We opened registration this week for Workshop: Birch Milk Handling, a one-day, in-person session in Petaluma, California on February 22. It's a hands-on morning for anyone who touches raw milk between the parlor and the vat: intake temperature checks, tank sanitation, somatic cell counts, and the paper trail that has to back all of it up. If you make cheese, you already know why this one fills up fast.
We put this workshop on the calendar for a reason. Regional dairy outlook reporting for the year ahead points to a milk-to-feed margin that's better than last year's but still uneven month to month, and several state legislatures have reopened debate this session on raw-milk handling and sales rules. Whichever way that legislative picture moves, the baseline expectation on documented, defensible milk handling only goes up, not down. A load you have to dump, or a certification you have to explain away to a buyer, costs more when the margin under it is thinner.
Who this workshop is actually for
We built Birch Milk Handling around two kinds of members. The first is the small farmstead operation where one or two people do everything, and where a formal SOP for milk intake has never quite made it out of somebody's head and onto paper. The second is the growing creamery that's added a second or third supplier and needs a consistent way to qualify new milk before it hits the vat. Both groups tell us the same thing: they know their own routine cold, but they've never had to defend it to an inspector or a new wholesale account, and they'd rather practice that before they have to.
One member who took an earlier version of this workshop put it plainly when we followed up with her afterward: "I could do the temperature check in my sleep. What I couldn't do was write down why I do it that way, and that's what actually got asked of me." That's the gap the workshop is built to close — not teaching people to handle milk safely, most of them already do, but giving them the documentation habit that holds up when someone else is reading it.
The day runs through intake protocols, calibration of your own thermometers and testing equipment, a walkthrough of what a buyer or auditor typically asks to see, and time to build a one-page SOP you can take home and adapt. It pairs well with Milk Quality & Herd Health if you're building out a fuller training plan for new hires this spring, and it counts toward hours for members working through the Food Safety & HACCP Certificate.
What to bring, and what comes next
Bring your current intake log, if you have one, even a rough one. Half the workshop is comparing what you already do against a template, not starting from a blank page. Seats are limited because the second half of the day is small-group work, so if you're planning to send more than one person from your creamery, register everyone separately rather than assuming a spot will open.
If Petaluma isn't reachable for you, tell us. We build our workshop calendar partly around where members ask us to go next, and California isn't the only region that's asked for a milk handling session this year. In the meantime, the Food Safety Committee is a good place to raise questions about intake standards more broadly, and our course catalog has options if you'd rather start with something virtual before committing to a travel day.
Either way, put February 22 on your calendar if Petaluma works for your schedule. We'll have the full agenda and a downloadable prep checklist up on the events page within the next week.
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.