Planning a year without the numbers

Most of you start January the same way. Last year's make totals in one column, this year's
intentions in the next, and a conversation with a lender, a landlord or a milk supplier somewhere
before spring. This year the second column has less to lean on than usual.

The federal statistical releases that were scheduled for 11 January did not appear. Crop
production, the annual crop summary, grain stocks, winter wheat seedings and the monthly world
supply-and-demand estimate have all been suspended since 22 December, along with the funding for
the department that produces them. The stated intention is to publish everything once the doors
reopen. Nobody has said when that is.

If your reaction to that is "I make cheese, not corn", fair enough — but the feed number is your
number too. Hay and silage quality after a wet autumn, corn stocks, the cost per hundredweight
your milk supplier is looking at: those are the inputs that turn into your milk price in March,
and right now everyone in the chain is negotiating from memory.

What is missing, and what isn't

Worth being precise about the size of the hole. Market prices are still quoted, cheese still
moves, and the commodity picture has not changed character: storage is full, farmgate prices have
been poor for a fourth consecutive year, and the supply side of the world has not shown much
inclination to slow down. What is missing is the official, comparable, everybody-reads-the-same-
page version of that picture — the one you cite in a loan application rather than assert.

What is not missing is your own book. A farmstead producer in the upper Midwest put it to us this
week better than we would have: the shutdown does not know what her cost per pound is either, and
she does. If you have been meaning to work out what a wheel of your washed-rind actually costs to
make — milk, culture, labour, the electricity your cave draws in a cold snap, the shrink you write
off at eight weeks — this is an unusually good month to do it. It is the one figure in your plan
that no agency can fail to publish.

The new safety net exists, on paper

The farm bill signed just before Christmas replaced the old margin protection programme for dairy
with a new margin coverage programme, and the terms are meaningfully better for small producers.
Coverage now runs from 5% to 95% of production history rather than 25% to 90%. The top coverage
level for the first tier moves up to $9.50 per hundredweight, first-tier premiums come down, and a
producer can elect different coverage on the two tiers rather than one setting for the whole herd.
Production history is still built from the best of 2011–2013, updated forward.

The catch is administrative rather than legislative. The offices where a producer would actually
sign up are part of what is closed, and loan closings and programme applications are stacked up
behind the same door. So we are not going to tell you a sign-up date, because we do not have one.
What we will say is that when it opens it will likely be a short window with a queue in front of
it. Members who expect to enrol should be pulling their production records together now, while
January is quiet, rather than in whatever week the announcement lands.

For members outside the United States, the transferable lesson is the boring one we keep
relearning: a support scheme is worth what its administration is worth on the day you need it.
Several of our European and Southern Hemisphere members have been through their own versions of
this and have been generous about saying so on the members' list.

We will keep an eye on the release calendar and flag the moment the backlog starts landing,
because it will land all at once and some of it will move prices. In the meantime, the
Membership & Outreach Committee is collecting a plain read of how members are actually planning
through this — what you are assuming, and what you have simply postponed. Reply to us with a
paragraph. It is more useful than it sounds, and it is the sort of thing we can take into a room
where the people writing rules for "dairy" have never costed a cave.

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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.