We've had more calls this month from members asking about tariffs than we've had in the last two years combined, and most of the callers don't export a single wheel. That surprised us at first. It shouldn't have. Canada and Mexico alone take more than 40 percent of U.S. dairy exports, and this spring Canada answered new U.S. tariffs with its own: a 50 percent duty on milk and cream, 25 percent on cheese, and 50 percent on whey. That's real volume — cheese exports to Canada alone were worth well over $100 million last year — and when that much product loses its usual home, it doesn't stay contained to the exporters who wrote the shipping labels.
Here is the mechanism, as plainly as we can put it. A producer who used to move surplus cheddar or a commodity mozzarella into a Canadian or Mexican contract now has fewer places to put that volume at the price it used to fetch. Some of it gets redirected into the domestic wholesale market instead, and domestic wholesale is exactly where most of our membership sells. More supply chasing the same buyers tends to soften the price a buyer is willing to pay, even for a farmstead operation an ocean away from any port. A few members who sell to regional distributors told us their spring quotes came in flatter than expected, and this is very likely part of why.
What we don't know yet
We want to be honest about the limits of what we can tell you. Tariff policy has moved fast this year, and the retaliatory measures from Canada, Mexico, and China have shifted more than once since the spring. We are not going to predict what the rate schedule looks like in three months, and any blog post that claims to is guessing. What we can tell you is the direction of the pressure right now: export-oriented commodity cheese is facing higher costs to move north and south, and that is nudging more of that supply toward the same domestic buyers our members compete with.
If you sell direct to consumer at a market stand or through your own retail counter, this pressure reaches you more slowly and more faintly — your pricing is set by your own costs and your own customer relationships, not by a wholesale index. If you sell wholesale into distribution, it's worth asking your buyer directly whether their supply mix has shifted this spring, rather than assuming your own quote softened because of something you did. A flat or lower offer right now may have very little to do with your cheese and a great deal to do with where a much larger volume of commodity product just got rerouted.
A note on the bigger picture
It's tempting to read a trade dispute as something happening to someone else, somewhere else. For most of our membership it isn't abstract — it shows up as a slightly different number on a quote sheet, a distributor asking for a longer payment window, or a buyer who suddenly has more options than they did last year. None of that means your cheese is worth less. It means the market you're selling into got a little more crowded for reasons that started at a border, not in your cave.
We don't have a clean fix to offer here, and we're wary of anyone who claims they do. If you distribute through a regional partner and you're seeing pricing behavior that doesn't match your usual season, that's worth a direct conversation with your buyer this month, before your next contract renews.
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.