Ray Mueller
Correspondent
CHICAGO
The back and forth trend on spot market prices for Cheddar cheese on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange staged another turnaround late last week as block prices again reached the $1.50 per pound plateau on Friday with barrel prices following at $1.4925.
Those prices held through the trading session on Wednesday of this week. The only activity on the day’s market was an uncovered offer to sell a load of Cheddar blocks.
The AA butter spot market was more active on Wednesday. There were two carload sales, an uncovered offer to sell and an unfilled bid to buy as the price held at $1.35 per pound, an increase of 4 cents from a week ago that occurred on Thursday and Friday of last week.
Class III milk futures prices, however, were not reacting favorably to the week’s quiet spot market. By noon on Wednesday, they had dropped by 5 cents to 21 cents per hundred for every month from November 2009 through December of 2010.
With only a few trading sessions remaining, the October futures were holding at $12.76 per hundred. The November futures had slipped to $13.60, December 2009 through February 2010 were in the upper half of the $14s and all other months through September of 2011 were in the $15s, mostly the upper half.
A Class I fluid milk national base price of $12.86 per hundred has been announced for November. This is an increase of 51 cents from October and puts the Milk Income Loss Contract value of milk shipped in November at 37.35 cents per hundred.
The National Milk Producer Federation’s Cooperative’s Working Together project has accepted 154 of the 168 bids from dairy herd owners in 33 states for the organization’s third herd buyout or retirement round this year. This round covers 26,412 cows and a projected 517 million pounds of milk.
