Happy new year from all of us at the federation. If your first week back involved a spreadsheet before it involved a vat, you are not alone — a good number of members open January by reconciling last year's milk checks against this year's forecast, and this year's forecast is a mixed one.
The federal projection for 2024 puts the average milk price a little below where 2023 landed, with the milk-to-feed margin expected to run tighter for at least a couple of months this year. That is not a crisis number. It is a "watch it, don't ignore it" number, and for members who run their own herds or buy on contract, it is worth a fifteen-minute look before you lock in spring purchasing.
What the tighter margin actually touches
For a wholesale-facing creamery, a thinner margin usually shows up first in input costs — feed, packaging, the utility bill on a cave that runs colder in January anyway — before it shows up in your sale price. If you haven't looked at your feed contracts since harvest, this is the week to do it. Several members have told us the biggest surprise of a tight-margin year isn't the milk price itself, it's discovering a supply contract renewed on autopilot at last year's terms.
Export demand is the brighter half of the picture. Cheese has been the strongest line in the country's dairy export numbers for more than a year now, and members who ship internationally reported a steady close to 2023. If your case has room for a wider distribution footprint, this is a reasonable year to ask your distributor about it — steady export growth tends to firm up wholesale pricing even for members who never ship a pallet themselves.
What to check this week
Two practical steps, neither of which requires guessing at a number we won't publish here:
- Margin coverage enrollment. If your operation is enrolled in a federal dairy margin protection program, January is typically when coverage elections are reviewed or locked for the year. Talk to whoever handles that paperwork for you before you assume last year's election still fits.
- Your own cost sheet, not ours. We don't publish dues, wholesale pricing, or revenue figures — those vary too much member to member to be useful as a blog number. What we can tell you is the direction: feed and margin pressure up slightly, export demand for cheese specifically holding up. Build your own January numbers around that direction, not around a figure from us.
A tighter year is not the same as a bad year, and 2024 opens with more members shipping product farther than they were three years ago. If margin planning isn't something your operation has formalized, the Membership & Outreach Committee can point you to a member who's happy to walk through how they set it up. Reach out through the member portal and we'll make the connection.
It's tempting, in the first week back, to treat the federal outlook as background noise and get straight to production. Most members do exactly that, and most years it costs them nothing. But a year where the margin is projected to run thinner than the year before is precisely the year where a fifteen-minute check pays for itself — not because the number is alarming, but because a small miscalculation compounds differently when the cushion underneath it is smaller.
If you sell primarily wholesale, ask your buyer directly whether they're planning around flat pricing or expecting movement later in the year. If you sell direct, at a farmers' market or from your own counter, the margin story matters less day to day, but it still shapes what your suppliers are paying for feed and packaging, which eventually shows up in what they charge you. Either way, the federation's read on 2024 is: steady, not soft, with export demand doing real work to hold cheese pricing up even as the milk-to-feed math gets a little tighter. Plan your first quarter around that, check your own numbers against it monthly rather than assuming January's read holds through June, and you'll be ahead of most of the year's surprises before they arrive.
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.