If you only looked at the month-over-month number, December's milk check would read like good news. The Class I base price climbed to $18.21 per hundredweight this month, up a real $1.46 from November's low. If you looked at last December instead, the same number reads differently: $3.22 per hundredweight below where it sat a year ago, and the lowest for this month since 2018. Both readings are correct. Neither one is the whole picture, and we'd rather members have both before they finalize a January budget.
The full-year number is the one worth sitting with a little longer. The Class I base price averaged $18.94 per hundredweight across 2025 — $1.41 below 2024, and the lowest annual average since 2021. That's the number that shows up in a milk check on the farm side of the case, and it's the number a lot of members have been quietly absorbing all year through tighter feed budgets and postponed equipment purchases rather than a single bad month.
Why the herd keeps growing into a soft market
The part that surprises members outside the dairy side of our membership is that milk production has kept climbing through a year of falling prices, not shrinking to meet them. More cows, plus more milk per cow, plus continued investment in cheese manufacturing capacity in the major dairy states, has kept supply growing even as domestic demand holds steady rather than accelerating. Exports have been the release valve — cheese and butter shipments have stayed strong enough this year to soak up some of that extra milk, which is part of why cheese specifically hasn't taken as hard a hit as the raw milk price alone would suggest. Deli specialty cheese sales in particular have kept growing this year even as plain American cheese cools off, which matters if your creamery sells into that specialty case rather than a commodity block market.
None of that changes the arithmetic for a small producer holding a milk check against a feed bill. It does mean the pressure this year has been more about margin compression than a collapse in what the market wants — a distinction that matters when you're deciding whether to hold a herd through a rough stretch or size down going into spring.
What we're telling members to do with this
The 2026 forecast is already pointing toward further softening on the all-milk price, driven mostly by lower wholesale cheese and butter prices working back through the system rather than any single shock. If your operation runs on thin margins already, that's a signal to build your spring budget assuming this year's pressure doesn't ease early, not a signal to panic. If you sell into the specialty or deli case rather than commodity channels, this is also a reasonable moment to revisit your pricing and make sure a wheel that costs more to produce than it did two years ago is actually priced to reflect that — a conversation our Pricing & Margin for Specialty Cheese course walks through in more detail than we can fit here.
If you're a farmstead member weighing a herd decision before spring, talk to your regional rep before you make it final. We can't tell you what to do with your own herd, but we can tell you what other members in a similar spot decided and how it worked out, and that's often the missing piece when a decision like this gets made alone at the kitchen table in December.
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.