Dairy Industry News Roundup: Week of April 18 - April 24, 2026

# Dairy Industry News Roundup: Week of April 18 - April 24, 2026 Welcome to your weekly dairy industry briefing! The headline numbers this week were impossible to ignore: USDA confirmed the U.S. dairy herd has climbed to 9.62 million head, the largest count since 1993, while the April WASDE pushed the 2026 all-milk price forecast to $20.50 per cwt. The Class I base price advanced $3.19 to $18.66, the GDT auction snapped a brief recovery with butter falling almost 8 percent, and California regulators continued to walk a careful line on H5N1 as spring bird migration ramps up. Here are the stories that mattered from April 18 through April 24. --- ## 1. This Week From Therio No new long-form piece dropped from Therio this week, the team is heads-down on the next round of Digital Passport features. If you missed it, last week's [Herdscripting 101](/news/herdscripting-101) from co-founder Greg Cochara is the deepest public explainer on how dairy treatment protocols actually work, why the gap between what the vet prescribes and what happens at the chute is the most expensive problem in dairy animal health, and where the regulatory framework (VCPR, AMDUCA, FARM Tier III) is heading next. It is becoming the piece we are sending to every vet, processor, and software vendor who asks how Therio thinks about animal health workflows. Expect a follow-up on residue avoidance and lot-level traceability in the coming weeks. --- ## Industry News ## 2. U.S. Dairy Herd Hits 9.62 Million, Largest Since 1993 USDA's monthly Milk Production report, released on April 22, confirmed what analysts have been bracing for all spring: the U.S. dairy herd has expanded to 9.62 million head, the largest count in 33 years. The herd grew 211,000 cows year-over-year and added another 15,000 head between January and February 2026 alone. **February 2026 milk production at a glance:** | Metric | Value | Year-over-Year | |--------|-------|----------------| | National dairy herd | 9.62 million head | +211,000 (+2.2%) | | 24-state herd | 9.183 million head | +217,000 | | Total milk production | 18.3 billion lbs | +2.9% | | 24-state production | (subset) | +3.1% | | Milk per cow (monthly avg.) | 1,899 lbs | +12 lbs | | Last comparable herd size | 1993 | 33 years ago | Phil Plourd of Ever.Ag Insights called the rising cow count the defining characteristic of the report. The drivers are familiar but stacking up faster than expected: light cull cow slaughter, high retention, a wave of new and expanded facilities (especially in the High Plains and along the I-29 corridor in the Dakotas), and beef-on-dairy economics that have pulled dairy-bred replacement heifers out of the pipeline while making every milking cow worth keeping a little longer. The growth is geographically lopsided. Kansas, South Dakota, Texas, and Idaho continue to add capacity at a rate the Upper Midwest cannot match, while traditional production states like Wisconsin and New York are growing more modestly. With spring flush still ahead in the major Midwest production zones, several analysts expect this to be one of the largest spring milk waves in U.S. history. The downstream signal is already showing up in component markets. Cream multiples have softened, balancing plants in the Midwest are running long, and a handful of cooperatives have quietly tightened over-base milk acceptance for the next 60 days. If you are a producer, this is the moment to get a hard look at your processor's surplus policy, your component premium structure, and your hauling allocation for May and June. ## 3. April WASDE Raises All-Milk Price Forecast to $20.50/cwt The USDA's April 9 World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates report, which the trade fully digested over the past week, revised the 2026 all-milk price forecast upward by $0.80 to $20.50 per cwt. The Class III milk price forecast moved up to $16.90 and Class IV moved up to $18.60. **WASDE April 2026 vs. prior month:** | Metric | April 2026 Forecast | Change | |--------|---------------------|--------| | All-milk price | $20.50/cwt | +$0.80 | | Class III | $16.90/cwt | Revised up | | Class IV | $18.60/cwt | Revised up | | Cheese price | Raised | + | | Nonfat dry milk | Raised | + | | Butter | Lowered | - | | Dry whey | Unchanged | flat | | 2026 milk production | 235.3 billion lbs | +0.6 billion lbs | | Average dairy herd | 9.610 million head | Higher | | Milk per cow | 24,485 lbs | Lower (offset by herd) | The story inside the numbers is product mix. Cheese and NDM are doing the heavy lifting on the strong side, supported by recent price strength, durable domestic demand, and improved competitiveness against EU and Oceania product. Butter is moving the other direction, weighed down by record-high cream availability from the spring flush. Dry whey continues to drift sideways. The DMC margin forecast for the year now sits near $10.44 per cwt, with March at $9.41. That is a meaningfully better margin environment than markets were pricing in two months ago, and it is the single biggest reason cull rates have stayed light. The risk to the upside case is straightforward: the same herd expansion driving the production forecast also caps how high cheese and powder prices can run