We welcome our Jacoby trading team back to discuss the rapid increase in milk production so far in 2021, compared to 2020 in which the national herd decreased by 30,000 cows. 

Don Street, our director of global strategy, explores production issues like the hefty 3% increase in cheese as compared to last year, driven by American and cheddar. 

Jacob Menge, future and options trader, leads a discussion about what inflation could mean for dairy as foreshadowed by the increasing cost of many commodities, from lumber to diapers. 

T3: Welcome, everybody to our monthly mass balanced discussion. Today, we've got my father, Ted Jacoby. We've got Joe Maxtor, who's our butter trader. We've got Don Street who tends to lead the mass balance discussion and heads our powder group. We've got Diego Carvallo, also from our powder group. We've got Gus Jacoby, who heads our milk and fluid team. We've got Greg Scheer from our milk team. We've got Jacob Menge, who's gonna lead the charting discussion who also heads up our risk management group.

We've got Anna Donze who handles pooling for the milk group. Welcome, everybody. Don, why don't you take it away?

Don: I think we have a real roller coaster that's getting ready to happen, certainly on milk production. And I'll just get right into this, we’ve seen a very tight protein market in the last 10 days. Cheese has been a bit more sideways but price-wise hanging in there. When you just kind of look where we've been for Q1 we had 2% more milk, and we were running 90-some-thousand cows more than a year ago. The roller coaster starts because in Q2 of last year, the cowherd shrunk by over 30,000 head. When you look at when we start in April, instead of being 90,000 head higher than a year ago, April is going to be 110,000, let’s say, it's going to be a significant jump up. That number only grows to when we get to June, we could be 150,000 cows ahead of one year ago.

T3: Don, has that jumped because we shrunk the herd at this time last year because of the pandemic? Are we expecting the herd to grow over the next three to four months, or is it a combination of two?

Don: I think mostly the drop of Q2 last year when the pandemic really began because we had from 5,000, 13,000, 9,000 cows every month. Take that times 12, you have 8,000 on average, you get 96,000 more cows every year. So most of this is simply the drop that took place a year ago. Plus, milk per cow a year ago was also pulled back as more co-ops instituted base programs. So my milk gross projection for Q2, it’s a really solid 3% out, which is 50% more than the growth we had in Q1. To me, that's the biggest change that's coming down the dairy road in this Q2.

T3: Is it fair to say, Don, that the number is going to be twice as big in Q2 and Q1, but the real trend from Q1 to Q2 isn't more increased milk, it really reflects what happened last year because the pandemic hit and we shrunk the milk supply?

Don: That is correct. If I look month-on-month, you're clearly going to have more cows. Productivity growth seems to be pretty reasonable. Ignoring the seasonal trend on milk, Q2's gonna be just a really quarter for milk. Try to think about this in terms of what we do with the milk that's produced. In Class I, bottled milk, same old story, for the two months that we've reported in 2021, were down about 2.5% over the prior year. Last two has been really strong with the exception of cottage cheese, sour cream, ice cream, yogurt has just been on a tear production-wise, 8% to 10% up, which even on a small class of milk is significant.

Total cheese production was negative in January. February was really up strong.

On this edition of The Milk Check, T3 and Anna join our dairy market sage and patriarch, Ted Jr., on a trip down memory lane to talk about how the dairy industry has developed over more than 50 years.

They discuss changes in trucking, processing and entrepreneurship, among many other topics.

The trio also debates how the Federal Order System has impacted the industry, whether it still holds water in today's market and the perception that dairy producers are often the most impacted by market downturns.

T3: I thought this podcast would be a great opportunity to just talk a little bit about history. Talk a little bit about what were markets like back in the '60s and how have they evolved into what we're dealing with today? And maybe what are some of the things that are still the same and what are some of the things that are different? And I just thought it would be a great perspective to talk about how milk and cheese and whey and cream, how it all moved back then, and how it all moves around and gets balanced today. We really haven't talked about things from a historical perspective, and I thought it would just be a great conversation.

