Carrera Elite
Libra
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Glendale,AZ
Posts: 44,127
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1990 Carrera 23.5 Classic
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Posted: June 02 2007,9:34 am |
Post # 13 |
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The price of fuel drive up the price of alot of things......
Milk prices rising sharply
Corn, fuel costs spill over to dairy products
From Staff and Wire Dispatches
Last week, there was a special on milk at the Breckinridge Street Kroger in downtown Louisville, and Latrice Morris took advantage.
"I grabbed two gallons, because it was $1.99 apiece," Morris said. She has two sons, "and they love milk."
Yesterday, Morris grudgingly lowered one gallon of Kroger-brand milk into her shopping cart at a cost of $3.45.
"That's ridiculous. I don't like it, but you've got to buy it."
The Kroger brand milk was a relative bargain. A name-brand milk at the same store was $3.79 a gallon.
Dairy market forecasters are warning that consumers can expect a sharp increase in prices this summer. Higher costs of transporting milk to market and increased demand for corn to produce ethanol get the blame.
U.S. retail milk prices have increased about 3 percent, or roughly a dime a gallon, this year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In Louisville, average retail prices rose from $2.85 in January to $3.09 in May. Surveys were conducted in the first 10 days of each month.
University of Illinois dairy specialist Michael Hutjens forecasts further increases of up to 40 cents a gallon for milk over the next few months, and up to 60 cents for a pound of cheese.
That would drive the cost of a gallon of whole milk around the country to an average of $3.78, based on the Agriculture Department's monthly survey of milk prices in 30 metro areas.
Prices in the latest survey, earlier this month, ranged from $2.76 a gallon in Dallas to $3.86 in Chicago and $4.09 in New Orleans, where the dairy industry has struggled to recover from Hurricane Katrina.
Hutjens and others said higher gasoline prices have increased the costs of moving milk from farm to market, and corn -- the primary feed for dairy cattle -- is being gobbled up by ethanol producers. The Agriculture Department projects that 3.2 billion bushels of this year's corn crop will be used to make ethanol, a 52 percent increase over 2006.
Chris Galen, a spokesman for the National Milk Producers Federation, pointed to another factor: Global demand for milk has grown in the past few years, primarily in the new Asian economic powers.
"China of course is a big story," he said. "They're consuming more (milk protein); they're using more dairy ingredients in animal feed."
In years past, that demand might have been met by Australia and New Zealand, he said. But drought in Australia and the limits of New Zealand's dairy industry have pushed China and its neighbors to buy American.
Hutjens said the biggest dairy price spikes are likely to come later this summer in the areas farthest from the Midwest corn and grain fields, which feed most of the country's dairy cattle.
"Certainly I think you're gonna see it worse in places like the Southeast -- in Georgia and Florida -- and California," he said.
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12-22-2025 Gas price in your area (Rep.#7,378) from: GoFastRacer
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