Ask a member who sells milk rather than makes cheese with it how their year went, and you'll get a more complicated answer than the price charts suggest. Yes, milk prices firmed through the fall. But new federal cost-of-production figures released this quarter show that on average, dairy farmers spent more to produce a hundredweight of milk than they were paid for it — a wider gap than the year before, and a much wider one for smaller operations than large ones. If you run fifty cows, your production costs per hundredweight are more than double what a two-thousand-cow operation pays. The price board doesn't know the difference. Your bank statement does.
This is the exact math that's kept our Dairy Pricing Reform campaign running for two years now, and it's why we're not declaring victory just because the headline number moved in the right direction this fall. A member who signed our petition on this issue back in the spring put it to us plainly on a call last week: "firmer" isn't the same as "fair," and a pricing formula that treats every operation as if it has the same cost structure will keep squeezing the smallest ones no matter which direction the market moves.
There's a small, useful precedent for what we're asking. The federal dairy safety-net program that pays out when margins fall below a set trigger just had its feed-cost formula corrected, after years of members and other advocates pointing out that the old formula assumed cheaper feed than most operations actually pay for. That correction produced real retroactive payments to enrolled farmers this month. It's a narrow fix to one input in one program, not the broad pricing overhaul we're asking for, but it's proof that a formula built on outdated assumptions can be revisited when enough people document the gap between the model and the invoice.
What the campaign is actually asking for
Our ask hasn't changed since we opened this campaign: a review of how the federal milk pricing formulas account for the real cost differences between farm sizes, so that a strong market for cheese and butter translates into a livable price at every scale, not just the largest ones. We're not asking regulators to fix a number by decree — we're asking for the underlying formula to be looked at with better, more current farm cost data behind it, since the data driving today's pricing rules predates a lot of what's changed in the last two years.
Members have kept this campaign alive through letter-writing rounds and petition signatures all year, and it's made a real difference in how seriously the issue gets treated in the rooms where it matters. If you haven't added your name yet, our advocacy page has the current petition open, and it takes about five minutes. If you have signed but want to do more, we're looking for members willing to share a short written account of what their own cost-per-hundredweight looks like this year — anonymized if you'd prefer — to put real numbers behind the testimony we're preparing for the new year.
We know asking members already stretched thin by the holidays to also write to a rulemaking docket is a lot. But the gap this year's data shows is exactly the kind of evidence that moves a slow-moving process, and we'd rather bring regulators too much of it than too little. Reach out to the Membership & Outreach Committee if you want to contribute an account or just want to understand where the campaign stands before you decide.
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.