The Closures of Four Dairy Plants Lead to Worry in Vermont

A series of unexpected closures of milk-processing plants in recent months has shaken farmers and Vermont leaders. They worry that the sudden loss of local production capacity could damage the state’s vital but fragile dairy industry, a $5.4 billion sector.

“While we’ve had a steady decline in the number of dairy farms, we’ve not seen such a precipitous decline in processors like this for a long while,” said state Rep. John O’Brien (D-Tunbridge), a member of the Vermont Milk Commission, which recommends ways to support the dairy industry.

The HP Hood plant in Barre, which bottled milk under the Booth Bros. label, closed in April; 70 workers lost their jobs. In May, Dublin-based Perrigo announced plans to lay off 161 workers as it moves to close the Georgia plant where it makes infant formula by the end of 2027. In early June, the German owner of Franklin Foods said it would shutter the cream cheese plant in Enosburg Falls where 100 people worked. A new owner plans to open a smaller operation there.

Finally, a week after that announcement, Kansas-based Dairy Farmers of America said it would lay off 81 people and “idle” the St. Albans Creamery, which it acquired in a 2019 merger with the local co-op that had operated in Vermont for more than 100 years.

The creamery, known as a balancing plant, turned local milk into a variety of dairy products, including cream that was sold to the Ben & Jerry’s ice cream plant across town. The co-op has agreed not to dismantle the plant while it arbitrates a claim by the Teamsters union that the closure was retaliation for a strike last year.

That high-profile legal challenge is not the only pushback to the demise of the creamery. U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) criticized the closure, holding a press conference outside the shuttered plant last week and calling for its owner to “do the right thing” and reopen. He added that the shutdown looked to him like an effort at “union busting.”

This plant is vital to dairy farmers; it is vital to this entire community. It must not be closed.
Sen. Bernie Sanders

“The bottom line is, this plant is vital to dairy farmers; it is vital to this entire community,” Sanders said. “It must not be closed.”

Sanders added that it “really pisses me off” that the closure was being done not by some large corporation but by a farmer-owned cooperative that was supposed to be looking out for the interests of its members and their communities.

Democratic political aspirants also expressed concern. Amanda Janoo, the Democratic nominee for governor, said in a statement the closure underscored that “when we lose local ownership, we lose local control.” Molly Gray, the nominee for lieutenant governor, called it a “tremendous blow to Vermont farmers in Franklin County.”

The closures struck a chord because they tapped into Vermonters’ fears that the decisions could accelerate the decline of an industry deeply embedded in the state’s history and culture. While small Vermont dairy farms have been struggling for decades, the state’s signature industry has long proven its resilience. Big farms have gotten bigger and more efficient. Cows produce more milk than ever, thanks to improved nutrition. And inventive farmers and food manufacturers have learned to churn out high-value products such as cheese, yogurt and ice cream.

“We are cows and covered bridges, so when people see this happening, it hits us emotionally,” Lyle Jepson, commissioner of the Vermont Department of Economic Development, told Seven Days.

Losing milk processors hurts farmers partly because they pay to ship their milk to processing plants; sending it to more distant ones will be costlier.

“This erodes already thin margins and threatens the sustainability of family farms across Vermont,” Kevin Kouri, chair of the Vermont Dairy Producers Alliance, said in a statement.

The closures and the higher expenses will ripple across the dairy economy and should be a “wake up call” for a state whose “policies and leadership have not kept pace with the needs of this foundational industry,” Kouri wrote.

The Dairy Farmers of America said its decision was not made lightly and “reflects broader operational and network changes needed to best serve our farmer-owners and customers.” Milk previously processed at the creamery will instead be handled at plants in New York, Maine and Massachusetts.

Mary White, president of the Vermont Farm Bureau, said farmers who had been delivering milk to the Booth Bros. plant in Barre for years must now pay to send it to an HP Hood plant in Concord, N.H.

“It was sticker shock for them when they found out what their transportation costs were compared to what they had been,” White said.

Not everyone agrees that the closures will deliver a devastating blow to dairy farmers.

Richard Nelson of Derby, whose family owns one of the largest and most technologically advanced dairies in the state, said the transportation costs will rise but so will the amount he is paid for his milk in other markets.

Cream from much of the milk processed in St. Albans was sold to marquee producers such as Ben & Jerry’s, but a lot of it was turned into powdered milk, which commands lower prices, Nelson said. Now his milk, which is produced from a 2,450-strong herd in Irasburg, is getting top dollar at a DFA processing plant in Franklin, Mass. And, he added, the St. Albans plant was operating at a reduced capacity — a drain on all DFA members.

