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 program for dairy with a new margin coverage program, 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 program 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 enroll 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.
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.