11/29/2023
Did you know milk isn't sold by the gallon?! 🤯
Milk is actually sold from the farmer to the cooperative or processor by the hundredweight (cwt) or every 100 pounds of milk.
So when dairy farmers sell the milk product from their farm, it is sold by hundredweight. At our dairy farm we sell our milk through the cooperative, Dairy Farmers of America (DFA). DFA then decides where our milk will go to be processed (pasteurized & homogenized) before being bottled and sent to your local grocery store.
Milk prices change from month to month and are based on the Class III and Class IV milk futures prices. That's right, the farmer doesn't set the price for which the milk is sold. In September, the fluid milk price was about $19.70 per hundredweight. This means for 100 pounds of milk, farmers were paid $19.70 before paying their expenses.
A gallon of whole milk weighs about 8.65 lbs. Broken down, there are about 11.56 gallons of milk per hundredweight. This means the farmer is paid about $1.70 per gallon of milk. However, that is not what he or she truly earns.
The farmer then has to use that $1.70 per gallon of milk sold to pay shipping both ways, feed costs, fuel costs, power bills, and the list goes on. By the end of the day, it's said that a dairy farmer truly earns about $0.30 per gallon of milk.
Here at our local grocery store you can see a gallon of Laura Lynn milk cost about $3.02 last week. So when you run in your local store with $5 to grab a gallon of milk only about $0.30 reaches your local farmer for them to be able to feed their family.
So make sure you buy a gallon of milk this week on your grocery run to support your local dairy farm families!
