Most of our spotlights land on someone marking a milestone they chose — a new credential, a first competition entry, a promotion. This one is about a milestone that arrived because the creamery's budget forced it. An assistant cheesemaker at a small farmstead dairy in the upper Midwest has spent this fall running the aging cave entirely on her own for the first time, after the member who'd mentored her for three years had his hours cut to part time in September. She didn't ask for the responsibility this early. It landed on her anyway, and members told us her story because it's a version of this fall a lot of small operations are living right now.
"I knew the rotation because I'd done it alongside him for years, but knowing the rotation and being the person who decides it are different jobs," she told us. The wheels don't care whether the person checking them has done it solo before. A cave still needs turning, brushing, and humidity checks on the same schedule it always has, and this fall's early cold snap made that schedule less forgiving than usual — a sharp temperature swing in late September pushed several batches toward a faster rind development than she'd planned for, and she had to decide, alone, whether to intervene or trust the process.
What changed when the decisions became hers
She told us the hardest adjustment wasn't the physical work, which she already knew how to do, but the second-guessing that comes with nobody to check her read against. Her mentor used to walk the cave with her twice a week and the two of them would sometimes disagree about a wheel — whether a rind was developing normally or needed attention — and talking it through was often how she learned to trust her own judgment. Without him there most days, she's had to make the same kind of call by herself, then live with not knowing for certain if she got it right until the wheel is ready to sell.
She's started keeping a more detailed cave log than she used to, in part because writing down her reasoning in the moment gives her something to check against later, and in part because it's become the closest thing she has to the conversations she used to have. When a wheel comes out differently than expected, she goes back to what she wrote and tries to figure out where her read diverged from what actually happened, rather than just noting the outcome and moving on.
The part she didn't expect
The surprise, she said, wasn't how much she didn't know. It was how much she did. Three years of walking a cave alongside someone else builds a kind of intuition that doesn't show up until you're tested on it without a second opinion in the room, and by her own account most of her calls this fall have held up. The ones that didn't taught her something specific enough to apply next time, which she says is different from the vaguer kind of learning that happens when someone else is there to catch a mistake before it becomes one.
Her creamery isn't alone in having thinned staffing this year; feed costs have eased some, but labor and other costs haven't, and a lot of small operations are asking one person to cover ground that used to be two. If that's your situation too, our Education Committee has heard from enough members in the same position this fall that they're considering a peer discussion thread specifically for makers who've had to take on cave responsibility earlier than planned. If that would be useful to you, let the committee know — it's the kind of thing that only gets built if members ask for it.
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.