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Marketer says the butter buyers are “anxious”

A market advisor says the butter market is higher thanks to a little buyer anxiety. 

Katie Burgess with Ever.ag tells Brownfield Tuesday’s $2.92 price was a new year-to-date high for the spot market, and she says the butter futures market is projecting record-high monthly prices for the next six months. “Futures are trading up over and above three dollars and I think that’s just a hangover from last year. Last year, we saw record high butter prices on top of what had been record high butter prices the year before.”

Burgess says buyers of butter are adding to their inventories now to avoid the high prices later. She says as they’re picking up futures contracts, it’s providing support to the market.

Burgess says Tuesday’s Global Dairy Trade event also had high butter prices, which could discourage U.S. buyers from importing butter. “It doesn’t really make sense to do that, so hopefully that means from a producer perspective these values can stay elevated because we’re not going to be flooding the market with cheap imported fat.”

Burgess says there is still a considerable amount of butter in storage. 

USDA’s next dairy cold storage report comes out April 24^th.