We spent this week writing about the commodity cheese rally and what it does and doesn't mean for your own margin. That conversation kept circling back to a related one: the federal dairy margin protection program that's supposed to smooth out swings like this one, and how many of our smaller-producer members still aren't enrolled in it. Enrollment for next year's coverage year opens on the 13th, which makes this a timely week to raise it.
The program pays out when the gap between the national milk price and feed costs falls below a level a producer selects when they enroll. It's not designed for years like this one, when prices are climbing — it's designed for the other direction, the stretch a few years back when feed costs stayed high while milk prices sat flat for months. Several of our longtime members leaned on it hard during that period. But because it's opt-in and re-enrolled annually, it's exactly the kind of thing that falls off a small operation's calendar when there's a hundred more urgent things happening — and this has been a year with a hundred more urgent things happening. Nationally, enrollment in the program has actually fallen sharply over the past two years, and the operations most likely to have dropped off are the small and mid-sized ones this coverage was built to help most.
What we've been asking for
Our Membership & Outreach Committee has spent part of this year collecting stories from members about enrollment friction: paperwork that assumes a larger operation's recordkeeping, coverage elections that have to be made months before anyone knows what the year will actually look like, and a signup window that doesn't line up cleanly with when a small creamery's books are actually closed out. None of that is a scandal, but all of it adds up to smaller producers being underrepresented in a program built partly for their benefit.
We've folded those stories into the federation's ongoing dairy-pricing-reform comments to the relevant federal offices, alongside a specific ask: a simplified enrollment path for operations under a certain production threshold, with fewer required elections and a recordkeeping standard that matches what a two- or three-person creamery can actually produce. This isn't a new position for us — members have been submitting petition signatures and letters on dairy pricing reform for a while now — but the price volatility of the past several months has made the case more concretely than any of our previous advocacy language did.
What you can do this week
If you're a small producer member and you've never looked into whether you're enrolled, that's worth ten minutes this week, not next quarter. The new coverage year's signup window is open for a limited stretch, and missing it means waiting another full year for the next one. If you were enrolled once and let it lapse because the paperwork didn't fit around your calendar, tell us — the specifics of what didn't work are exactly what strengthens our next round of comments, more than a general complaint does.
And if you've made it through this program successfully and have opinions about what should change, our Membership & Outreach Committee is still gathering input before the next comment period closes. A short note describing what worked and what didn't for your operation carries real weight when we're arguing that a simplified path is workable, not just convenient. Even a few sentences about how long the paperwork took you, or which election you found confusing, becomes part of a stronger, more specific ask the next time we sit down to draft comments on this program.
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.