Dairy farmers across Upstate New York are investing millions — building barns, adding cows, installing new, sometimes high-tech systems to increase efficiency.
All of this is in anticipation of what’s to come.
“On one hand, we have lots of optimism with the fairlife plant opening up, Great Lakes Cheese, Cayuga Milk, Blue Bunny ice cream,” said John Mueller with Willow Bend Farms in Ontario County, listing off all new and expanded dairy plants in the area.
“Lots of expansion. Lots of growth. Very exciting.”
And Willow Bend and its two sister farms are well-positioned for this moment.
Over the past decade, the farm has doubled the size of its herd to 6,000 cows. They’re drawing up plans for a new $5 million cowshed and after that gets built, Mueller hopes to add another 800 cows.
But there is uncertainty. These are big investments, made with the expectation of a return. An immigration crackdown, on-and-off tariffs and an escalating trade war with China are eroding that confidence, threatening both the workforce and the markets.
“This is anxious times, right?” Mueller said.
And New York has a considerable stake in how all this turns out.
It’s the fifth-largest milk-producing state in the country, and the leading producer in the northeast. With 3,000 farms statewide, concentrated in the Finger Lakes and Western New York, dairy represents the largest agricultural sector in the Empire State.
"You don't know, right?” Mueller said of what lies ahead. “Right now, it just makes everybody nervous. ... We're worried. Our staff is worried. It's a worrisome environment.”
'Our farmers are feeling this'
The U.S. sends 16% of all the milk it produces to other countries. If those markets tighten, then the milk product backs up, and prices fall.
“Mexico is our number one customer for dairy products for the United States by quite a bit,” Mueller said, noting that Canada is second. “And if they stop buying our cheese or butter or yogurts or whatever, then — oof — we’re in trouble”
Dairy has been spared in Trump’s tariff tit-for-tats with Mexico and Canada, so far. Not so with China, which ranks third among the largest buyers of U.S. dairy exports.
China has responded with stiff retaliatory tariffs, as it did in 2018, when a trade war erupted during Trump’s first term. Back then, U.S. dairy exports to China fell by 43%.
“Tariffs hurt us horrifically during the first Trump administration,” said Natasha Stein Southerland, a third-generation dairy farmer in Genesee County.
At the time, the Trump administration blamed China for “unjustified retaliation,” and ended up paying billions of dollars to farmers to offset the damage. There already is talk of similar offsets this time around, as milk futures prices are trending downward.
It’s the kind of interruption and uncertainty that farmers can ill afford at the moment.
“Our farmers are feeling this directly right now,” said Christopher Wolf, a professor of agricultural economics at Cornell University who has been watching President Donald Trump vacillate on tariffs.
“Every time he makes an announcement,” Wolf said, “the market goes in the other direction.”
Before all this the U.S. dairy market was going steadily up, domestically and globally, with $8 billion in new processing facilities and expansions expected to come online by 2026. The growth is driven by specialty products and consumer demand for high-protein diets. Domestic consumption is reportedly at its highest level in more than 60 years.
The biggest of the local projects is a $650 million fairlife milk processing plant nearing completion in Webster.
Once fully operational, the fairlife plant will take in 5 million pounds of raw milk daily – enough to consume all the milk currently being produced by 60 — if not more — of the largest dairy farms in Western New York, by some estimates.
Stein Southerland and Mueller both hope to be one of them. Fairlife would provide stability.
Willow Bend is one of the larger dairy farm operations in the region, producing 250,000 lbs of raw milk a day.
What fairlife signals, along with the other plant expansions, is there is room to grow.
“All this expansion created, obviously, a lot of optimism in an industry, and confidence going forward that there'll be milk markets,” Mueller said. “You see lots of dirt moved and barns being built, and cattle prices are quite high because there's quite a demand for cows to fill these barns.”
Built into all this already is a degree or trepidation, as Mueller explained: “If I know my history right, the New York dairyman will probably overshoot it, and we'll have too much milk, and then the price will go down, and then there'll be a contraction, and that's just how it works."
But it’s hard to grow if you can’t find the workers.
'A lot of fear, a lot of rumors'
The dairy industry has struggled for decades to find workers and relies heavily on migrants, who represent roughly half of its workforce. Many of these folks have been here for decades, but that doesn’t mean their paperwork is in order.
The Trump administration’s ramp up in detaining and deporting immigrants is something Richard Stup has heard about as an agricultural workforce specialist with Cornell Cooperative Extension.
“A lot of fear, a lot of rumors. A lot of you know, wild, wild, somewhat speculation, but speculation that is rooted in reality,” he said.
That was before U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced late last month that it had begun “enhanced, targeted operations in parts of New York." One of the more high-profile detentions involved a mother and her three children, taken into custody at a dairy farm in Sackets Harbor, Jefferson County.
While the family has since been released, officials say these actions feed a level of uncertainty and fear across already vulnerable communities.
“It makes them certainly more likely to leave, move to a different situation, or go back to a home country, or something like that, which certainly is going to have a big impact on them and their families,” Stup said.
“But it can also have a big impact on the farms,” he added, “and other businesses where they work.”
'Everyone's scaling up'
Outside of LeRoy, the mile-long strip of Gully Road that runs past Stein Farm also cuts alongside barren fields awaiting crops and empty cowsheds.
“There were three farms on this road growing up,” Stein Southerland said.
And now?
“We’re the last one that’s dairy,” she said. "There is a point where scale and efficiency truly do take over.”
The farm has tripled in size over the past decade, to 1,800 dairy cows. And the family is preparing to start work soon on a $3 million rotary milking parlor that will double capacity there as well.
"We will be moving dirt this spring,” Stein Southerland said, adding: “The change in dairy in New York State is really rapidly happening. Everyone's scaling up.”
For many, that also includes the use of automation and robotics as well as artificial intelligence.
“There's so much tech in this world right now revolving around dairy,” Stein Southerland said.
From an app on her mobile phone, she can track how many steps each of her cows take in a day, monitor their internal body temperature, and see how often each takes a drink.
“My cows have a Fitbit that they travel with everywhere every single day,” she said, “and instead of being on their wrist, they actually swallow it, and it rides around one of their stomach chambers.”
Farmers collect a lot of data. And recent years have seen major advancements using AI and other technologies to compile, analyze and distill that data in ways that can dramatically improve productivity, as well as overall herd health.
Stein Southerland uses the readouts to assess health and milk production, if a cow is ovulating or about to give birth.
And to detect infections before they spread.
“If I only have to pull out and examine two cows instead of six cows,” said Stup, the Cornell agricultural workforce specialist, “that's a significant labor savings right there.”
Farming, Stein Southerland said, “is going through a bit of a revolution at the moment, and it's a technological revolution, and you're either going to find a way to stay small and niche and really specialized, or you're going to make a large batch product on a large scale.”
It’s an anxious time, as Mueller said. With Fairlife, Great Lakes Cheese, Cayuga Milk, and Blue Bunny ice cream giving reason to scale up. But the directives coming out of Washington beg caution.
"I'm nervous about today,” Mueller said, picking up where he left off, and taking an extended pause. "I'm nervous for our industry. I'm nervous for our country.”
