We've written twice this week about how far this year's milk pricing has moved and about the relief program that opened its signup window on Monday. What we haven't said as directly: the federal formulas that produce these prices aren't fixed in stone, and the process for revisiting them is one small producers can weigh in on, if they know it's happening and take the time. This week we're organizing a letter campaign on dairy pricing reform, and we'd rather ask members to participate now than explain after the window closes why it mattered.
Pricing reform proposals move slowly and get most of their public comment from the largest processors and the biggest cooperatives, because they have staff whose job is to track exactly this kind of thing. A farmstead operation with one make a day generally doesn't have that staff, and understandably tunes it out. The problem is that the rules that come out of this process apply just as much to a twelve-cow operation as to a plant running three shifts, and the twelve-cow operation's experience of a formula rarely looks like the plant's.
What a letter campaign actually does
We're not asking anyone to become a policy expert overnight. A letter campaign works because it's simple: we draft a template that lays out, in plain terms, how this year's pricing swings have affected small and mid-sized cheesemaking operations specifically, and members who want to participate can sign it as written, adjust a paragraph to reflect their own numbers, or write something from scratch if they'd rather. What matters for the record isn't eloquence — it's volume, specificity, and the fact that the comment came from an actual small producer rather than a summary written on their behalf.
If you make cheese and you've felt this year's price swings in your own numbers — and based on what members have told us this month, most of you have — your specific experience is more useful to this process than you might think. A sentence like "a formula revision changed my per-hundredweight price by more than a dollar in a single month, and I had no practical way to hedge against that" carries weight precisely because it's concrete and it's yours.
We know this feels like a strange ask in a week when a relief program just opened and everyone's attention is already stretched thin. We're asking anyway because this is one of the few moments where the process is genuinely open, and because we've heard from enough of you this month — independently, in different conversations — that the current volatility isn't working for operations your size. That pattern is worth putting on the record while the window is open, not after the rules are set for another cycle.
This isn't the first time we've organized around a comment period, and it won't be the last. What's different this time is the timing: this campaign lines up with a week where milk pricing and federal relief have already been front of mind for most of you, which means the letter you'd write today is one you could probably draft from memory.
What we'd do with this
If you want to participate, the Membership & Outreach Committee has the draft letter and can walk you through adding your own numbers in under twenty minutes. If you'd rather write your own from scratch, ask them for the submission details and deadline instead, and do it before the end of the month — comment windows on pricing formulas don't reopen on request. Either way, the ask is the same: let the people setting these rules hear from someone who actually runs a make sheet, not just from the operations big enough to have a policy department.
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.