Most Augusts, a farmstead member we'll call the make sheet's usual owner is out cutting a second hay crop, not buying one. This year the second cut barely materialized, and by mid-July she'd made a call she hadn't made in a decade of running her own herd: order in supplemental hay from a neighbor two counties over, at a price that made her wince when she wrote the check.
She's not alone. This has been a hard summer for pasture growth in parts of the country, echoing what dairy operations overseas have dealt with this year, where record heat has cut grass growth by roughly half in some regions and pushed daily feed costs well above normal. For a member whose whole pitch to customers is "grass-fed, farmstead, small-batch," buying hay isn't just a cost line — it brushes up against the story she tells about her own cheese.
Doing the math twice
She ran the numbers before she committed. A smaller herd on tighter pasture would have meant less milk and a thinner make schedule through the fall, which would have cost her wholesale accounts she's spent years building. Buying hay was more expensive per cow per day than she's used to paying, but it let her keep the herd at full size and the make schedule intact. "I did the math twice because I didn't like the first answer," she told us. "The second time it still said buy the hay."
That's not a universal answer — a smaller producer with less wholesale exposure might reasonably have gone the other way, culling or drying off early instead of paying up for feed. It's the same trade-off showing up nationally in enrollment numbers for federal margin-protection coverage this year, as more producers hedge against exactly the gap between milk price and feed cost that she was staring down in July. The Milk Quality & Herd Health course covers this kind of trade-off directly, walking through how nutrition decisions during a stressed season carry through to components and yield months later, which is useful reading whether or not your own hay barn is full.
What she'd tell a member facing the same call
Her advice for anyone weighing the same decision this month: get a feed cost per cow per day before you decide anything else, not after. It's the number that makes the trade-off concrete instead of abstract, and it's the number a lender or a co-op field rep will ask for anyway. She also said not to wait until the barn is empty to start calling around — hay got harder to find as the summer went on, not easier, and the members who called suppliers early got better prices and better bales.
There's a case counterpart to this, too. Cheese prices at the case have stayed firm even as the milk market has cooled off its spring highs, which is part of why she felt comfortable protecting the herd rather than shrinking it — the demand on the other end of her supply chain hasn't gone anywhere. That's cold comfort when the hay bill comes due in the same month, but it's the reason the math worked out the way it did.
If your own summer has forced a similar recalculation, the federation would like to hear about it — not to publish your numbers, but because the pattern helps us understand what members are actually dealing with heading into fall pricing conversations. You can reach the Membership & Outreach Committee with your story, or just to compare notes.
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.