Michigan now has the highest milk production per cow in the country, and the state has doubled its milk production since 2000.

Given this growth . . . “Michigan is, in fact, the poster child for distressed milk,” wrote the University of Wisconsin’s Mark Stephenson in his upcoming May 25 article, “Tight capacity and falling premiums.”

“By my calculations, Michigan milk plants have the capacity to process just a bit more than 9 billion pounds of milk annually, and the state is producing more than 11 billion pounds of milk. That is a little more than 100 tanker loads of milk a day that need to find a processing home,” wrote Stephenson in the fourth article of a five-part series titled Changing landscape of U.S. dairy plants.

Falling premiums
This, of course, has sent premiums once found in milk checks spiraling downward.

“The combination of high transportation costs and faltering sales has moved the state’s All-Milk price from about the middle of the pack in 2011 (26th out of 50) to dead last in 2017. And those sales of distressed milk to other states has put considerable price pressure on premiums in other states as well,” noted Stephenson.

To learn more about the pressing matter, look at the May 25, 2018, edition of Hoard’s Dairyman.