The member who reads the bill text

Most members know Tom Reyes' name from the bottom of an advocacy update, not from a conference stage. He owns Speltmoor Farmstead, a small raw-milk operation, and for the last several years he's been one of the federation's most active members when it comes to actually showing up — reading proposed rule language line by line and submitting written testimony on the aging and labeling dockets that affect operations like his own. This spring has been a busier season than most: statehouse activity on raw-milk sales has picked up in several states, and Reyes has been tracking more than his usual share of it.

We asked him what got him started.

"Nobody else was going to read the whole thing"

"The first time, I did it because I was annoyed," Reyes told us. "There was a proposed rule that would've changed how aging periods got measured, and every summary I read got some detail wrong. So I just read the actual text, and once you've done that once, you notice how few people have."

That habit turned into a routine. Reyes now tracks a handful of dockets each year, most of them dealing with raw-milk aging thresholds and interstate shipment rules, and submits comments when a proposal would affect small operations like his differently than it affects larger ones. "A big commercial plant can absorb a labeling change in a way a two-person farmstead can't," he said. "Somebody needs to say that part out loud, in writing, where it counts."

He's careful to note he's not a lawyer and doesn't pretend to be one. "I'm not telling anyone what's legal. I'm telling them what a rule looks like from the vat, which is a different kind of information than a regulator usually gets in a comment file."

This year, more than a dozen states have had bills in front of their legislatures that would expand or restrict the sale and distribution of raw milk and raw-milk products, and Reyes says the pattern in the language is what makes each one worth reading closely rather than skimming a summary. One state's bill this spring simply widened an existing monthly volume cap to cover an additional species of milk — a change that sounds minor in a headline but rewrites the math for anyone planning next year's herd. "A retail-sales bill and an on-farm-sales bill can look almost identical in a headline and be completely different in what they actually require of a small producer," he said. "The herd-size exemptions matter. The volume caps matter. You can't know which side of that line you're on without reading the actual sections."

Why this matters more than it looks like

It's easy to treat advocacy work as background noise — something the federation handles so members don't have to think about it. Reyes pushed back gently on that framing. "The federation can summarize a proposed rule and tell you the deadline to comment. It can't manufacture the specific example from a real operation that makes a regulator stop and reconsider a threshold. That part only comes from us."

Reyes doesn't attend many events — he's said before that a two-person operation doesn't leave much room for travel — but his written record with regulators is longer than almost anyone else's in the federation. It's a reminder that engagement doesn't have to look like a conference badge to matter, and that some of the federation's most useful work happens in a farm office with a highlighter, not in a hotel ballroom.

If you've ever wanted to weigh in on a proposed rule but weren't sure where to start, the advocacy page on the member portal lists open comment periods and a short guide to writing testimony that regulators actually read. Reyes' advice, for what it's worth: "Say what happened to you, specifically. Don't try to sound like a policy brief. You're not one, and that's the point. A regulator reads a hundred form letters and remembers the one paragraph that sounds like an actual person."

If your state has a raw-milk bill moving this session and you're not sure how it would affect your own operation, the Membership & Outreach Committee can point you to members like Reyes who've already been through the process of figuring that out.

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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.