Every year we hear from a handful of members who are cutting something. This spring, the calls have leaned harder than usual toward one specific member profile: a farmstead operation, a small herd, a lineup built around two or three styles that took years to get right, and a set of input costs that stopped making sense sometime over the winter. One of those members, a member since 2016 who milks a mixed herd of about forty cows and asked us not to use her creamery's name in this post, agreed to talk through the decision she made instead.
"I looked at three options," she told us. "Raise prices past what my wholesale accounts would carry, drop one of my cheeses to free up milk for the other two, or cut the herd. Everybody assumes cutting the herd is the last resort. For me it was the first one that actually solved the problem."
Why the herd, and not the lineup
Her reasoning was mostly about time, not sentiment, though she was clear that both were involved. Her aged cheddar and her washed-rind wheel each have a following she's spent close to a decade building — retail accounts that reorder without being asked, a couple of restaurant buyers who've never once questioned a price increase because they trust what's in the case. Dropping either line would mean starting that trust-building over with a new product, in a year when she doesn't have the margin to absorb a slow ramp-up. Feed costs, on the other hand, scale directly with herd size. Fewer cows meant a smaller feed bill immediately, not a product she'd have to reintroduce to buyers a year from now.
The math wasn't painless. She sold eight animals this spring — not to a neighbor she trusts, which would have been her preference, but to whoever the broker found, because timing mattered more than which farm the cows ended up on. Milk volume dropped by roughly a fifth. She's making the same two cheeses in slightly smaller batches, on the same schedule, and so far her existing accounts haven't noticed a difference in what shows up in their case.
What she'd tell another member facing the same call
"Do the math on what's actually driving your costs before you decide what to cut," she said. "I almost dropped a cheese because it felt like the obvious thing to trim. It wasn't the expensive part of my business. The herd was."
She also pushed back gently on the idea that a herd cut is automatically a step backward. "I'm not smaller because I failed at something. I'm smaller because I did the arithmetic and picked the version of smaller that keeps the cheese the same." She's still an ICF member in good standing, still shows at the state fair competition most years, and said she'd rather talk to another member weighing the same decision than have them find out the hard way what she already learned.
If you're working through a similar set of input-cost pressures this spring, the Membership & Outreach Committee keeps a running list of members willing to have exactly this conversation. Nobody on that list will tell you which choice is right for your operation. They can at least tell you what the arithmetic looked like for theirs.
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.