The cash price of butter tumbled on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange on Monday, continuing a trend of falling prices for the commodity and a reversal of the skyrocketing prices at had taken hold during late summer.
The cash price for butter declined 16.5 cents a pound on the CME to $2.64 a pound.
Butter hit a record high of $3.06 a pound on Sept. 19. The price has fallen 42 cents a pound since then.
Market watchers and dairy farm interests had been saying for weeks that the prices for butter would fall once supply aligned itself with demand that had been skewed by record exports of butter and increased butter consumption in the United States.
The price of butter is important in Wisconsin because it is a factor in determining the price that farmers are paid for milk their farms produce. Wisconsin has nearly 11,000 dairy farms.
Dairy farms in Wisconsin have nearly 1.3 million cows that produce 3.2 billion gallons of milk annually.
Wisconsin is the top cheese producer in the U.S. and is second only to California in the amount of butter it produces, according to the Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board.
Source: Journal Sentinel