Two free webinars are on the calendar this month, and we'd rather flag them now than have you discover them the morning of. Both are open to all members, both run virtual, and both grew out of questions our staff have been fielding all summer.
What's on the calendar
The first is Herd Health & Milk Quality, running August 18, aimed squarely at members who sit closest to the milk itself — farmstead producers, small co-op suppliers, anyone whose cheese quality starts well upstream of the vat. It walks through the herd-health basics that show up later as somatic cell counts and flavor defects, and it's built to be useful whether you're milking eight cows or eight hundred. We ran a version of this session last year and it filled quickly; if this week's margin numbers have you rethinking your feed program, this is a good companion conversation to have while that's fresh in mind.
A week later, on August 24, we're running a session on raw milk rules that's meant less as a legal briefing and more as an orientation. It covers where interstate shipment restrictions apply, what a small-producer exemption actually requires you to document, and how the requirements differ depending on whether you're selling direct or through a distributor. We are not able to tell you whether something is legal in your specific case — that's a conversation for your own counsel and your state's regulator — but we can make sure you're asking the right questions before that conversation happens, and we can point you to the parts of your own paperwork that tend to get overlooked.
Both sessions run about ninety minutes with a live question period at the end, and both will be recorded for members who can't make the live time. Registration is open now through the events page on your member portal, and neither requires a course enrollment or a credential in progress — they're open sessions, and we'd rather have you there with questions than have you sit one out because you weren't sure you qualified. If you have a specific herd-health or raw-milk question you'd like addressed live, send it to us ahead of time and we'll try to work it into the Q&A.
Why we keep doing these virtual
We know some of you miss standing in a room together, and we miss it too. But this year's webinar attendance has told us something worth listening to: members who couldn't justify a flight and a hotel for a two-hour session have been showing up for these in numbers we didn't see before 2020. A fair number of you have said flat out that the recorded version, watched later with a cup of coffee and your make sheet open, is more useful than the live version ever was.
There's also a timing argument for staying virtual right now. Case counts have been climbing again this month as the Delta variant becomes the dominant strain in a growing number of places, and several members have already told us they're rethinking travel and indoor gatherings they'd penciled in for the fall. A webinar doesn't ask you to make that call. We're not walking away from in-person events — the calendar for next year already has more of them than this one did, and we still believe a room full of members beats a screen full of them for the conversations that happen in the hallway afterward — but the webinar slot has earned its permanent place in how we run programming, and this month is a good example of why.
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.