State milk prices may finally be returning to normal following wild fluctuations due to the health pandemic

Having a steady market for your milk was not of much concern to dairy farmers until the growth of the last few years changed how we think about market access

“We had 100,000 more cows year-over-year in December. That was the biggest year-over-year advance in some time,” shared Phil Plourd during USDA’s 97th Annual Agricultural Outlook Forum

It wasn’t the year anyone predicted in the dairy industry, but according to University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Mark Stephenson, in terms of milk price, 2020 was better than we thought

After riding the rocky waves of 2020, all in the dairy industry are hoping for smoother sailing in the year ahead when it comes to milk prices. But do agricultural economists see calmer waters in our future?

This article’s title seems appropriate when looking back at 2020. The numbers will show that 2020 was a record year for Idaho’s dairy industry, in both milk production and total milk receipts

While many unknowns remain regarding 2021 milk prices, there are a few factors with major impacts that we do know details about

During the last decade, the U.S. dairy industry has seen both butterfat prices and protein prices drive farm gate milk checks

Feeding for greater protein and fat levels to take advantage of high milk component prices has been a hot topic this year

Dairy farmers have become accustomed to operating in an environment of “reasonable uncertainty.” However, the COVID-19 crisis has made 2020 prices especially volatile for the industry

“Mandatory pooling would not change the fact that you had a negative PPD,” said Andy Novakovic, Cornell University economist, in unpacking the correlation between plant pooling and producer...

For the same reason that many dairy economists are unwilling to put too much stock in predicting future milk prices, 2020 has left the industry with another lesson just as applicable to federal order pricing:...

The COVID-19 pandemic has most certainly impacted the financial stability of the country, put the economy into recession, and even raised concerns of a coming depression

Could dairy’s “V-shaped” price recovery transcend into a “W-shaped” price downturn? If shifted from a “V” to a “W-shaped” milk price graph, the markets...

Receiving a response from a federal agency just 48 hours after submitting a significant petition is almost unheard of these days

Many dairy farmers were justifiably frustrated during the initial height of the pandemic this spring as their milk struggled to get to consumers

June milk checks carried a dose of unwelcome pricing news

Milk prices are high now, but they are not expected to last. What might a producer do to slow the financial impact of that fluctuation?

Forecasting the future of the U.S. dairy industry has always been a difficult task due in part to the inelastic nature of the demand for dairy products

“I think this is a fragile high,” cautioned dairy economist Mark Stephenson. We know that milk prices already live on a knife’s edge, and the pandemic has heightened that uncertainty