T2: Well, let's start in the '50s. Tank trucks came in in the mid-'50s. They were relatively small, they were about 30,000, 35,000. By the time you got to 1960 or so, you're up to a load somewhere between 45,000. In those days, the Class 1 utilization was paramount. Depending on where you were located, you had basically 60%-plus Class 1 utilization and milk move from upper Wisconsin, Eau Claire and Bloomer and Turtle Lake, during the short period of the year, we...back to almost everywhere, to Florida to Louisiana, New Orleans, Dallas, you name it, St. Louis was a big market. Indianapolis in the '60s had 20 to 30 loads a day moving out of basically the Fond du Lac area down to Indianapolis, which is why Foremost is prominent in Indiana these days is because a lot of that milk was Foremost Milk, they actually had an office in Indiana, which wasn't closed until a few years ago.

The market was much different. Class 1 utilization was the big item and we had a much more cyclical milk production profile, if you will, where in the fall of the year when it got hot, and it seems to me, if my memory serves, it got much hotter in the '60s and '70s than it does today. And production really languished, particularly down in the Southeast. And so huge volumes of milk moved and most of that milk was moved directly out of plants. It wasn't moved directly from the farm, never moved directly from the farm until, oh, probably sometime in the '90s. Farms got big enough and the technology of dairy farming reached that point. That was the way the industry was structured in those days. And it's a much different structure today.

T3: To be back in the '50s and 60s, you also had a lot of Grade B milk, we don't ever talk about Grade B milk anymore. How did that affect the industry?

T2: Actually, we didn't have that much Grade B milk, and most of what we had stayed home. Yeah, we moved a little, it wasn't really that much. There were quality standards when you moved. Acid was the primary quality standard, acid and temperature. And you expected the milk to show up at a bacteria count of something less, basically, than 750,000 or half a million. Again, depending on where you were, and temperature less than 45 degrees. So that was the standard. And it wouldn't make any difference whether it was B or A in those days. Quality was not a matter of somebody saying that it was B or A, it was a matter of what showed up at the plant. And if it wasn't suitable when it showed up at the plant, it was rejected. It wasn't a question of arguing about it, it was rejected.

This time on The Milk Check, we welcome a leading mind in international trade policy and personal friend of the podcast.

Jaime Castaneda is senior vice president of policy strategy and international trade for the National Milk Producers Federation, where he oversees the development and implementation of domestic policy. He also leads international trade negotiations for the U.S. dairy industry as senior vice president of trade policy for the U.S. Dairy Export Council.

Jaime joins the Teds in a discussion of how trade policy developed over Jaime's 22 years in the industry, from dairy farmers' early reluctance to accept imports to the industry's ongoing efforts to improve and enforce trade agreements.

Among other topics, they also debate whether the Federal Order System and tariff rates are holding back U.S. dairy in international markets, or if the problem is our slow response to short-term international economics and low customer loyalty outside of domestic markets.

T3: Hello, everybody. Welcome to the "Milk Check," episode 35. It is March 16, and our guest today is Jaime Castenada from the U.S. Dairy Export Council. But I believe you wear multiple hats. So, I'll let you describe what roles you fill with USDEC and National Milk.

Jaime: Yeah. Thanks. Good afternoon to everyone. I am actually the senior vice president for the National Milk Producers Federation. Under that capacity, I oversee the development and implementation of domestic policy, an area of different issues, including from the initiative of Foundation for the Future, that was the preload to the dairy margin coverage to Farm Bills to just name it. At the same time, I served in my capacity, as senior vice president for policy and trade, I also lead our partnership with the U.S. Dairy Export Council and serve now, for almost, actually, next month is going to be 22 years that I am with the industry and that I have been serving as our partner with the U.S. Dairy Export Council.

T3: Well, wow, we're lucky to have you. And T.C. Jacolby & Company is one of the founding members of the U.S. Dairy Export Council and we've been involved with the U.S. Dairy Export Council from the very beginning. Have you been involved with the U.S. Dairy Export Council the whole time?

