Holy Cow! Economic Churn Is Causing A Butter Shortage.

ACROSS AMERICA— Please, not the butter. The anguish is palpable among America’s cooks.

They’re already going through stick after stick of the baking staple — face it, life staple — for fall confections, and now they’re steeling themselves against a butter supply meltdown during holiday baking crunch time.

“A butter shortage is where I draw the line,” one person said on Twitter. “This is simply unacceptable.”

“Would you people please stop yelling [to] my wife there’s about to be a shortage [of] this or shortage of that?” a Twitter user who goes by Seagull lamented. “This is how I end up with 11 lbs of butter in the freezer.”

OK, Seagull, we’ll use our inside voice: They’re not lying.

Below are five things to know:

Why Butter?

There’s no single reason for the butter shortage. The big one is that with rising feed costs and a persistent labor shortage, some dairy farmers got out of the business entirely, causing the Agriculture Department to consistently lower milk production estimates into 2023.

Weather extremes are hard on cows, too. They don’t produce as much milk during heat waves, floods, droughts, and frequent and intense storms, a USDA report said, adding that environmental conditions that are harsh for dairy cows “lead to the distribution and resiliency of parasites and pathogens that affect animal health.”

Prices Are In The Stratosphere

The cost of butter far outpaced other pantry staples amid painfully high inflation, soaring 24.6 percent over the past year, according to the August Consumer Price Index report. The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis said that in January, the average price of a pound of butter was $3.67, compared to $4.70 per pound in September.

Butter will get pricier amid surging demand to meet holiday baking needs, making it more difficult for suppliers to catch up, Scott Grawe, a professor of supply chain management at Iowa State University, told CNBC.

“Prices are not going to come down,” he said.

Government Butter Stash Dwindles

The strategic butter reserve is dwindling as more of the stockpile is released to close the gap between supply and demand, according to the Agriculture Department.

The emergency reserve of butter dropped 10 percent from July to August, and was down 22 percent compared to the same time in 2021. To put that in perspective, the butter reserve stood at 282 million pounds this past August, compared with 362 million pounds in August 2021.

Incidentally, the government keeps its stash of butter — cheese, too — in cold storage facilities, including caves in Missouri. Modern Farmer has a detailed explanation of how it came to be. Commodities of all sorts are stockpiled in secret locations around the country — oil, of course, but also medical supplies, vaccines, medicines, ventilators, hospital beds, plant species, animal DNA and other things to get the country through a disaster.

A One-Two Punch For Bakeries

The butter shortage couldn’t have come at a worse time for bakeries trying to rebuild businesses hurt by pandemic restrictions.

Indiana baker Krysta E. Young has had to adjust or change recipes that call for butter, or remove them from her menu. She worries the flavor and texture her customers have come to depend on will be compromised.

“Many professionals have had to close their businesses, reimagine how to sell their products, manage supply shortages and even more prevalent, manage food shortages,” she wrote in an editorial for Fox News.

“Butter prices for me personally have increased about 30-50%,” she wrote.

Some bakers are creating their own stockpiles.

“What happens when you bake cupcakes for a living, have a big wedding order coming up, and people are starting to panic about a butter shortage in your small town? You call a friend that works at a grocery store. Yes, that's 72 pounds of butter,” a woman asked on Twitter, posting a photo of the four cases of butter she procured.

State Fairs Use A Lot Of Butter

Butter gluttony trips the trigger of another Twitter user, who asked: “Why are ‘butter boards’ trending when there’s also news of a butter shortage? How very Gilded Age of us.”

To that user’s point, state fair butter cow sculptures were as ubiquitous as ever this past summer, despite the escalating butter shortages.

The sculptor for the Ohio State Fair, which claims bragging rights for the first-ever butter cow, used a record 2,500 pounds of butter to create a ginormous butter farm scene that included 10 life-size sculptures of kids, a cow, a goat and a pig.

The butter sculpture at the Iowa State Fair is popular with presidential candidates seeking favor in the state’s first-in-the-nation caucuses. About 1,200 pounds of butter were used to sculpt the cow into a scene from “The Music Man” for this year’s Iowa State Fair.

Those two fairs alone used 3,700 pounds of butter this year — enough butter to supply the needs of 617 people, according to statistics showing that Americans, on average, consume a little over 6 pounds of butter a year.

The approach at the New York State Fair could be the wave of the future. Its butter cow sculptor uses butter waste.

What’s Next?

Some areas of the country could be churning toward greater supplies, according to the Agriculture Marketing Service’s Dairy Market News report for the week ending Friday. The government disrupted cream shipments to states affected by Hurricane Ian and sent them to other parts of the country.

Butter inventories are especially tight in the Northeast, with some production facilities shutting down entirely. Maintenance has sent some churning facilities offline in the West.