Over Christmas, I enjoyed reading the December edition of leading US dairy publication Hoard’s Dairyman.

The opening line summed it up: “In milk price terms, almost every day was Christmas for dairy producers in 2014.”

January to November 2014 prices were the highest in history for those months. Hoard’s noted: “At a guesstimated $17.75, Class III milk prices would close out the year averaging $22.37 per hundredweight – which would be exactly $4 more than the previous record in 2011.”

While US dairy farms are being hit with a sharp price drop in December, they are still feeling good due to low feed costs and the additional benefit of a new margin protection programme contained in the US farm bill.

By early December, 27% of US herds had signed up for the new Margin Protection Programme (MPP), although the final deadline was extended to 19 December.

Another interesting snipper from Hoard’s is that between 1992 and 2012, average US dairy herd size grew from 61 to 144. However, due to growth of herds above 1,000 cows, the mid-point was actually 900 cows in 2012, up dramatically from 101 cows in 2002. With nine million high-yielding dairy cows, milk data from the US in the coming months will have a major influence on prices here.