Jaime: Yes, yes. In fact on Suber, really, I discuss joining the U.S. Dairy Export Council. The way that we work is that we operate everything that relates to policy under National Milk, specifically related to trade, just to make sure that, if you remember, the U.S. Dairy Export Council, it's a cooperator for USDA, which receives monies from MAP, the checkoff funds as well as MAP money. So, in order to make sure that advocacy is properly and it's done using membership dues, then we created this ability. And I do remember sitting... And now at U.S. Dairy Export Council is a large organization, 150 members more or less. And I do remember when sitting with Ted Sr. in a small table, Lei Jensen and a few other folks that were the original founders of the U.S. Dairy Export Council.

Ted: Those were the days. I remember those days very vividly. It goes back, what, to the '90s?

Jaime: Yeah, 1999. 1999, and that's where we began developing the trade policy. If you remember, prior to 1999, even dairy farmers, and this is a lot of credit to folks like yourself and Tom Camaro that look at the vision and the future. And if you remember, dairy farmers were not very keen on trade. In fact, if you talked to them on trade, in the 1990s, it was all about, "We hate imports." And it was the development through this small group of folks that were the visionaries that we developed this trade policy and this perspective,

On this two-part edition of The Milk Check, listeners get a seat at the table during our mass balance report meeting, held after the release of monthly milk production numbers. Our traders gather to evaluate the data, forecast class allocations, share what they're hearing from buyers and sellers, and chart price data to predict market developments. 

Our regular cohosts, Ted, T3 and Anna, are joined by Don Street, director of global strategy; Gus Jacoby, executive vice president of the Fluid Dairy Group; Jacob Menge, director of risk management; Brianne Breed, vice president of cheese and butter sales; Joe Maixner, cheese and butter sales manager; and Diego Carvallo, director of dry dairy ingredient trading.

In part one, we evaluated the fundamentals of the dairy markets and what the monthly production numbers mean for different industry sectors.

Now in part two, we look at anecdotal evidence in the wider marketplace, such as the consumer price index and international trade, to forecast dairy's future in the global economy.

Anna: Welcome back to part two of the March episode of "The Milk Check," where we're going to continue to listen in as the team participates in our monthly mass balance report. If you missed Part 1, make sure to go back and listen.

T3: Thanks, Anna. In this section, we'll rejoin Jake and our dairy product trading team as we talk this time about things on a much more macroeconomic level. Jake gets into a fascinating discussion about what we think inflation is going to be doing over the next few years and, from that, we'll dovetail some of the more kind of higher-level issues that we're paying attention to and how those issues might affect dairy production. Jake, take it away.

Jacob: Alright. Let's kick off the product trade discussion side of things. A lot of times when we discuss the product group, we'll start kind of with a macroeconomic outlook. And I think today the obvious place to start is inflation. And we've been talking about inflation for a while. This week and last week, some really notable things happened on inflation, so I have to talk about it for two seconds here because it actually relates directly to milk in my opinion.

OK, so let's talk about the consumer price index for just one second, right? It's what everybody uses to gauge inflation. You've probably heard, like, "Oh, for the last decade, we've had very low inflation." And if you use the CPI as your gauge for that, then it's true.

I think the CPI is broken for gauging inflation and here's my reasoning behind that. Over the past 10 years, the wealth gap has gotten larger between the top 25% and the bottom 25%. And the CPI is terrible, terrible at capturing inflation on the assets where the wealth is actually growing.

And so here's my example. CPI. What is it? It basically looks at a basket of things like fuel, of food, of housing, stuff like that, OK? I'll be very blunt. If one person makes $100,000 extra in a year or 10 people make $10,000 extra, it turns out that person that made $100,000 extra doesn't go buy extra bread with their $100,000, right?

And so the CPI does not reflect that. What does the person that made the extra $100,000 buy? Stocks. They invest it. That, in my opinion, is where inflation has existed; it's the stock market.

And that is actually pretty well-reflected in P/E ratios, right? Everyone these days is saying like, "P/E ratios are worthless," blah, blah, blah. Well, why is that? It's really a function of inflation. It's a different type of inflation but that is really, really, really, really important to commodities to understand.

On this two-part edition of The Milk Check, listeners get a seat at the table during our mass balance report meeting, held after the release of monthly milk production numbers. Our traders gather to evaluate the data, forecast class allocations, share what they're hearing from buyers and sellers, and chart price data to predict market developments. 

