feed contracts are fixed-price or spot, and if you don't know the answer off the top of your head, that's worth finding out before harvest numbers firm up the picture in a month or two.
What we're asking members to do
If your operation or a supplier you rely on took damage, tell us. We're not able to offer financial relief directly, but we can route you toward the state programs that do, and knowing where the damage clusters helps us represent the region accurately if this comes up with the federal safety-net programs later in the year. And if you're one of the members who came through untouched, a few of you have already offered barn space or a spare truck route to others in the network — that kind of thing is exactly what the outreach committee exists to broker, so let them know what you have to offer.
We'll keep watching the block market and report back if the feed-cost picture sharpens. For now: check on your neighbors, and if your cave needs backup power or cold storage this week, ask.
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.