As Milk Prices Stall, Wisconsin Dairy Farmers Disagree On How To Turn Market Around

Some Producers Say Exports Are The Answer, Others Call For Managing Supply. Dairy prices typically rise and fall on a three-year cycle driven by supply and demand. So when 2014 brought record-high milk prices, no one was surprised that the market crashed a year later.But the industry has been caught off guard by the lack of improvement in prices since then.“There’s just a lot of dairy product on the marketplace and I don’t see farmers cutting back very quickly, unless prices really go south and I don’t expect that to happen,” said Mark Stephenson, director of dairy policy analysis for the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “So I just think that there’s more like this longer, slow bleed this time.”