If you've been refreshing a legislative tracker this week hoping for movement on the farm bill, you can stop. The federal fiscal year ends in a few days, and the committees writing the next farm bill have already signaled that a real vote is more likely in December than this month. That's not unusual — the last time the omnibus passed on schedule was over two decades ago — but it does have consequences for members who've been waiting on specific provisions.
What's actually stalled
Two threads members have asked us about most this year sit inside that bill: FSMA small-producer exemptions and raw-milk aging rules. Neither moves without the underlying legislation, and neither is likely to get resolved before the current farm bill's authority is extended or a new one is negotiated. That means the exemption thresholds some of our smaller creamery members have been pushing for stay exactly where they are for now — not rejected, not advanced, just parked.
We know that's an unsatisfying answer after a year of coalition meetings and petition drives on both topics. It's also the honest one. A missed deadline rarely means a policy died; more often it means the fight moves to whatever must-pass vehicle comes next, and members who stay engaged through that gap tend to get better outcomes than members who assume the issue is dead and stop showing up to comment periods.
Nothing about your current compliance obligations shifts because of a missed deadline, either. If you're operating under existing raw-milk aging requirements or current small-producer thresholds, keep operating under them — a stalled bill doesn't create a grace period. We've heard from at least one member this year who assumed otherwise and had an uncomfortable conversation with a state inspector as a result. When in doubt, the Food Safety Committee can point you to the specific rule text that applies to your operation today, not the one that might apply eventually.
What we're asking members to do
Our advocacy work doesn't pause just because the calendar did. If you've already signed a petition or joined a letter campaign on FSMA exemptions or raw-milk aging this year, that record doesn't expire — it becomes part of the file we bring to whichever committee staffer picks this back up in the fall. If you haven't yet weighed in and either issue affects your operation, now is actually a reasonable time to do it: staffers drafting the next version of a bill are more likely to be reading new input in the weeks after a deadline slips than in the weeks right before one, when everything is already locked.
The clearest way to help is specific, not general. "Please support small-producer exemptions" is less useful to us than a short account of what a current threshold actually costs your creamery in testing or paperwork, with rough numbers if you have them. We compile these into the comment letters and testimony packets the federation submits, and a specific number from a real operation carries more weight in that packet than a general statement of support ever does.
If you want to add your operation's numbers to our comment file, or if you're not sure which of the two issues affects you, reach out to the Membership & Outreach Committee this week — they're the intake point before anything goes to the advocacy file. We'll keep tracking the bill's progress here as it moves, including if and when either provision resurfaces on a vehicle that actually has a chance of passing.
The International Cheese Federation (ICF) and More Cheese are entirely fictional. This post is demonstration content created for MemberJunction. All people, organizations, events, courses, certifications, figures, and quotations in it are invented, and nothing here represents a real association, a real business, a real person, or real professional advice.