The Paycheck Protection Program opened for applications this week, and it's the single most common question in our inbox right now: can a small creamery or cheese shop actually use it, and what does it cover. We're not going to give anyone tax or legal advice — talk to your lender and your accountant about your own numbers — but we can tell you what members are running into, and what the federation is pushing for on their behalf.
What the program is asking for
At a high level, the program is built around payroll: a business applies through an existing SBA-approved lender for a loan sized to roughly two and a half months of payroll costs, and the loan can be forgiven if the money mostly goes to keeping employees paid, plus a smaller share for rent, mortgage interest, or utilities. Farms and food producers with a modest employee count are generally eligible, but the eligibility language was written with a generic small business in mind, not a seasonal creamery with a payroll that swings hard between a busy fall cheese season and a quiet winter.
Two questions came up on almost every call this week:
- What counts as payroll for a farm with family labor or seasonal help? The guidance here has been revised more than once since the program opened, and several members told us their lender is asking for different documentation than a lender across town is asking a neighboring member for. If you're applying, ask your specific lender for their documentation checklist in writing rather than assuming it matches what you've read online.
- Does an owner's own draw count, and how? This is exactly the kind of question that has a real, specific answer for your situation and a wrong answer if you generalize from someone else's. We are not the source for that answer — your lender or accountant is.
The Membership & Outreach Committee has been collecting examples of where the program's standard small-business framing doesn't fit a seasonal food producer well, and we're compiling those into a comment for the relevant federal agencies rather than leaving it as scattered complaints. If your business has hit a specific wall applying — a lender who won't take agricultural borrowers, a payroll calculation that doesn't reflect your seasonal hiring, a documentation request that assumes a monthly-average business model you don't have — send it to the committee. Specific, dated examples carry far more weight than a general complaint that "the program doesn't work for us."
We'd also note: several members reported their usual bank doesn't participate in the program at all, and had to find a second lender that does. If you haven't confirmed your own bank is an approved lender, that's worth a phone call before you assume the application process starts the way you expect it to.
We expect the eligibility rules and lender guidance to keep shifting over the next several weeks as the program works through its first wave of applicants — that's been the pattern so far. We'll keep pushing member examples into the record where the program's design assumes a kind of business that isn't ours, and we'll flag it here if the guidance changes in a way that matters to how you apply. In the meantime, the fastest path to a straight answer is still your own lender, not a webinar or a blog post — ours included.
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.