German butter output put into store

Dairy product output estimates for Germany 2011 indicate more butter in store than for years past. It’s reckoned that last year’s commercial butter production topped 470,000 tonnes. That’s 4.7% more than in 2010 and an output that hasn’t been beaten since 1997. At the same time butter imports dropped sharply by 5.5% to 140,000 tonnes and so did exports: by the same percentage to 120,000 tonnes. As consumption remained at around 5.9 kg/head, the result is thousands of tonnes more in store.

Preliminary dairy statistics for 2011 from the central reporting agency ZMB in Berlin show where the extra butter came from: a best-ever 29.7 m t delivery of milk from farms. Even just five years ago this total hadn’t reached 27 million tonnes. At the same time, German dairyland’s favourite child, cheese, slowed down in production with estimated output up 1% to – still a record – 2.29 m t. While exports of German cheese continued in the traditional direction – upwards – the rate has slowed down with an estimated 2.3% increase between 2010 and 2011 compared with the 5% and over regularly achieved in the years before. ZMB points out that the domestic consumer has saved the day for German cheese by increasing consumption yet again to an estimated 23.1 kg/head. The agency estimates that for the first 10 months of 2011 households in Germany bought 1.6% more cheese than in the same period of 2010.