Food and agriculture has landed on the "essential business" list in the state orders issued over the past two weeks, and for most of our producer members that's meant continued operation rather than a shutdown. We're grateful for that. What it hasn't meant is business as usual. Members are telling us that the paperwork, inspection scheduling, and interstate movement that used to be routine are all running slower and less predictably right now, even where the underlying rule hasn't changed at all.
Two threads are showing up most often in what members are sending our way. The first is interstate cheese shipment — carriers rerouting, drivers reporting longer waits at some state lines, and a few members unsure whether a delivery still counts as essential travel under a given state's order. The second is raw-milk aging access: state inspectors who normally visit an aging room on a set schedule are deferring or rescheduling those visits, which matters most for members whose cheese needs a documented sign-off before it can legally ship.
Part of the difficulty is timing. State stay-home and essential-business orders have been issued within days of each other but not on identical terms, and a shipment route that crosses two or three state lines can mean crossing two or three different definitions of what counts as essential. A carrier who's used to a predictable interstate run is now checking each state's order before a trip rather than assuming yesterday's route still works the same way today. None of this means the rules are wrong. It means the rules are new, moving fast, and not yet fully synchronized with each other — which is exactly the kind of gap that trade-association advocacy exists to flag.
What we're doing with it
Grassroots advocacy only works when we have specifics, and this is a month where specifics change week to week. We're asking members to document two things and send them to the Food Safety Committee: any interstate shipment you had delayed or questioned in the past two weeks, and any inspection or aging-room visit that's been pushed back. We are not trying to build a case for anyone to break a rule — we're trying to have an accurate, current picture of where essential-business status is running into practical friction, so that if a state agency asks us for input, we're answering with what's actually happening rather than what happened last month.
This is also a reasonable week to note what the federation is not doing. We are not issuing legal guidance on what counts as essential travel in your state — that determination sits with your state's order and, where it's ambiguous, your own counsel. What we can do is aggregate what members are reporting and put it in front of the right regulatory contacts as a pattern rather than a one-off complaint.
If you have something to report
Send it to the Food Safety Committee through the member portal, and be specific: date, state, what was delayed, and whether it resolved. A single delayed shipment might be a fluke. Twenty of them in the same week, from members in different states, is the kind of pattern that gets a policy conversation moving. If your operation depends on raw-milk aging sign-off and you're worried about a shipment window closing before an inspector can get out to you, flag it now rather than after the fact — that's exactly the kind of case the committee needs while this is still current.
We also want to hear from members whose experience has been smooth, and not just the delays. If your state has issued clear, workable guidance for food and agriculture shipments, that's useful too — it gives us a working example to point to when we're talking with a state that hasn't. Advocacy built on one bad story and one good story is more persuasive than advocacy built on complaints alone, and this is a month where we'd rather have both sides of that picture than just the frustrating half.
None of this replaces your own judgment about what your state's order actually requires. If you're facing a decision this week about whether a specific shipment or inspection visit is covered, talk to your own counsel or your state agriculture department directly — we're here to track the pattern across the federation, not to make that individual call for you.
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.