We spent most of August telling members with cows that a federal margin-protection program's first enrollment window was closing. This week, the same program's window reopens — for next year. If that sounds like whiplash, it is one, and it is worth a paragraph of untangling before the calendar moves on.
The program pays out when the gap between the national milk price and feed costs falls below a level a farm signs up for. This year's enrollment closed in late September, and payments tied to it have already started reaching producers who signed on early — money that, for a lot of small and mid-sized dairy operations, showed up at a genuinely useful moment. Now a separate window has opened for coverage that would apply to next year, and it runs on its own calendar, not tied to when this year's checks clear.
Why the two windows aren't the same decision
Enrolling for next year isn't a renewal of this year's choice — it's a fresh one, made with a different set of numbers. Feed costs and milk prices move, sometimes a lot, between one enrollment season and the next, and the coverage level that made sense this year isn't automatically the right one for the year ahead. If you're a member with a production operation and you signed up back in September, this week's opening doesn't require anything from you yet. If you sat this year's window out, this is the moment to decide whether that was the right call, with a fresh look at where your own margin actually sits.
We're not in a position to tell any individual operation what level of coverage fits their farm — that's a conversation for your own numbers and, frankly, your own risk tolerance, not something a federation blog post should be doing for you. What we can do is flag the window and point you toward the program office that runs it, since the paperwork deadline has a way of arriving faster than anyone plans for. It's also worth remembering that this program only ever addresses the margin side of your operation — it does nothing for the retail or wholesale demand side, which is its own separate set of questions with its own separate committee to ask them of.
Members who've been through an enrollment cycle before tell us the biggest mistake isn't picking the wrong coverage level, it's picking a level and then never revisiting it as conditions change through the year. The window that opened this week isn't the only chance to think about your margin exposure; it's simply the one with a filing deadline attached.
None of this happens in a vacuum. Milk output has been a mixed picture region to region this autumn — growing in a few warmer-climate states, flatter or a touch lower almost everywhere else — and manufacturing plants have had enough raw milk on hand that processing lines have mostly stayed full. Cheese prices firmed through the week, with both block and barrel cheddar trading a bit above where they sat a month ago, and the trade press's own read on the federal government's latest production figures this week nudged its 2019 and 2020 milk-production forecasts up rather than down — a firmer supply picture than a lot of members were expecting going into fall. None of that changes the enrollment math for any one farm, but it is the backdrop against which the decision gets made.
If you run a dairy operation and haven't looked at the margin-coverage program yet, the Membership & Outreach Committee keeps a plain-language summary on file and is glad to walk you through where to find the enrollment portal. The deadline for next year's window is months away, not days — but the people who've told us they were glad they enrolled are, without exception, the ones who didn't wait until the last week to run their own numbers.
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.