Earlier this week, New York state lawmakers passed a $229 billion spending plan that will incrementally increase the state’s minimum wage to $17 in New York City and its suburbs and $16 for the rest of the state by 2026.
Raising the minimum wage – once again – could be the nail in the coffin for many.
“There’s going to be changes at farms as these costs increase and farms look to cope and deal,” said Steve Ammerman, Director of Communications for the New York Farm Bureau.
In Valatie, dairy farmer Eric Ooms with A. Ooms and Sons Dairy has hundreds of cows he has to milk everyday – a big task that once took a lot of hours of labor to do.
But with labor costs going up, he knew something’s got to give.
“What we’ve done to address higher costs is we’ve always tried to find ways to minimize labor. In the dairy industry that means we have robotics,” said Ooms.
Instead of training workers, he now trains his cows to milk themselves with the help of technology.
When the cows want to get milked, all they have to do is walk up to the machine and it does the rest.
“So, the cow comes in and the robot identifies who she is and it has all the information on the cow on the screen,” explained Ooms.
In the long run, he says using technology is less costly than paying wages.
But for other dairy farmers, the increasing costs have become too much to stay in business.
“Now when you add on inflation, overtime, minimum wage, unions, and on and on, it’s not worth being in business in this state anymore,” said dairy farmer Raymond Dykeman with Dykeman and Sons Inc in Fultonville.
“We can’t make ends meet because we have no ability to dictate what price we’re going to receive for our product,” he added.
Dairy prices are federally regulated– meaning farmers don’t set them.
“So, they have no control to pass along those higher labor costs,” said Ammerman. “They have to absorb them.”
While the state has passed tax credit initiatives to help farmers financially, there are questions about sustainable they are.
“Tax credit–somebody has to pay for that so people’s taxes are paying for that, and that doesn’t make a lot of sense for me,” said Ooms.
