5,000 More Dairy Cows and a Decline in Cheese Stocks

With California Ag Today, I am Haylie Shipp. This is the Ag Information Network…

We’re talking milk stocks on today’s program following up on recent data from the U.S. milk production report which indicates a slight year-over-year decrease. Kathleen Wolfley, an agriculture broker with Ever.Ag…

“Yeah, so we had a milk production report that came out on Friday. And it kind of gave us a glimpse at where we landed in May and milk production for the total U.S. was down nine-tenths of a percent year-over-year. That was a little bit below our expectations, but overall we’d call the report fairly neutral. Just taking into consideration the fact that markets have been pretty strong here in the last several weeks, I don’t know as though this report came as too much of a surprise.”

Keeping a close eye on cow numbers, she said that there was around a 5,000-cow growth over the April-to-May time period…

“With a lot of that growth coming in places like Texas and New Mexico, a place where we really haven’t been talking about growth very much in recent months or recent years.”

And something a little terrifying to me, cheese stocks are down!

“Inventories on the American cheese stocks side of things were down about 4.2% year-over-year. So, we’re seeing a little bit of a slip in American cheese stocks. We’ve had opportunities to sell that cheese elsewhere, not necessarily putting it into the warehouse.”

Kathleen Wolfley, Ever.Ag.