On Board With The Chairman - April 2026

Dear Member-Owners,

The Board of Directors held its monthly meeting on Tuesday, April 21, at the Visalia office with an agenda that was extremely full of information and packed with visitors presenting at the meeting. We’ve taken a different approach to these meetings, as I’ve mentioned in the past, and this month’s meeting focused on finance/banking and everything related to the financial group’s work.

Rob Vandenheuvel was up first and gave the board an update on the vote for new board members. As we announced in the annual meeting, the following members were either elected or re-elected to join the board. Representing District 1 will be Will Dyt. Representing District 2 will be Steve Scheenstra and BJ Schoneveld. District 3 will be adding Jonathon DeGroot and Steve Maddox, and District 4 will be Louie Borba and Dave Koolhaas. We’ll welcome the new guys to the board at our May meeting and look forward to getting them onboard and ready to hit the ground running. Rob also updated the board on milk flows at CDI, as we seemed to have found another wave of milk at the plants. The team has been doing their best to move milk around and continue selling Condensed Skim Milk to our partners out of state, in order to clear more milk through our facilities.

Jason Allen was up next and had the bulk of the meeting. Jason invited our auditors, Baker Tilly, to give the board the final review of the audit. We are pleased to announce that the audit was again successful and that the books are in order. After the audit presentation, Jason invited Amanda Durow and David Ericson from CoBank to give the board an update on the relationship between CDI and our banking partners. As Jason presented at the annual meeting, CDI is carrying a heavy debt load, which is a strategic focus area that will be addressed in the coming years. Amanda presented the network of banks that CDI is working with and each bank’s current debt holding for CDI. This was a great exercise for the board to walk through with the CDI finance team and CoBank to provide a refresher on those holding our business debt, but also for CoBank to better understand our strategic direction. After the CoBank discussion, Jason invited Curtis Bosma from High Ground Dairy to review our hedging strategies. CDI engaged with HighGround Dairy at the end of 2025 to advise and execute our risk management strategies across our butter/powder and other business areas. Curtis and the HighGround Dairy team have extensive knowledge in this space and are already providing valuable insight. Taking a fresh look at how we manage our commodity price risk was a strong talking point at our tailgate meetings back in October, and this partnership provides additional perspective and expertise that will pay dividends for our business. After all the invites were done, Jason went over the March and year-to-date financial results. March was a positive month financially for CDI, and, as Jason and Rob discussed during the annual meeting, the first quarter was strong as well. The board had a lengthy discussion about the current assessment as well as the Capacity Shortage Surcharge (CSS). The board decided to keep the assessment at the current rate of $0.75 per cwt through the month of June and revisit it then. This was a long conversation, as we know we need to make sure our members’ milk checks are competitive in the marketplace, but the board ultimately decided that because we only have three months of results and a lot of question marks around where commodity markets will go next, there was wisdom in revisiting the situation with at least the first half results locked in. The board also took no action to deactivate the CSS program at this time, as there continues to be more member milk production than available processing capacity, but we will continue to monitor this monthly.

As I close, I’d like to thank our three directors who are coming off the board after the annual meeting. It was a pleasure to serve with John Bidart, John Verway, and Edgar De Jager. I appreciate the dedication these three have given to CDI during their respective terms. They have had to help make some tough decisions over the last couple of years, and I truly appreciate the insights they each have brought to the table. I wish you three nothing but the best for the years to come and pray that God continues to bless you and your families.

It was also great to see so many of you at the annualmeeting. I know that it’s not easy to make these mid-morning meetings with howbusy the dairies can be, but the turnout was great. I also know that theinformation that was disclosed at the meeting wasn’t the most positive either,but the board and I hope that what people came away with was more informationabout how CDI got to this spot, and also how the board and staff plan ongetting us back to where we need to be.

As always, please feel free to reach out to me or any of the board members with any questions you may have.

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All the best,

Cory Vanderham

Chairman of the Board

Vanderham West Dairy

Lazy V Farms

559-269-9618

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