Earlier this month, the federal milk testing program aimed at dairy-herd surveillance added a batch of new participating states, bringing more of the country's milk supply under routine sampling than at any point since the program started. We're not going to interpret what that means for animal health policy — that's a federal and state veterinary question, not a trade association's to answer. What we can do is help you think through what it means for your own herd and processing records, because that part is squarely ours.
Federal agencies have also confirmed detections tied to the surveillance work this winter, which is part of why member questions about recordkeeping have picked up. We mention that only as background for why the topic is live right now, not because there's anything actionable in it beyond what your own veterinarian and state agriculture office would already be telling you.
Two kinds of paperwork, one drawer
Most small operations keep herd health records and processing records as though they're unrelated — one binder for the vet's visits, one for pasteurization logs and cleaning schedules. An expanded testing environment is a good prompt to check that both are actually current, because a state inspector or a buyer asking about your biosecurity practices this spring is going to want to see that the two tell a consistent story. If your herd health log hasn't been updated since the fall, or your HACCP plan still references a supplier you switched away from, this is the week to fix that, not the week a question makes you go looking for it.
The Food Safety Committee has flagged this exact gap as a recurring theme in member questions this winter: not confusion about the testing program itself, but uncertainty about whether existing internal records would hold up if someone asked to see them. That's a fixable problem, and fixing it doesn't require guessing at policy — it requires an afternoon with your own binder and a willingness to admit which pages are stale.
If you've never sat down and compared your two logs side by side, start small. Pick one supplier, one monitoring point, and one corrective action from the last quarter, and trace whether the paper trail actually supports the story you'd tell an inspector out loud. Gaps tend to show up fast once you're looking for them on purpose instead of assuming they aren't there.
What our courses actually cover
If your recordkeeping has drifted, the Food Safety & HACCP Certificate is built around exactly this kind of gap — not diagnosing animal health issues, but building and maintaining the documentation trail a HACCP plan requires: supplier verification, monitoring logs, corrective-action records, and the review cadence that keeps a plan from going stale between recertifications. It's a two-year credential, shorter than most of our others, precisely because the material it covers changes often enough that a longer cycle would leave members working from outdated guidance.
For herd-level questions specifically, our Milk Quality & Herd Health course covers the operational side: testing routines, culling and treatment recordkeeping, the kind of herd documentation a processing plan depends on upstream. It doesn't replace your veterinarian's guidance; it exists to help you keep the records that guidance generates in a shape that's actually useful when someone asks to see them. Members who've taken both courses tell us the value is less in any single form and more in having a consistent habit of updating both logs on the same schedule, instead of letting one drift while the other stays current.
Pull your HACCP plan and your herd health log side by side this week and check that the dates on both are recent. It's a smaller job in January than it will be once spring production ramps up. And if you're not sure whether your current documentation would satisfy a buyer's biosecurity questionnaire, Membership & Outreach can walk you through what other members are including in 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.