We signed up a new member last month whose cave is in the southern hemisphere and whose sheep are, at this point in the year, deep into lambing season while most of our other members are watching their first cool nights of fall. Charlie Mason co-owns a small farmstead operation on the Tasmanian coast, making sheep's milk cheese from a flock he and his partner run themselves, and he joined the federation almost by accident — a course listing he found while looking for anything written about washing rinds in a maritime climate.
"Everything I'd read up to that point assumed you were dealing with someone else's climate," he told us when we asked how he'd found us. "Half the advice didn't translate. I wanted to know if anyone else was dealing with the same problem from underneath, so to speak."
What virtual actually solved
A year and a half ago, a member on the far side of the world joining an association based in the northern hemisphere would have meant an annual flight to a conference, if that. Most trade and professional associations spent this year rebuilding their event calendars around shorter, more frequent virtual sessions rather than a single annual gathering, partly because it was the only option and partly because members scattered across time zones turned out to show up for it. Our own committee calls and webinars followed the same pattern.
For Mason, that shift is the entire reason membership was practical at all. This year it has meant logging into a webinar at an hour that is, by his own account, "closer to breakfast than dinner," and being in the room anyway. That is not a small thing for someone running a two-person operation who cannot leave the cave for a week at a time to fly to a conference on the other side of the planet. The virtual format that most of our members adopted out of necessity has quietly made the federation reachable for members who were never going to make that flight in the first place.
Still finding his footing
Mason has been candid that he is early in this — he has sat in on two webinars so far and has not yet worked his way into a course, which puts him at the start of a trajectory a lot of new members follow. What he has already brought is a genuinely different set of conditions to compare notes against: a wet, salt-heavy coastal climate that behaves nothing like a cellar in the upper Midwest, and a production calendar that runs opposite everyone else's, with his flock lambing this month rather than in spring.
He is arriving at an interesting moment for dairy on the island. Tasmania's milk output hit a record this year, its third straight year of growth and roughly double the pace of the rest of the country, driven by good conditions and steady investment in processing capacity. Mason's own operation is small enough that a state-level production record barely touches his flock directly, but he says the broader confidence around him — new tanks going in down the road, a neighbor expanding — made this feel like a reasonable year to formalize something he had been doing informally for years.
He is also, by his own description, still working out which committee's questions actually match his situation. Food safety rules written with a temperate-zone winter in mind read strangely to him in September, when his own creamery is heading into its wettest stretch of the year rather than its driest. That is exactly the kind of mismatch our Membership & Outreach Committee is used to untangling, and precisely why a member an ocean and a hemisphere away is worth having in the room, even a virtual one.
If you make cheese somewhere unusual and have ever wondered whether the federation's advice actually applies to you, his early experience is a reasonable data point that it can, with some translation. Our next few virtual sessions are open to all members regardless of time zone — check the events calendar and pick one that lands at a reasonable hour wherever you are.
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.