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Upstate dairy farmers plan to dump gallons of perfectly good milk — potentially sending big bucks down the drain — because they’re stuck with a massive coronavirus-fueled oversupply, according to a report Thursday.
“It’s horrible,″ Melissa Menendez of Sprucegate Holsteins Dairy Farm in Walden told the Times Herald-Record. “We’re still trying to take it in.”
New York’s milk market was sent into chaos two weeks ago when quarantine-prepping customers began overstocking their home fridges — and then the demand suddenly plunged, Phil Johnson, president of the Downstate Milk Producers Co-Op, told the paper.
As the impact of closed restaurants and schools along with stay-at-home restrictions set in, milk production plants were left with too much of the product and no desire to buy more from farmers, said Johnson.
Al Buckbee, co-owner of Bellvale Farms in Warwick, said he may have to start dumping as soon as Saturday.
Tollgate farm employee Dave Schillawski milks cows.AFP via Getty Images“You can’t run it down the drain, so we’re trying to figure out how we can spread it on our fields,″ Buckbee told the outlet, adding other farmers are in the same boat. “It’s not like you have equipment for this kind of thing.”
Some farmers are crossing their fingers that New York’s dairy market stabilizes before milk goes to waste and they potentially lose thousands.
“If people want to help us, they should buy milk,″ Buckbee said.
The outbreak has also caused JBS in Souderton, Pa., one of the East Coast’s top beef processors, to shutter portions of its 1,000-employee plant, according to the paper.
