More than $7 billion worth of new dairy processing facilities will be opening their doors in the coming years. Most of these plants will be making cheese, whey, and extended shelf-life milk. What that new processing capacity means is that there will be 50 million to 60 million pounds of new milk demand per day in the next year or two, estimated dairy market analyst Mike McCully.
“There’s been nothing like this before,” he said of the historic amount of recent investment in dairy processing. During the Global Dairy Summit at World Dairy Expo, he expressed that there is a lot of optimism in dairy right now.
More processing capacity is welcome news for an industry that has grown its production about 10% in the last decade. While areas like the Southeast have declined in production and even California has stopped growing, places like Texas, Kansas, western New York, and the I-29 corridor around South Dakota have seen an influx of farms.
Katlyn Allen
October 24, 2024
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