Our regular cohosts, Ted, T3 and Anna, are joined by Don Street, director of global strategy; Gus Jacoby, executive vice president of the Fluid Dairy Group; Jacob Menge, director of risk management; Brianne Breed, vice president of cheese and butter sales; Joe Maixner, cheese and butter sales manager; and Diego Carvallo, director of dry dairy ingredient trading.

In part one, we evaluate the fundamentals of the dairy markets and what the monthly production numbers mean for different industry sectors.

In part two, we will look at anecdotal evidence in the wider marketplace, such as the consumer price index and international trade, to forecast dairy's future in the global economy.

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. Today on "The Milk Check," we're doing things a little bit differently. Every month, the T.C. Jacoby & Company, we have a conversation that we call the mass balance report, and it happens right after the monthly milk production numbers come out. We get all the available traders in the company together to discuss what the most current reports and numbers mean. This month, our listeners will get an opportunity to eavesdrop on that conversation. This edition will be released in two parts, so be sure to listen to both to get their thoughts on a variety of topics, from production and utilization to inflation.

T3: Thanks, Anna. And thank you everybody for listening today. So when you're listening to our traders talk, the thing to keep in mind is a lot of times when we're trying to get our head around what we think prices might do, there're really three elements to that process.

The first element is evaluating the fundamentals. As you hear Don Street talk about what the milk production report has done and what we think milk production is going to do and where milk is gonna be allocated between the different classes of milk, you're really gonna be hearing us talking about the fundamentals.

The second part that goes into our evaluation is what I call the anecdotal evidence, which is the fact that our traders are talking to buyers and sellers of dairy products in the marketplace every day. And what we're hearing from those buyers and sellers also goes into our opinions of what the market might do.

The final thing that comes into play is where we are evaluating what we call the technical information. All of the futures and options markets we have in the dairy industry today and all of the spot auctions that we have in the industry today ultimately create a series of price data. And as you chart that price data, those charts often give you signals as to what you think this market might do next. And when you hear Jacob Menge, our director of risk management, talk, that's mostly what you're going to be hearing, him looking at those charts and telling us what those charts are hinting at. So I think this conversation today is gonna be a very interesting conversation, and I hope you enjoy it as much as we do.

T3: Joining us today is Don Street, our director of global strategy.

Don: Hey, Ted. Glad to be here.

T3: Gus Jacoby, executive vice president of our fluid dairy group.

Gus: Hello,

The Milk Check welcomes guest J. David Carlin to discuss the role of dairy lobbyists in Washington, how they've adjusted to the pandemic and industry outlooks during the Biden administration.

Carlin is the International Dairy Foods Association's senior vice president of legislative affairs and economic policy.

Ted, T3 and Anna talk with their guest about issues like how lobbying via Zoom allows for additional public input, the importance of enforcing international trade deals, volatility in dairy pricing and much more.

T3: Good morning, everybody. Welcome. Today, we have a guest. I'd like to introduce everybody to Dave Carlin. Dave is senior vice president of legislative affairs and economic policy for the International Dairy Foods Association. Dave, welcome. Thanks for joining us.

Dave: Thanks, Ted. Glad to be with you.

T3: Why don't you just, kind of, tell everybody a little bit about what you do? What's your job in Washington?

Dave: Well, I'm one of those lobbyists that probably keeps the town running in a lot of different ways, but we're not very popular outside the Beltway. So, that's what I've been doing in Washington for the last, oh, I guess, 30, 35 years. And I came to IDFA about six and a half years ago; grew up on a dairy farm in central Kansas. So, a little bit of a homecoming for me and decided at least that I could, if I'm going to lobby, I could lobby on behalf of an industry that I care about and believe in.

So, I'm part of a team of folks over here at IDFA that advocates for policy positions with the Congress and the administration that we think will benefit the dairy industry. And we work with our members to prioritize those policy requests and make sure that whatever we're working toward is going to be impactful and meaningful.

So we've, of course, been very active in the COVID policy debate. We work a lot on nutrition issues and trade issues, given how important trade is to our industry, and a lot of other issues that come up here in Washington. We also do little work in the economic policy area as my title, kind of, indicates. So, milk pricing issues and FMMO issues or other things that we sometimes focus on, and I get involved in here.

