This is the week of year when the milk supply stops being an abstract line in a federal report and starts showing up in a member's inbox as an actual number. The federal forecast bumped its 2025 milk production estimate up again this month, and the reason is the one every cheesemaker with pasture-based cows already knows: spring flush has arrived, and cows on new grass are giving more milk than the processing plants strictly know what to do with right away.
For members who buy milk on the spot market rather than under a fixed contract, that's translated into real softness at the farm gate this week, with spot prices running well under the federal Class III benchmark in several regions. If you've been quoted a lower number than you expected on a spot load, you're not imagining it, and you're not the only one.
The other half of the story
Here's the part that makes this spring different from a straightforward oversupply story: cheese demand hasn't backed off to match. Orders for May and June have stayed elevated through the same weeks that spot milk got cheaper, and plants running full schedules are absorbing flush milk into vats rather than into storage. That combination — cheap milk, strong cheese demand — is good news for a make room with the capacity to use it, and mostly irrelevant for a member who buys cheese rather than makes it.
"We watch the flush every year, but this year we actually had the tank space to do something with it," one member cheesemaker in the upper Midwest told us this week, describing a spring that let her run an extra batch a week without the milk sitting around losing quality first. Not every creamery has that flexibility. Smaller operations without extra vat capacity or cold storage are watching the same flush pass through without much benefit, since there's only so much a small room can process before the milk needs somewhere to go.
What to watch through June
Flush season typically peaks in late spring and eases through early summer as pasture growth slows, so the softness in spot pricing this month is unlikely to hold through the whole season. If you buy milk under contract, this mostly won't touch your number. If you buy spot, it's worth locking in volume now for any batch you were planning to scale up, rather than waiting for a price that's already about as favorable as it's going to get this year.
Members weighing whether to add a batch, a cohort of interns, or extra aging-room shelving to take advantage of a flush like this one can find planning worksheets on the member portal under the pricing and margin resources, and the Pricing & Margin for Specialty Cheese course covers exactly this kind of seasonal input swing if you want a fuller walkthrough before you commit to anything.
There's a longer-run wrinkle worth flagging too. The same production growth pushing spot prices down this spring is part of why forecasters are already pointing to softer dairy product prices heading into 2026, even with 2025's numbers still trending upward. That's not a reason to panic about next year's contracts today, but it is a reason to treat this spring's cheap spot milk as a window rather than a new normal, and to build any expansion decision around what your operation needs on its own terms rather than around a price that's likely to firm back up by fall.
If you're not sure whether your own numbers make a spring expansion worthwhile, that's exactly the kind of question the federation's pricing resources are built to help with, and it's a better conversation to have now, while the flush is still running, than in August when the milk has already gone somewhere else.
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.