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The concept of sustainable development means promises that can actually be kept, as the system this article deals with means to illustrate. The Comté PDO cheese chain is usually described as a paragon of success. Thanks to a large qualitative survey under way since 2014, we follow up on the question raised by the Comté chain manager: will the cheese’s impressive performance continue to hold? We will address the question by examining four issues raised by the stakeholders themselves as well as in the literature: 1/the production of a quality cheese, 2/the breeding and selection criteria for the Montbeliard cow, 3/feeding the animals on a just-in-time basis, 4/farmers’ desire for comfort and a social life. Decoding these issues reveals hybrid temporalities, in which nature and techniques are interwoven, and which punctuate cheese production as well as dairy farming. The actors can manage the diversity of rhythms but are also subject to its constraints. We will show that simply referring to the long or the short term is not enough: it is better to explore the multi-temporality that produces unexpected effects, some of which may endanger an as yet still ongoing sustainable future.