The Market is Lying to Us

Milk production is up 4.5% — but somehow, milk is clearing. Something doesn’t add up.

In this episode of The Milk Check, the team uncovers the shifts reshaping dairy economics in 2026.

Ted Jacoby III leads a classic market roundtable with the Jacoby team to unpack what they’re seeing as dairy transitions out of the holiday demand season and into early-year reality.

Despite 4.5% year-over-year milk production growth, milk is clearing in many regions. Cheese and butter markets are under pressure, but inventories aren’t yet burdensome. Protein markets remain tight. And nonfat dry milk is showing surprising strength.

So what’s going on?

In this episode, we cover:

Why added processing capacity may be masking where supply is really long

How cheese and butter are absorbing milk that would normally back up at the farm

Why protein demand is tightening skim solids and whey markets

Whether nonfat’s recent rally is real or a phantom

And which dairy market narratives the team thinks are wrong right now

If you’re trying to make sense of conflicting signals across milk, fat, protein and powder, this episode delivers the context behind the numbers.

Listen now to The Milk Check episode 90: The Market is Lying to Us.

Got questions?

We’d love to hear them. Submit below, and we might answer it on the show.

Ask The Milk Check

Ted Jacoby III: [00:00:00] Am I just being a conspiracy theorist?

Diego Carvallo: I would probably bet a little bit on that conspiracy theory.

It could be. It could be possible, Ted. Who knows.

Ted Jacoby III: Welcome to the Milk Check from TC Jacob and Company, your complete guide to dairy markets, from the milking parlor to the supermarket shelf. I'm Ted Jacoby. Let's dive in.

We're on the new side of the New Year. It is January 12th. we're gonna have a classic market discussion today. Things have started to settle down from the holidays and I thought it would be a great idea just to share with everybody what we're seeing in the markets as we're transitioning from the high-demand season into the low-demand season.

We have our usual suspects today. We have my brother Gus who manages our fluid group. We've got Josh White, head of our dairy ingredients group. We have Joe Maixner, head of all of our butter sales.

Mike Brown, our Vice President of Market Intelligence, and myself. So, we'll start with milk, Gus. What's it look like right now?

Gus Jacoby: It certainly isn't tight, but it isn't really long either.

I think the November milk production was up [00:01:00] 4.5% and that typically would be fairly significant in areas where there isn't a lot of additional processing capacity. One would think it would be very, very long with that kind of growth, but we're not seeing that. Areas like the upper Midwest, Mideast, those areas are not as long as we thought they would be. I don't want to act as if it's tight. That's not the case. Through the holidays, there was still plenty of milk that was around. But I think here as we climbed out of the New Year holiday and into mid-January, things have gotten fairly what we would say in balance.

And that's a little bit alarming considering that type of milk production growth.

Ted Jacoby III: Why do you think that is? Is it just all the new capacity from all the new plants that have been built, or what else is going on?

Gus Jacoby: Well, certainly in that western, upper Midwest and Southwest region, upstate New York as well, there's been a lot of processing capacity that's been added.

So, those areas have been able to soak up that extra milk. I think milks travling a bit but I also think folks have found a little bit more efficient avenues to place the milk after dealing with some length over the past year [00:02:00] or so. But there's a little bit of a question mark I have in the back of my mind as to how efficient we've been able to do so.

Typically, when we have this kind of large growth, anything north of 4% is large, and large enough to be concerned about. Bu