before exports have to do the clearing work. ## 4. GDT Event 404 Falls 2.7%, Butter Down 7.9% The Global Dairy Trade auction held on April 23 (Event 404) reversed last fortnight's modest recovery, with the GDT price index falling 2.7%. The auction drew 147 participating bidders and 99 winning bidders. **GDT Event 404, April 23, 2026:** | Product | Avg. Price | Change | |---------|-----------|--------| | Index average | $4,089/MT (composite) | -2.7% | | Butter | $6,852/MT | -7.9% | | Anhydrous Milkfat (AMF) | $7,418/MT | -9.6% | | Skim Milk Powder (SMP) | $3,448/MT ($1.56/lb) | +3.2% | | Cheddar | $4,798/MT ($2.18/lb) | +1.1% | | Mozzarella | $3,850/MT ($1.75/lb) | -3.1% | | Whole Milk Powder (WMP) | $3,666/MT ($1.66/lb) | -0.6% | | Lactose | (not disclosed) | +7.2% | The headline is the milkfat complex. Butter fell 7.9 percent and AMF fell 9.6 percent in a single event, the biggest two-week drop in milkfat product since late 2024. The driver is the same on both sides of the world: very heavy spring flush milk in the Northern Hemisphere on top of a still-strong New Zealand season is producing more cream than the global system can absorb at $7.50/lb butter equivalents. EU butter is now competitive with U.S. butter for the first time since the cream crisis began, and a few processors are starting to push butterfat back toward less price-sensitive end uses (bakery, foodservice) instead of retail prints. Skim milk powder told the opposite story, rising 3.2 percent on continued Asian buying interest, particularly from Southeast Asia and the Middle East. Cheddar held its ground (+1.1%). The next GDT auction is May 5. ## 5. Federal Order Class I Base Price Jumps $3.19 to $18.66 The Federal Milk Marketing Order announced its advanced Class I base price for April at $18.66 per cwt, an increase of $3.19 from March. That is one of the largest single-month moves in the FMMO Class I price in the past three years. The mechanical driver is the higher-of formula and the underlying movement in advanced Class III and Class IV pricing factors used in the Class I calculation. The practical effect is meaningful for producers in Class I-heavy markets (Northeast, Southeast, Florida, Arizona, Pacific Northwest), where the Class I differential will translate more directly into the producer price differential and the uniform price. Bottlers, meanwhile, are recalculating spring procurement budgets. With the FMMO Class I price up sharply at the same time as cream and butterfat have collapsed, the spread between fluid milk costs and butter realizations has compressed faster than at any point in the last cycle. Expect to see bottling cooperatives lean harder on long-haul fluid supply contracts and on private-label fluid customers to absorb the move. ## 6. Arla Walks Away from Them Andelsmejeri After Danish Regulator Pushback In a notable European M&A story, Arla Foods amba withdrew its proposed acquisition of Danish co-operative cheese producer Them Andelsmejeri on April 13 after the Danish Competition and Consumer Authority (DCCA) flagged competition concerns in several cheese markets. The DCCA discontinued its Phase II review when the notification was withdrawn. The deal was small in absolute terms but symbolic. Arla has been the acquisitive consolidator of European dairy for the better part of a decade, and a Danish regulator pushing back on a Danish cheese tuck-in is a signal of how much tighter antitrust review has gotten in EU dairy following the Friesland Campina-Milcobel discussions and the broader scrutiny of co-op consolidation. Expect more deals to either be restructured (carve-outs, behavioral remedies, partial-equity structures) or shelved entirely. For U.S. observers, the read-through is that the Lactalis-Fonterra Mainland Group close looks even more like a one-off in scale and structural complexity. Anyone modeling further mega-mergers in dairy needs to be more conservative on regulatory timelines, especially in Europe. ## 7. California H5N1: Quarantines Lifted, Spring Migration Watch Ramps Up California regulators continued to walk a careful line on highly pathogenic avian influenza this week. The California Department of Food and Agriculture's late-February release of all dairies from H5N1 quarantine remains in effect, and there are still no restrictions on moving dairy cattle within California. But CDFA is keeping the state in Stage 3, which means continued bulk-tank milk testing across all licensed dairies for the next several months as wild bird spring migration ramps through the Pacific Flyway. The reason for caution is straightforward: low levels of H5N1 are still being detected occasionally in California cattle and wildlife, and the U.S. has now confirmed two distinct virus genotypes in dairy cattle. The original B3.13 (clade 2.3.4.4b) is still the dominant strain in California and most affected states, but the newer D1.1 genotype (the dominant North American flyway strain in fall and winter 2025) has been confirmed in dairy herds in Nevada and Arizona. Federal testing requirements for cattle leaving California remain in place under the 2024 Federal Order. For producers, the spring migration window (roughly mid-April through May) is the highest-risk period of the year for cross-species spillover from waterfowl. The