Two dairy stories have been running side by side this month, and members keep asking us to sort out which one changes anything in the make room. Short version: one is a market signal worth acting on, and the other is a food-safety reassurance that shouldn't change your written plan at all.
The margin news
Early August brought some of the best milk-over-feed numbers producers have seen in years. Class III milk has been holding near $20 per hundredweight, corn futures dropped below $4 a bushel for the first time since 2020 on a strong harvest outlook, and the federal price forecast for cheese has been revised upward twice this year on genuine price strength. Put plainly: milk is expensive to sell and cheap to make right now, which is not a combination that shows up often.
A widely watched farm sentiment survey published this week captured the mood from the other side of the ledger and found it more complicated than the margin numbers alone suggest. The index climbed sharply in July after a rough June, but input costs are still the top worry for roughly a third of the producers surveyed, and a subindex tracking farm financial performance actually slipped, coming in lower than a year ago. Researchers running the survey called the improvement in overall mood "puzzling" given that commodity prices had softened over the same stretch. Read together, the two data points say something useful for anyone buying milk on a member's behalf: the people selling it to you feel slightly better than they did a month ago, but not because the underlying pressure on their operation has actually eased. Costs are still the thing keeping them up at night.
If your own books have felt better than expected the last few weeks, that's the margin side of the story, and it's worth treating the window as temporary rather than permanent. Analysts are already flagging that strong margins tend to pull more milk into production, which eventually leans on price the other way. This is a reasonable week to lock in what you can on feed and packaging contracts before the calculus shifts back, and to revisit your notes from Pricing & Margin for Specialty Cheese if it's been a while since you last ran the numbers.
The testing news
Meanwhile, animal-health surveillance has continued tracking a highly pathogenic avian influenza strain moving through dairy herds in a number of states since the spring, and the federal food-safety regulator has been running retail sampling to check whether the virus was showing up, in infectious form, in products already on shelves. Through the first half of August, that surveillance work covered well over a hundred herds across more than a dozen states, and separate retail testing of pasteurized milk, pasteurized cheese, butter, and aged raw-milk cheese has continued to come back negative for infectious virus.
That's a reassurance about the commercial supply, not a change to anyone's obligations. Longstanding guidance against drinking unpasteurized milk hasn't moved, and if your operation ages raw-milk cheese under the existing rule, that rule is what governs you regardless of this outbreak. If a wholesale buyer or a nervous customer asks what's changed, the honest answer is: nothing in your plan, and nothing in the rule. If you want a refresher on what your written food-safety documentation should say about milk sourcing this year, our Food Safety & HACCP Certificate covers exactly that ground, even for members who completed it a few cycles back.
Between the two threads, the summer's read is steady: the supply chain is being watched closely, the safety case for the commercial supply keeps getting stronger, and your margin is having an unusually good year. Keep your records current on both fronts, and don't let a good quarter talk you out of a plan you'd otherwise stand behind.
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.