Here’s something to celebrate: The NMPF Export and Trade (NEXT) program is one year old, and already it’s a critical part of dairy’s export success.
NEXT is a voluntary, U.S. dairy product sales overseas and seeks a better alignment of supply and demand for milk and milk products at home. Member cooperatives provide the funding for NEXT by contributing two cents per hundredweight of milk marketed.
That may sound similar to the former Cooperatives Working Together program, but NEXT improves on it in multiple ways. After years of discussions with our members about how to strengthen CWT’s approach — revamp what CWT did, from eligible products to program structure — NEXT is more targeted, more flexible and more transparent, with clear benefits that’s showing through positive effects for its members.
Through NEXT’s first year, which ended at the beginning of July, NEXT committed export assistance on more than 315 million pounds of dairy products destined for international markets. That’s a 73% greater volume than in 2024, the last year of the CWT program, at a cost to its members that’s half of the CWT assessment.
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