That's, kind of, a 30,000-foot view of what I do. I'm not walking the halls of Congress these days, that hasn't been possible since COVID started last March. So, my world, like everybody else's, is very virtual, but we've managed to create some new pathways and make it work, from a virtual standpoint. So, advocacy continues here in Washington, and hopefully, as I said, it will benefit our industry going forward. So, that's my 30,000-foot overview of what I do.

T3: As I was hearing you talk, Dave, you provided what I thought was the perfect segue. Tell us about what lobbying Congress was like during COVID, because so much happened in the last 12 months as this pandemic evolved. Kind of give us a walkthrough of how that played out, from your perspective.

Dave: Yeah, and I will start by saying it played out much better than I would have ever expected when we first got into this mess. Typically, as I said, I'm able to go to the House and Senate office buildings, I can set up meetings with staff and see members, and we did fundraisers and events in the evenings on the political side. That was what I did for 30 years and then COVID hit. And the Congress basically shut down like everything else shut down, all the buildings were closed, members were working from their home states and districts a lot of times, staff were scattered to the wind.

And I really thought, "Gosh,

Did you rediscover the joy of cooking this year?

You're not alone.

There's no doubt that dairy consumer behaviors have changed in the COVID era. Who does it help and who does it hurt? Who can capitalize and who's in trouble? Ted, T3 and Anna debate.

Also, T3 observes an even more worrying trend among Millennial and Generation Z consumers on the horizon—and it's got nothing to do with the pandemic.

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.

Ted: You know, we're heading down the road from fall into winter, and temperatures are dropping and worried reports of the virus picking up speed in various parts of the country. Do we expect to have another debacle of dumped milk because of it? Obviously, my answer would be no.

T3: Mine would too.

Ted: And I think that there may be a silver lining, you know, not because of the virus but because of the fact that we now have some experience with it. I think it's correct to say that retail cheese sales are up. And I think they're up by, I saw, I've seen a number of different reports but anywhere from 1% to 3%.

T3: Oh, I think it's more than that. I think most assumptions right now, they may be up 1% to 3% in the current week. But I think, you know, since let's say April 1st, most of the numbers I see are within, let's say 3 or 4 percentage points of 10%.

Ted: Retail.

T3: Retail. And there's an offset obviously on the foodservice side.

Ted: Yeah. Well, the question that I wanted to raise, even though I don't recall 10% but the question that I wanted to raise is, will we lose that going forward? And I'm beginning to come down on the side that we won't, I don't think it'll sustain necessarily that level of increase but I doubt if it's going to go back to where it was before the pandemic. People started using cheese and eating cheese and became more accustomed to cheese. And I've several times used the example of my cheese counter at one of the stores I shop at that specializes in organic and really good specialty cheeses, and sometimes their cheese counter, which is relatively small but really well-stocked, is so crowded. I can hardly get at it. I have to elbow my way in and they stock a lot of artisan cheese and foreign cheeses and so on. Especially cheeses with cranberries and chives and all sorts of stuff.

I think the increase in sales of cheese are locked in. Now, is that going to translate to increases in cheddar block or barrels? Well, that's another question, isn't it? And I don't know whether it will or won't. I tend to think that we may see this vertical integration sort of come to a halt and we see more diversification in cheese manufacturing towards different styles of cheese. In the last—Teddy correct me if I'm wrong—10, 20, 30 years. We've seen vertical integration where people have gone huge plants to mot the cheddar blocks to cheddar barrels, in some cases to parmesan, and they basically chew up milk at a commodity sale cheese.

I think we're heading more towards specialty kinds of pieces. I think of Emmy as a good example. They produce a lot of different styles and they market them. I get this one website called The Deli Markets or something like that, that I happened to be on the email list for and all those different styles of cheeses, Carr Valley, Cowgirl Creamery, and all those different styles of cheese are on display at these cheese counters now. And people are picking up these little pieces and trying them. I think it tended to go in that direction.

We're no strangers to criticizing the Federal Order system. We find a way to do it almost every episode.

But this month, we're devoting the entire conversation to the fact that the regulatory framework in the dairy industry has hurt producers' bottom lines more than helped.

