Market News

Dairy markets start the week lower

Prices declined to start the week in the dairy markets on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange on Monday. Cheese barrels down 2 cents on one sale, blocks lost 4.25 cents on one uncovered offer, butter fell 3.25 cents and nonfat dry milk slipped a quarter-cent. Class III futures saw the August contract slip under $16 down 29 cents to $15.99. The other contracts were lower as well.

USDA reports more than 9.1 billion pounds of milk was delivered into the pooled Federal orders in June, down 17 percent from June of 2014. Class I utilization increased in all ten Orders with the total Class I up 3.2 percent compared to the previous year. The breakdown of utilization for June has 35 percent of the milk delivered into the orders going to Class I; 17 percent went Class II; 30 percent went to Class III and 18 percent was used for Class IV.  The weighted average uniform price for the pooled milk was $16.86 per hundredweight up 32 cents from May but $6.42 below June of 2014.

During May, 3.8 billion pounds of packaged fluid milk products were sold in the United States, 3.7 percent less than sold in May of 2014. Conventional fluid milk sales were 3.5 percent lower than a year ago and organic milk sales were down 7.4 percent.

Last week the average weighted advertised price of a half-gallon of conventional milk was $1.80 and the average price of a half-gallon of organic milk was $3.43 putting the organic-to-conventional spread at $1.63. The previous week the spread was $1.18 with a half-gallon of organic at $4 and a half-gallon of conventional milk at $2.82.