If you make cheese from milk you produce yourself, you've probably already heard that the enrollment window for next year's federal dairy margin coverage program got pushed back — from mid-December to January 31. If you hadn't heard, this is us telling you, because the extra six weeks is a genuine gift and a fair number of members let deadlines like this slide past them every year.
The program pays out when the gap between the all-milk price and average feed costs falls below a level a producer picks in advance. It sounds dry until you've lived through a year like this one, when milk prices set records at the same time feed costs did the same thing right behind them. The margin — not the price alone — is what determines whether a farmstead operation actually keeps more of what it brought in. A handful of our farmstead members who skipped enrollment in past years because "prices were good anyway" told us this fall that they wished they hadn't.
What this has to do with cheesemaking specifically
Membership skews toward people who buy milk rather than produce it, and for you this is background noise — worth knowing, not worth acting on. But we have a real and growing farmstead contingent, the members who milk their own herd and turn it into wheels the same week, and for them this genuinely matters. If that's you, or if you're the kind of member who reads the whole newsletter anyway, here's the short version: enrollment now runs through January 31, 2023, coverage is retroactive to January 1, and you choose your own margin trigger level and how much of your production history to cover. None of that is advice about whether to enroll or at what level — that's a conversation for your own accountant or lender, not us. It's just the calendar fact that the window is open longer than usual this year.
We've heard from a few farmstead members already asking whether the federation has a position on the broader dairy pricing reform conversation that's been simmering in Washington alongside this. We don't have a position to announce, and we're wary of pretending otherwise — pricing formula reform touches producers, processors, and cooperatives very differently depending on region and scale, and our membership doesn't agree on much beyond wanting a formula that's at least explainable. What we can do is keep tracking it and keep our farmstead members informed as the picture sharpens, which is the same job we've done on raw-milk aging rules and interstate shipment questions for years.
What to do this week
If you produce your own milk and you're not sure whether you're already enrolled for 2023, check now rather than in late January. Enrollment happens through your local federal farm service office, not through the federation — we don't administer the program and can't enroll you — but our advocacy team can walk you through what the numbers mean if the paperwork itself is the sticking point. A short call is usually enough.
For everyone else, the practical takeaway is smaller but real: if your milk supplier mentions margin coverage or feed-cost hedging this winter, you'll know roughly what they mean, and that's worth something the next time a supply conversation gets tense in January.
Members with questions can reach the advocacy team through the usual member portal contact form, or bring it up at the next committee call — we're tracking dairy pricing questions there through the end of the enrollment window.
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.