Happy new year. We're going to start it with a number that felt almost unfamiliar to type: corn and soybean meal are both trading well below their long-run averages, and December's federal livestock and dairy outlook says they're likely to stay there for most of the year ahead. If you spent much of 2025 watching the feed line on your budget climb faster than everything else, this is the first stretch in a while where it isn't.
We want to be careful about how much relief to promise, and about whose relief we're describing. The easing is real at the market level, but it lands differently depending on what kind of operation you run. A farmstead producer who grows a share of its own forage and buys the rest sees a fairly direct benefit. A member who buys milk from an outside supplier to make cheese sees a different set of numbers entirely, because the same forecasts calling for cheaper grain are also calling for a softer milk price in 2026 than in 2025. Cheaper inputs and a softer output price can offset each other more than either one feels like it should.
What eased and what didn't
Put those two forces together and what most members should expect for 2026 isn't a rebound so much as a slower bleed. For an operation buying most of its own feed, the math is meaningfully better than it was a year ago. For anyone whose margin depends more on the milk price they're paid or the milk price they pay than on the feed bill, it's closer to a wash, and in a few cases still tighter. Both of those things are true across our membership at once, which is exactly why we're reluctant to declare the squeeze over just because one input got cheaper.
There's also a timing wrinkle worth naming. Feed contracts get locked in ahead of need, often months before the cheese made from that feed reaches a case. A producer pricing a spring contract now is buying into today's lower numbers; a producer who locked in a contract back when prices were higher is still paying last year's rate no matter what the futures curve says this week. If your input costs don't feel like they've eased yet, that's often why.
What we're watching next
The Membership & Outreach Committee has started collecting informal input-cost reports from members on a rolling basis this quarter, specifically so we have something better than a national average to point to when a member calls asking whether what they're seeing locally is normal. If you have a January feed invoice you're willing to let us see in aggregate — no names, no numbers we'd publish individually — reach out to the committee. The more of these we collect early in the year, the better a read we can give you by spring, when most of you are locking in supply contracts for the season ahead.
For now: cautious is the right word. Watch your own numbers before you relax, but for the first time in over a year, there's a real reason to check them.
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.