Most members we talk to close their books sometime in January, once the holiday rush has cleared the counter and the last of the gift boxes are out the door. One farmstead cheesemaker we spoke with this month does hers earlier, in the gap between Christmas and New Year's, while the shop is quiet and the cave is finally caught up. "If I wait until January," she told us, "I've already made half my buying decisions for spring on last year's numbers instead of this year's."
She runs a small mixed-herd operation in the upper Midwest, selling mostly through her own farm store and a handful of regional accounts, and this was not an easy year to close out. Milk prices spent most of 2025 lower than the year before, and the forecasts she's been reading suggest 2026 won't be the year that turns around — herd sizes and per-cow output keep climbing nationally even as prices soften, a combination that squeezes an operation her size harder than it squeezes a large commercial dairy that can spread fixed costs across far more milk.
What the holiday case bought her
The one bright spot in her numbers was the case itself. Holiday gift boxes and cheese boards carried a bigger share of her fourth-quarter revenue than in past years, which tracks with what we've heard from members across the country — interest in cheese boards for entertaining reliably spikes in December, and this year was no exception. "The board sets paid for December," she said. "They didn't fix the whole year, but they mattered, and they mattered more than they have in past years."
That distinction matters to how she's planning 2026. Rather than treating a good holiday season as a signal to expand wholesale accounts, she's using it to shore up direct sales and reconsider whether it's finally time to enroll in the federal margin coverage program at a higher tier — a conversation she'd put off in past years because the paperwork felt like more trouble than the protection was worth. Watching some of her regional peers close their doors entirely over the past two years has made the calculation feel less optional than it used to.
Her process is deliberately unglamorous. She pulls three numbers first: what the farm store brought in during the fourth quarter, what her wholesale accounts paid net of the discounts she extended to keep them, and what she spent on feed over the same stretch. Comparing those three against last year's figures, rather than against a budget she wrote back in January, tells her where the real movement happened. This year, the wholesale side barely held even while the farm store grew — a pattern she says would have been easy to miss if she'd only looked at her total revenue line.
What she's telling other members
Her advice for other farmstead operators closing out a hard year: separate what the holiday case earned you from what your wholesale accounts earned you, because they tell you different things about where 2026 should go. A strong retail week doesn't mean your wholesale pricing is sustainable, and a soft wholesale quarter doesn't mean your whole business is in trouble. Do the math before the tree comes down, not after — a January close means you're already a month behind on decisions that needed to happen in December, and those first few weeks of the new year are exactly when feed suppliers and buyers alike expect an answer.
If you're weighing the same margin coverage decision she is, this week's federation coverage on the program's 2026 changes is a reasonable place to start before you call your accountant.
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.