For years, a member of ours who runs a small farmstead creamery in the upper Midwest kept a folder of course names she meant to get to eventually — coursework on affinage, on cave management, on the chemistry behind why a wheel sometimes cracks and sometimes doesn't. "Eventually" kept losing to make days, farmers' market Saturdays, and a tasting room that needed staffing on weekends. This year, the tasting room closed in March and didn't reopen. The folder finally got opened instead.
A different kind of spring
She's quick to say she'd trade the extra hours back for a normal season without hesitation. Wholesale accounts went quiet, the tasting room stayed dark, and for a few weeks in April she wasn't sure the creamery would make it through the year. But once the immediate scramble settled — moving to online ordering, figuring out curbside pickup — she found herself with evening hours she hadn't had in a decade, and the coursework folder was sitting right there.
She started with a course on maturation planning for small rooms, something she'd avoided for years because her cave setup felt too idiosyncratic to map onto someone else's framework. It turned out the opposite was true. "I'd been guessing at humidity swings for six years," she told us. "Turns out there's a reason my washed rinds always went sideways in August, and it wasn't bad luck." From there she moved into a course on cave management itself, working through airflow and load patterns with her own room as the case study.
The value wasn't abstract. She reworked her shelving layout based on what she learned about airflow, and she's kept a humidity log for the first time — something she'd meant to start years ago and never had the uninterrupted stretch to build the habit. Her early read is that this year's aging wheels are turning out more consistent than last year's, though she's careful to say one season isn't proof of anything yet.
She also said something that's stuck with us: the coursework gave her a vocabulary for problems she'd been solving by instinct for years. That matters when you're trying to describe a defect to a supplier, or explain to a new part-time hire why a certain rind gets brushed and another gets washed. Instinct is real experience, but it's hard to hand down. A shared vocabulary travels.
Not every year, or every week, looks like this one
We want to be honest about something: not every member had spare evening hours this year. For a lot of creameries, the pandemic meant less time and more pressure, not more of either. This member's story isn't a case for silver linings — it's one small, specific thing that happened to work out for one operation, in a year that was hard on nearly everyone in the federation. If your year looked nothing like this one, that's the far more common story, and we see it.
If you've got a folder of your own — courses you've been meaning to take, questions about your cave you've never had time to chase down — our course catalog is worth a look, especially with enrollment options expanded this year for members working around irregular schedules. And if cave humidity and airflow are the mystery in your operation the way they were in hers, Maturation Planning for Small Rooms and Cave Management are both running again this winter.
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.