Butter a Bright Spot for Dairy Market

This year’s been a “banner year for butter,” a recent USDA report shows. Due in part to a rise in home baking and cooking because of the COVID-19 pandemic, butter production has risen in the last calendar year, with domestic annual production on pace to surpass 2 billion pounds for the first time since 1943. It’s partially the advancement of a trend underway since the early 2000s, a time during which butter consumption has slowly increased. But it could cause a logjam in the market heading into the holidays; usually by late summer, there’s a lot of butter in cold storage in the U.S., but because of increased demand, those stocks are drawn down heading into the highest-demand time of the year. See more.