It's a phenomenon we've noted in bits and pieces in previous episodes, including near the end of our conversation last month. But in this episode, we examine the lack of competition and innovation in the industry with an eye toward its earliest source—the Capper-Volstead Act of 1922.

Ted shares an idea for how to fix the problem. It might seem backward—but only at first.

T3: What do we want to talk about?

Ted: Well, one thing as Anna can testify we've gotten some emails from mostly dairy farmers who express a lot of paranoia with regard to the federal order system and the regulatory system and where the money is going and so on. I think we had part of that discussion last time, didn't we? Didn't we shelf part of it?

Anna: I know we started that conversation.

Ted: Yeah. We beat it a lot. And we've also danced around it a lot. The tenor of the emails that we got was paranoid. You know, somebody's going south with the money, the co-ops are no good, they're stealing the cash, and that isn't what's happening and that's not the problem.

Anna: You know, even some of our producers have had a little bit of paranoia, and not about the co-ops or us, but about the Federal Order system in general. Because when everybody has money taken out of their check, they don't understand that somebody is getting it. It looks like, you know, the MA office is keeping it or something, when really it's not that. It's that it gets distributed to the co-ops and everything, especially the ones who are using, you know, lower price utilization.

Ted: You know, if we want to go back to square one and the Capper-Volstead Act, and then regulation that developed not at the same time but eight or ten years later, the Capper-Volstead Act gave the co-ops power to collective bargaining similar to a labor union. Well, let's take a look at the results of that. In the '30s, when the Capper-Volstead Act came in, we had basically fluid dairies, bottling plants, were 70% or 80% of the market in cheese, and it was a balancing item similar to what powder is today.

It was not a good retail product in the '30s. And the collective bargaining was mostly targeted towards the fluid end of the industry. Look at the results. The fluid end of the industry has been destroyed. So, how do we solve that problem? The problem is not necessarily the fault of cooperatives. The problem basically goes back to the structure and the fact that we've eliminated competition for the milk. Now, that, of course, that gets back to, well, what's competition? Is it collective bargaining or is it handlers bidding for the supply?

So that's a discussion, I think, that probably needs to be had but it needs to be had in the vein of not being anti-cooperative because that's not the right way to do it. There's some very good cooperatives in the United States and in the world actually. But generally speaking, they don't do a good job on the marketing side of the business. And that's where 50% of the price on the retail shelf is. It's in marketing. The dairyman winds up lucky, 20%, 25% of the retail price. So, obviously, to my mind, there's something wrong. And I think it comes back to the fact that you don't have the competition for the milk, and that's a regulatory issue. I'm not sure how you solve it. Clipping the wings of the cooperative a little bit.

You'd only need one look at recent history on the CME to see the rollercoaster that has been spot cheddar prices.

In this episode, T3 notes the collision of around a half-dozen contributing factors to explain why it's happening. Ted discusses why the Federal Order system is hurting the situation more than it's helping.

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.

Ted: What should we talk about? Markets have gone from the penthouse to the outhouse.

T3: Well, I would say the markets went from a fair price to the outhouse to the penthouse back to the outhouse, and I actually think we're gonna probably end up back in the penthouse in about a month. It's a roller coaster.

Ted: And it's chaos on the milk side. I visited with our milk group today a little bit and depending on what you're making and what you're selling and what your orders are, you've got the Class III for August right now at $19-something, and I think probably around $19.50 or so. And you've got the Class III for September probably around $17 maybe?

T3: Yeah $16.80 or so right now, $17.

Ted: Something like that. So they could have as much as a $3 per hundredweight gap. So here we are trying to sell milk for delivery at this point in time and people are trying to figure out what price they're gonna wind up having to absorb to put the milk into cheese and then what they're gonna be able to sell the cheese for. So the futures market, at least in my view, is rather inadequate to solve that particular problem. And I think that accounts for a lot of the issues right now because, Teddy, and you correct me, you're in cheese, but the inventories are not burdensome and the sales haven't been that bad. In some cases, depending on the style and so on, they've been pretty darn good. And yet the milk, we wind up with some people unwilling to pay the going rate for milk because of the violence in the market at this point in time.

