If your December milk check looked a little thinner than your October one, you weren't imagining it. Federal analysts trimmed their full-year all-milk price estimate again this month, to about $20.60 per hundredweight for 2023, as wholesale cheese, butter, and nonfat dry milk prices all softened into the holidays. Several of our members in the Midwest and Northeast have been comparing notes on just how far that softening has gone since summer.
It's been a strange year to price against. When you adjust for what feed, fuel, and packaging have cost this year, margins for a lot of farmstead producers are about as tight as they've been in two decades. That's not a crisis — it's a correction after a stronger run-up in prior years — but it has changed the conversation at every conference table we've sat at this fall.
What actually held steady
The one piece of good news member calls kept circling back to: a short-term federal funding law cleared in mid-November, and among its provisions is a one-year extension that keeps the Dairy Margin Coverage program running into 2024 without a gap. For members who've built DMC into their annual budgeting — and by our informal count, that's most of the small and mid-size creameries in the federation — that continuity matters more than the exact number on this month's payment. A lapse, even a short one, would have meant re-enrolling from scratch during a margin-tight stretch, which is the kind of paperwork nobody needs in December.
We'd also point out, gently, that a soft wholesale market for commodity block and barrel isn't the same market our aged and specialty members are selling into. Several of you have told us your holiday case business is up even as bulk prices ease — buyers trading down on the everyday shred but trading up on the gift box. If that's been your experience too, we'd like to hear it; it helps us make the case, to regulators and to our own members, that specialty and commodity dairy don't always move together.
What to watch heading into the new year
Two things worth putting on your calendar. First, if you haven't reviewed your DMC coverage level for 2024, now's the window — the extension keeps the program running, but elections still happen on the usual schedule. Second, keep an eye on your early-year input costs; several members who work with regional distributors like Ostergaard & Sons Dairy Supply have flagged early conversations about freight surcharges for next year, though nothing is finalized on that front yet.
None of this is investment or business advice — it's simply what we're hearing across the membership and what the public data shows. If you want to compare notes with other members before your own year-end close, the Membership & Outreach Committee keeps an informal thread going for exactly that, and any member can join it by writing in. It's a small thing, but a surprising number of members tell us the thread itself is worth more than the dues line it sits under.
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.