WCMA Notes: Dairy’s Amazing Partnership with Mexico

Amidst a backdrop of on-again, off-again U.S. tariffs, a delegation of dairy farmers, dairy association leaders, importers, and food processors from Mexico visited Wisconsin this week to share information, tour dairy facilities and “preserve, facilitate and improve trade between the two nations.” 

The Seventh U.S.-Mexico Joint Binational Dairy Meeting offered the quote above in a joint statement outlining goals for these great trading partners to work together to grow the dairy industry for the benefit of both nations. 

Kudos to U.S. Dairy Export Council and National Milk Producers Federation who created and maintain this productive annual gathering. Dairy Farmers of Wisconsin and Wisconsin Cheese Makers Association were proud to develop programming for this year’s visit to Wisconsin. 

A simple, yet powerful, fact drives this meeting: Mexico is deficit in meeting its dairy needs, and our neighbor to the south is, by far, the largest market for U.S. dairy product exports. USDA’s Economic Research Service (ERS) pegged the value of U.S. dairy exports to Mexico at $2.4 billion in 2023, more than twice the value of exports to Canada, our #2 market, and three times the value of exports to China, our #3 trading partner. 

Mexico’s National Confederation of Livestock Organizations (CNG) reported at this week’s meeting that aging infrastructure on Mexico’s small farms leaves the nation deficit in its ratio of supply to demand.  Over 97 percent of Mexico’s 154,000 dairy farms have less than 100 cows.  

Attendees from Mexico at the binational meeting this week included several of the nation’s largest, most modern, farms, with owners stating they had clusters of farm sites with 1,000 to 5,000 cows. The small number of farms with 600 or more cows produce 25 percent of Mexico’s milk, according to the CNG. 

With milk production of 29.8 billion pounds, Mexican farms produce about 64 percent of all milk consumed in Mexico and imports of 19.7 billion pounds (milk equivalent) fill the remaining 36 percent need, CNG reported. America supplies about 80 percent of this import need. 

Data from USDA ERS finds that many of U.S. states benefit from healthy trade with Mexico:  

• Texas exported more than $890 million worth of dairy products to Mexico in 2024, down 3 percent compared to 2023. 

• California exported more than $482 million worth dairy products in 2024, down 12 percent compared to 2023 exports to Mexico. 

• Michigan sent $195 million worth of dairy to Mexico in 2024, down 2 percent. 

• Wisconsin, host of the binational meeting, moved more than $72 million worth of dairy products to Mexico in 2024, up 24 percent. 

Wisconsin Agriculture Secretary Randy Romanski greeted the binational meeting Tuesday, noting that 2024 cheese sales from Wisconsin to Mexico grew by 67 percent, and the first quarter of 2025 is keeping pace with 65 percent growth.  

Cheese exports to Mexico are a national hit, far beyond Wisconsin.  Mexico is America’s No. 1 cheese customer, as well as overall dairy buyer, and in 2024 imports of U.S. cheese grew by 7 percent.  

That amounts to 424 million pounds of cheese exported to Mexico in 2024, according the U.S. Dairy Export Council (USDEC). That figure has soared: just five years ago, Mexico imported less that half that amount of cheese from America. Put another way – Mexico’s growth in cheese buying in the last five years equals 20 percent of all new cheese production in the U.S. in that timeframe.