T3: Exactly. And I think the biggest problem that we have right now in the marketplace isn't necessarily the price as much as it is the volatility of the price. Why don't I start by explaining, kind of, what's causing this volatility? What has the journey been since, let's say, the end of March and what it's doing farther down the food distribution channel and how people at the supermarket level and at the restaurant level are reacting to it, and then we can talk about how that feeds all the way back to the milk price and what's causing this rollercoaster that is creating stress for everybody in the pipeline?

When the pandemic started and restaurants started closing and food distributors started canceling cheese orders, the price started to drop. And by the end of March, the price had almost gone all the way down to $1 a pound. But two things happened while we were that low. The first thing that happened was supermarkets started seeing huge increases in sales. And the first part to keep your head around is cheddar, which is how we price all of our cheese and ultimately our milk, is really a market that's skewed to retail. We sell more cheddar marginally in retail and more mozzarella, for example, in food service. And all you have to do is think about it when you're in a supermarket and you look at all the shredded cheeses on all the pegs in the dairy case, you'll see a lot more cheddar packages than you will mozzarella packages. Whereas if you're thinking about it from a foodservice perspective and you think about all the pizzas and lasagna and Italian food and everything you eat, they actually sell a lot more mozzarella in that direction.

The last few weeks have been some of the strangest for an industry in the midst of its weirdest year in memory.

Listen as Ted, T3 and Anna get to the bottom of why spot cheddar prices maintain a steady hold on improbably high prices and why the Federal Order system appears to be doing the opposite of what it was meant for.

T3: So here's where we're at. It's July 8. Today, cheddar blocks on the CME spot market are trading at $2.7375 a pound, barrels are trading at $2.40 a pound, nonfat is trading at a dollar three and a quarter, butter is trading at $1.68 and three quarters. You have over a $10 difference between where July, Class III milk will probably come in and where July, Class IV milk will probably come in, which is really about as big a disparity as I've ever seen in my 25 years of trading cheese and powder in the United States. It's amazing. Talking a little bit about the markets and what we expect going forward, starting with cheese, there has been for the month of June a genuine tightness in cheese specifically in cheddar blocks and cheddar barrels. We talked about this in the last podcast, you have a unique situation where retail sales continue to be much stronger than normal because of the pandemic. At the same time, the anticipation of the world opening back up, restaurants opening back up was causing food service distributors to order in large quantities to refill their pipelines, and you had the USDA's purchasing program and Food Box Program on top of all of that. And that created kind of a perfect storm of all the usual demand for cheeses across the whole Food Industry, whether it's restaurant-based, whether it's supermarket-based or whether it's government-based were all ordering it levels much higher than they normally do, which caused the shortage on cheddar and drove the market up to, you know, prices at $2.50 or higher.

You know, the question everybody's been asking already for a month is how sustainable are we up here? And the answer that I think I would give everybody is we are not going to be at $2.50 for the rest of the year, but we've been at $2.50 for over a month now and it is not out of the realm of possibility that we stay here for another two to four weeks. Furthermore, if we do drop off these lofty levels, I'm not sure we're dropping, let's say to $1.50 or to $1.75. There is enough underlying demand, that that probably that first place where you drop to is still probably above $2 a pound. And the reason I say that is all of the converters out there, those who buy the cheese and shredded or chunk it or slice it and put it into the packages for retail or restaurant demand, they're telling us that their inventories of cheddar block and cheddar barrel, if you're a processed cheese manufacturer, are on the low end of where they like them to be at this time of the year. Keep in mind that usually right around the end of June beginning of July is when cheese inventories peak. And then as we get through the second half of the year and demand picks up for the holidays, and milk production decreases because of the heat of the summer, you start seeing cheese inventories dropped back down. Well, at least by the tone that I'm hearing from a lot of our customers, you're actually at a place where people are very uncomfortable with how much cheese they have in inventory. And they're inclined to say "We don't have enough and we're concerned about having enough cheese for the remainder of the year."

Now, the flip side of that is they will also say in the same conversation, "We have absolutely no idea what to expect when it comes to demand." We would expect that it's possible the food service distributors have over-ordered in terms of the restaurants opening back up, because everything we're hearing about restaurants is they're running it,