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Early Morning Update - June 6, 2024

By: Dairy Team - Chicago, Dairy Chicago

 

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After a quiet Tuesday, spot cheese stuttered yesterday with a 3 cent drop for Block cheese and a 1.5 cent drop on Barrels. Class III and Cheese futures, which had started the day trading modestly lower, collapsed. Q3 Class III traded limit down for minutes following the spot call as the nearby markets gave up all of Tuesday’s gains - and most of Monday’s - in a matter of minutes. Weaker Class IV markets Wednesday didn’t provide any support. Overall trading volume was moderate but noticeably lighter than the previous days, which waters down at least one aspect of the move. Big moves ought to be associated with big volume to solidify the direction. That said, Open Interest rose for both Class III and Cheese in most months suggesting new sellers were a notable feature. Follow-through selling pushed nearby Class III and Cheese futures lower overnight.

The strong butter market rally the past few sessions seems to have ended yesterday as new selling piled in as contracts made or re-tested prior highs. Tops of markets can often zig and zag quickly as tempers flare and, while we don’t know if we’re near some sort of short or medium term top for butter – the action seems to reveal upside limitations. Spot butter posted a new 2024 high price of 3.1625 on Tuesday only to sell off 6.75 cents Wednesday on offers only (3 of them) and no trades. While summer heat – and presumably tight milk and cream supplies - linger out ahead of us (unless you’re in California this week), demand for bulk butter appears to be quite sporadic. And it would appear we’ve also been producing plenty of butter (see DPP comment below).

While spot cheese weakness yesterday ended a strong 3-day Class III rally, it’s important to note that both markets are rather sideways still above last week’s low price prints. While there appears to be more ample supplies of fresh block cheese, anecdotal comments continue to point to a tight barrel market. Although we are in barrel cheese season and as an industry we’re throwing a lot of resources at future block production, Cheddar production was 20 million pounds lower than forecast in yesterday’s April Dairy Products report.

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Total cheese production came in higher than expected with mozzarella was stronger than expected and offsetting a 8.6% decline in Cheddar production. Clearly the mozzarella demand has rebounded, but I’m surprised by the continued weakness in American styles. Butter production came in 5 million pounds higher than forecast and they revised up March production by 2 million pounds as well. It means demand was a little better than expected, but the production growth far exceeded the demand growth in April. NFDM+SMP production was also stronger than forecast while NFDM stocks were 50 million pounds higher than expected (that is a big miss, the April export data due out tomorrow will be interesting).

Whey product production was mixed relative to forecast, but nothing too crazy. Whey product stocks were mostly lower than forecast and down significantly from last year.

  • Dairy

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