In this episode, Ted and T3 are joined by Eric Meyer, President of HighGround Dairy in Chicago. Eric explains the CME's new block cheddar futures contracts, which will begin trading on Jan. 13.

The panel also reacts to surprising NDPSR data for the month of November. Eric is reminded that the St. Louis Blues won the 2019 Stanley Cup.

Anna: Welcome to "The Milk Check," a podcast from T.C. Jacoby & Company, where we share market insights and analysis with dairy farmers in mind.

T3: Welcome everybody to the T.C. Jacoby & Company Milk Check podcast. Today, we have a guest speaker: Eric Meyer, President of HighGround Dairy. And we thought we'd talk about the milk production report and a little bit about markets, and then also talk about the new cheddar block futures contracts that are going to be introduced on the CME in the middle of January. Eric, welcome.

Eric: Thank you very much. It's great to be here in a cold and snowy St. Louis. It's almost colder here and snowier than up in Chicago, so I feel for you.

Ted: How about the St. Louis Blues who played Chicago on Monday night?

Eric: Oh, do we need to talk about that? I was also told, I think, four or five times since arriving last night that you guys are currently the Stanley Cup champions. That's always nice to hear after three of them in the previous five years.

T3: I'm glad you know that. It's Wednesday, December 18. It just so happens the milk production report was released not ten minutes ago, before we started this, recording this podcast. Milk production in November came in at up 0.9% in November for the country and up 0.5% in the 24-state. And that's a bit of a surprise to the downside. I think most people were expecting something up about 1.5%. Eric, what are your thoughts on that?

Eric: So we were in that same camp, so we thought that the all U.S. number was gonna be in the 1.2 range with the 24 states that have been trending a lot higher. And we'll talk about that. I think there's a big shift in the last year of the 24 states straying from the all U.S. number, a big dichotomy between the larger farms in the dairy-centric states and the rest of the country. So we were in that camp, 1.5% was what we were thinking. Those were the numbers from both September and October, and so these numbers are definitely below expectations, a bit of a change in trend from the previous two months. With that number being up 0.9%, we also had a 60 million-pound downward revision in the October number, which represented a 0.3% decline.

So USDA originally reported a 1.3% all U.S. gain and now it's down to just 1% higher. We are getting more milk. I think there is, from a fundamental perspective, the first half of this year, we were down on milk production. And we hadn't been down on milk production since 2013. I mean, it's been four, five-plus years that we've been growing milk production. And so the poor economics in 2018 and in the early 2019 kinda did the market in. Farmers finally responded, which, you know, we rarely see. That said, the large scale farming communities, the ones that are larger that are more apt to hedging that have brought costs of production down, economies of scale, we feel like they've maintained, and are now starting to pick up that growth.

So one of the items in this production report that we saw that is notable, we didn't have any change this month from October to November from a herd perspective. But we now are in the 24 states which represents right around 96% of total milk production in the country. We're now above previous year on the overall milking herd while the all U.S. is down 27,000 head.