Dairy markets continue to slide this week, cash cheese prices slipped to $1.415 for barrels and $1.445 for blocks on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange on Wednesday while Class III futures saw another round of declines. In the last week, the April and May contracts have lost 77-cents each and March has dropped 83 cents. The dairy markets are under some pressure, milk intakes are running ahead of year-ago levels and cheese inventories are building.
Additional pressure coming from the Foreign Ag Service report that cheese and curd exports for 2009 totaled 239.2 million pounds, down 17 percent from 2008. Mexico was again our biggest customer buying 88.4 million pounds last year, a 9 percent increase compared to 2008. That gain was more than offset by a 9 percent decline in sales to Canada, 16 percent less sold to South Korea and a 25 percent drop in exports to Japan. Those four countries accounted for 62.9 percent of total cheese exports.
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