Whole Milk x 5 = The Importance of Trade

Fact: Getting whole milk back in school meals this fall is a big deal.

Thanks to the Whole Milk for Healthy Kids Act and demand from parents across the country, the most popular variety of milk in the United States is back on lunch trays, benefiting the next generation of milk drinkers.

The return of whole and 2% varieties also will absorb a lot of U.S. butterfat, a boon for dairy producers who have struggled with a supply imbalance. A reasonable estimate of how much whole milk will be consumed by American schoolkids shows additional demand that would be equivalent to nearly 24 million pounds of milkfat — for perspective, that’s enough to make that’s almost 120 million sticks of butter — in additional market need. That boosts dairy demand and improves prices for farmers.

But amid the excitement of bringing whole and 2% milk to schools in the United States, another slower moving, but in some ways even bigger, story is worth a comparison, in part because it’s become so taken for granted that it doesn’t grab attention the same way as whole milk on a lunch plate: Just how much rising exports increasingly support dairy prosperity.