biosecurity playbook has not changed: tighten access control, keep wild waterfowl off feed and water sources, separate poultry and cattle handling, monitor for milk drop and respiratory signs in lactating cows, and pull bulk-tank samples on the schedule your processor and state vet require. The next four to six weeks will tell us whether the winter quiet was a real turn or a seasonal lull. ## 8. India Tightens Cheese Analogue Rules On April 22, the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) introduced new regulations governing the production, labeling, and marketing of cheese analogues (vegetable-fat-based products that imitate dairy cheese in texture and use). The new rules require clear "analogue" or "imitation" labeling on packaging and menus, set compositional standards that differentiate analogues from real cheese, and tighten rules on cross-promotion and shelf placement in retail. India is the world's largest milk producer and a culturally cheese-cautious market, but vegetable-fat cheese analogues have been quietly displacing real cheese in pizza chains and packaged food for years on cost grounds. The new rules tilt the regulatory playing field back toward dairy. For U.S. exporters, the most relevant downstream effect is on whey and skim milk powder demand: as Indian processors are pushed to use real dairy ingredients in more applications, dairy ingredient demand into India should firm at the margin. ## 9. AI Adoption in U.S. Dairy: Wide But Shallow A McKinsey-led survey of dairy executives, summarized in trade press this week, put a number on something everyone in the industry already feels. Roughly 80 percent of U.S. dairy executives report using AI or advanced analytics in some capacity, but more than 70 percent describe their organizations as still being in pilot phases for most AI use cases. The biggest pilot categories are commercial applications (34 percent), strategy (32 percent), and operations (24 percent). The same survey put margin optimism for U.S. dairy at 95 percent (executives expecting margins to increase in the next 12 months) versus 76 percent for European peers. Sustainability priorities are inverted: 53 percent of European dairy executives rank sustainability in their top three priorities, versus 16 percent in the U.S. The takeaway is that the U.S. dairy industry is approaching AI the way it approached robotics 15 years ago: many pilots, fewer scaled deployments, and a small group of large operators who will extract most of the value first. The companies winning in this cycle are the ones treating AI as workflow infrastructure (treatment protocols, hauling routing, milk testing, predictive maintenance) rather than as a standalone product line. --- ## Quick Hits - **Cream multiples**: Spot cream multiples in the Central region are now bid in the 1.18 to 1.22 range, the lowest spring level in five years. Western multiples are softer still on heavy California flush. - **Cull cow slaughter**: Federally inspected dairy cow slaughter in the latest week was 49,800 head, down 11 percent year-over-year and the lightest weekly figure since early 2022. Producers are clearly choosing to keep cows in the parlor. - **Cheese stocks**: March cold storage data showed total natural cheese stocks at 1.450 billion pounds, up 0.7 percent month-over-month and roughly flat year-over-year, well below the five-year average build pace for the spring. - **Fluid milk**: February fluid milk sales totaled 3.4 billion pounds, down 0.4 percent year-over-year. Conventional fluid was down 0.5 percent; organic fluid was up 0.4 percent. - **Feed**: Iowa corn basis weakened 6 cents this week as planting progress accelerated, easing some of the feed-cost pressure that has dogged Midwest producers since February. - **Next GDT**: Event 405 is May 5. Watch milkfat for any sign that the butter selloff has bottomed. --- ## What to Watch Next Week **Spring flush peaks.** The next two weeks should mark the seasonal peak in U.S. milk production. With component levels still strong and cream prices falling, the pressure on butter and whey markets will continue to set the tone for May Class III and Class IV. **California H5N1 surveillance.** The first full Pacific Flyway migration peak under the new Stage 3 monitoring regime arrives over the next 30 days. Any uptick in bulk-tank detections will move policy quickly. **FARM 5.0 working drafts.** The National Milk Producers Federation FARM technical working groups are meeting in early May on the next FARM Animal Care version. Treatment record granularity and antimicrobial use intensity reporting are the two issues to watch. **USDA Cold Storage**, due May 22, will give the first hard read on how the spring flush is showing up in butter and cheese inventories. With cream multiples this soft, an outsized butter build is the consensus call. That is the week. Stay current on the data, stay tight on biosecurity through migration, and keep an eye on the cream complex; this is the moment in the cycle when the milkfat market sets the tone for everything else. *The Therio Dairy Newsdesk publishes a free weekly briefing every Friday covering markets, policy, and the operational stories that move the U.S. dairy industry. Subscribe via the Therio newsletter to get it in your inbox.*