Rejoice and be glad as all news is good news for the local milk producer.  Block and barrel cheddar closed the week at $1.90 per lb., a gain of 17 cents for blocks and 23 cents for barrels.  Whow, whey whent whay higher again and is at yet another all time high price of 86 cents per lb.  Butter gained one cent to close out the week at $2.50 per lb. 

Class III Milk Futures for the rest of 2022 have gained a dollar since the new year and range from $20.10 to $21.86 per cwt.  Class IV Futures are up $1.60 over the same period and run from $20.75 to $23.74 for the rest of calendar 22.  These prices have brought the Milk-Feed Index well in to the $9 per cwt. range, with a few months poking through $10 per cwt. for the rest of this year. 

I’m not inclined to say that this smells like 2014 since we still have a couple more dollars to go on price, and everything is costing more, particularly if diesel fuel and people are involved in its production or shipping.  It would take  over 10 years of consistent margins like this to zero out the last seven years of losses on milk production. 

Also, soybeans gained most of a dollar this week and March soybean meal went up $37 per ton, so those were gains of 6.7 percent and 7.5 percent.  Corn gained less than one percent, I guess because the Chinese backed out on a large purchase. 

Speaking of China, the U. S. House of Representatives passed a bill to rescue us from the descendants of Mao and Zhou, and their old neighbor, Chiang on Formosa.  This bill is well over 3000 pages long with amendments, so I doubt even legislative staffers are going to read all of it, but here a few highlights.

---$52 billion in grants and subsidies to help the semiconductor industry 

--- $45 billion to strengthen supply chains for high-tech products

--- $3 billion for facilities to make the U.S. less reliant on Chinese solar components.  For reference, these three items total $100 billion.  The 2021 farm programs came to $128 billion, so we farmers aren’t the only ones with our noses in the trough. 

--- $8 billion for a fund that helps developing countries adjust to climate change.  This is world socialism that is billed as ‘protecting the environment.’  Both concepts have a degree of acceptance among primary and metropolitan voters. 

--- $4 billion to help communities with significantly higher unemployment than the national average, though I don’t know how much human motivation and ambition can be generated with $4 billion. 

--- $10.5 billion for states to stockpile drugs and medical equipment.  This kind of thing usually becomes a slush fund, of sorts, for the individual states.  Even the GOP likes this kind of thing. 

I see that big chipmakers Samsung and Intel say they are building new factories in the U.S.  They added, “It will go ‘bigger and faster’ if we have federal help.”  That should be read as, “We think this is a high-risk endeavor, so we want taxpayers to protect us from the downside risks of investing in our own country.”