We wrote back in the spring about how the federal milk pricing formula actually works — the mechanics behind the number on your milk check. This is the follow-up: a formal review process is now underway, and the federation is coordinating a member letter campaign ahead of it. If you have an opinion about how well the formula served you this year, now is the window to put it on the record.
It's a fair question to ask this particular year. Class III milk hit a multi-year high in the spring and has come off that peak since, while input costs largely haven't followed the same curve back down. For members who set contracts or price sheets around the spring numbers, the gap between what the formula predicted and what actually showed up in a feed bill or a freight invoice has been the whole story of the summer. It's the same gap that's been driving enrollment in federal margin-protection programs this year, as more producers try to insure against exactly this kind of swing between milk price and feed cost.
What the federation is asking for
We're not asking members to become policy experts overnight. What's useful to the review process is specific, first-person experience: how a pricing swing this year changed a decision you made, whether a formula lag left you exposed on one side of a contract, or where the formula's assumptions about your region or your scale didn't match your reality. A sentence or two, grounded in something that actually happened at your creamery, is worth more than a paragraph of general complaint.
The Standards Committee is collecting these comments through early fall and will fold common themes into a coordinated federation submission rather than forwarding hundreds of individual letters. That means your specific example matters, but you don't need to draft formal testimony yourself — a short email is enough, and the committee will do the work of shaping it into something the review process can actually use. If you sat through our spring explainer on the formula and came away with a question you never got answered, that question is exactly the kind of thing worth sending in now.
Why this round is different
Pricing reform conversations happen on a cycle, and members who've been around a while may remember previous rounds that didn't move much. What's different this time is that the volatility of the past year has put real numbers behind arguments that used to be mostly theoretical — the case for faster formula updates, for example, is easier to make with an actual spring-to-summer swing to point to than it was a few years ago.
That volatility cuts both ways in the room, too. A formula update that helps a large processor manage price risk isn't automatically the update a small farmstead producer needs, and one of the reasons the federation wants a wide set of member letters, not just a handful, is so the submission doesn't end up speaking for only the biggest operations in the room. If your creamery is small enough that a single bad pricing quarter matters more to you than it would to a larger competitor, that's worth saying plainly in your letter.
If you want to add your name to the letter campaign or just talk through whether your situation is relevant, reach out to the Standards Committee before the end of September. We'll follow up here once the federation's submission is finalized, along with whatever response comes back.
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.