News

Texas dairies produce through utility shutoffs

The executive director of the Texas Association of Dairymen says Winter Storm Uri surprisingly caused more issues at processing facilities than with milk production.

“There has never been a situation in my lifetime or in recent memory for anybody in the industry where there was continued production but such a loss.”

Darren Turley tells Brownfield it’s very unusual for Texas to experience a statewide cold event and one as severe as this past February.

“Basically, all plants were affected in one form or another,” he shares.

He says natural gas shut-offs turned off the ability to pasteurize and dry milk along with other issues.

“We were in a situation where there really was no home for milk, and we also had every trailer full,” he says.  “Everybody continued to produce milk, we didn’t have an impact to the farm.”

Texas has been steadily growing its milk production and Turley says Winter Storm Goliath helped to better prepare producers for this event.  Even through the record cold, milk production in February increased a few percent.

“We had over 1,800 semi loads of milk that ended up getting dumped—it was huge—with no way to get them into processing, it was basically a weeklong shutdown,” he says.

He estimates production only dropped five pounds per cow across the state for the cold spell but production has already recovered and the culling numbers are still being calculated.