The 60-day line, and who’s asking to move it

If you make cheese from raw milk and you've ever shipped it across a state line, you already know the number by heart: 60 days. That's how long a raw-milk cheese has to age, at a set minimum temperature, before it can legally leave your state. The rule has been in place for decades, and it's one of the most durable pieces of federal food policy our members deal with — which is exactly why it keeps coming up in advocacy conversations rather than fading into the background.

This week our advocacy volunteers logged another round of member testimony and petition activity on the topic, adding to what's now a multi-year record of member input on interstate shipment rules. It's not a new fight. It is, at this point, one of the longer-running conversations in the federation's advocacy history, and it's worth explaining why it hasn't resolved either way.

Two reasonable positions, one rule

The case for holding the line at 60 days is a food-safety case: aging at a controlled temperature is one of the few tools that reliably reduces certain pathogens in a raw-milk product before it reaches someone else's refrigerator, and regulators have been reluctant to shorten a window that's been credited with a long track record. The case for revisiting it is a craft and market-access case: several traditional styles are conventionally aged well under 60 days, which means a producer making an entirely traditional product can sell it at the farm gate but can't ship it to a shop two states over without either changing the recipe or waiting out a maturation period the style was never designed around.

Neither side of that argument is wrong, exactly — they're weighing different things. That's part of why this issue doesn't move quickly at the federal level, and why our role here is less about picking a side and more about making sure both the safety case and the market-access case are actually heard by the people writing the rule, rather than one side showing up and the other staying quiet.

What we're asking members to do

If interstate shipment of raw-milk product affects your business — whether you're the one aging it or the one buying it from an out-of-state producer — the Membership & Outreach Committee is compiling a fresh round of member accounts to accompany our next round of comment submissions. We're not asking for position statements; we're asking for specifics: what style, what your current aging practice looks like, what changes (or doesn't) if the line moved. Those specifics are what make a testimony useful instead of generic.

One longtime member summed up the frustration well at a recent chapter meeting: "I'm not asking anyone to make raw milk cheese safer than it is today. I'm asking why a wheel that's fine to sell here isn't fine to sell one state over." That's the tension in a sentence, and it's the tension we're trying to represent accurately — not resolve on our own — when we submit member input.

If you want to add your account, reach out through the advocacy contact form on the membership portal before the end of the month.

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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.