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Dairy group says more products need to be part of mandatory cost of production surveys 

A dairy group wants more transparency from processors, but says the upcoming mandatory cost of production surveys likely won’t be enough. 

Sherry Bunting with the American Dairy Coalition tells Brownfield that reporting only block cheese, salted butter, nonfat dry milk, and dry whey production costs doesn’t measure the cost of making other popular products like whey protein concentrate. “You can’t really attribute costs for making whey protein concentrate because you’re not reporting the price for whey protein concentrate.”

Bunting says the popularity of whey protein concentrate is incentivizing more cheese production. “We have capacity being built today and online today producing more cheese to access more whey, and so, there needs to sort-of be an agreement to report more products.” 

Bunting says there should also be price discovery included in the mandatory cost of production surveys, even if it’s not in the formula. “This is for the purpose of future hearings to have this information and for transparency for the farmers and for stakeholders, so it would be good to expand price reporting at the same time to some of those other products.” 

Bunting says dairy farmers are forced to pay large make allowances to cover processing costs, and they need to see how plants allocate expenses to each dairy product.