“If that plant stayed open at one-third capacity, it costs me money out of my milk check to keep it open,” he said.

The amount of milk processed in St. Albans had decreased in part because Vermont has fewer dairy farms every year, and that loss is finally having an effect on total milk production.

In the past decade, the number of Vermont dairy farms dropped from 838 to 405. In earlier decades, farms that kept operating increased the size of their herds and production remained stable. But since 2016, the total number of cows has fallen by 14 percent and milk production by 8 percent, according to the University of Vermont.

The St. Albans plant also faced competition from larger, more modern plants, such as those in upstate New York built by the owners of the growing Chobani yogurt and Fairlife milk brands, Nelson noted. Chobani announced plans last year for a $1.2 billion, 1.4 million-square-foot dairy processing plant in Rome, N.Y., employing up to 1,000 people. And the Coca-Cola Company, which owns Fairlife, opened its new $650 million, 745,000-square-foot facility this month near Rochester, N.Y.

Those processors are or will soon be soaking up much of the milk produced in western and central New York. Other Empire State processing plants are looking for replacement milk from farmers in eastern New York who previously shipped their product to St. Albans, Nelson said.

Modern plants are not only “ginormous” but tremendously efficient, requiring far fewer workers to operate than the aging St. Albans plant, which also faced significant maintenance and upgrade requirements, Nelson noted.

When Dairy Farmers of America merged with the St. Albans Cooperative Creamery in 2019, it pledged to invest $30 million in the plant and $5 million in its trucking company. Despite those investments, the plant struggled. It was found to have violated its wastewater permit multiple times between 2021 and 2024. The violations involved dumping “substantial amounts of raw milk and cream” into the City of St. Albans’ wastewater treatment system on several occasions without pretreating the waste properly, according to the Attorney General’s Office.

The releases affected the health of a tributary of Lake Champlain and led to a $210,500 settlement in July 2025 that required the plant to upgrade its pretreatment system.

The closure of the St. Albans plant could affect how Ben & Jerry’s sources dairy. The majority of the cream used in the brand’s two Vermont production facilities was produced in the state last year.

“We are concerned we might not be able to maintain Vermont dairy products as a majority percentage this year, but we are acting to mitigate this,” Ben & Jerry’s spokesperson Sean Greenwood told Seven Days. Union officials said they suspect that Ben & Jerry’s factories in St. Albans and Waterbury had begun using cream from out of state months ago. Greenwood did not respond to additional questions.

The state is doing everything it can to make sure that laid-off workers find other opportunities, Agriculture Secretary Anson Tebbetts told Seven Days in June.

“We’re all very concerned about the employees that are impacted by this,” he said. Through a spokesperson, Tebbetts declined an additional interview, citing the ongoing litigation over the job losses.

The state had the third-lowest unemployment rate in the nation, at 2.7 percent in July, before some of the layoffs took effect. Jepson, the economic development commissioner, said he fully expected those seeking new jobs to be able to quickly find them. Those jobs may not be in dairy processing, but the state’s growing semiconductor, manufacturing and aerospace industries are providing significant opportunities, Jepson noted.

Gov. Phil Scott is focused on finding ways to help businesses grow through favorable tax policies, workforce development and lower regulatory burdens where possible, Jepson said.

But there’s only so much the state can do, according to O’Brien, the Tunbridge state representative. Vermont simply doesn’t have the money to subsidize large business development or help struggling farmers directly, he said.

O’Brien had proposed a bill that would help subsidize farmers when milk prices dropped sharply, similar to the system in Maine, he said. Another bill would have taxed the sale of dairy products based on the number of miles they traveled to get to Vermont, to create another incentive for people to purchase local products. Neither got any traction this past session, O’Brien said.

If she’s elected governor in the fall, Janoo said she has some ideas to help the St. Albans plant reopen. The state could, for example, help workers or farmers explore employee ownership models to buy back the plant and possibly provide financing for such a venture, she said. Janoo spent much of her career as an economist working on international industrial policies to support local economies.

She is spending a lot of time on the campaign trail talking about the increasing consolidation of wealth and power in the hands of fewer corporations and people and the need for the state to break those cycles. It was “heartbreaking” to see that exact kind of power imbalance she has been talking about play out in real time, she said. Dairy Farmers of America may technically be a cooperative but in reality is a “huge conglomerate” based outside Vermont making decisions that affect local farmers and workers with little say in the matter, she said. The state should implement “strategic economic policy planning” that supports local industries instead of simply accepting their demise as inevitable, she added.

“If we do not do something, the forces of ‘the free market’ will just turn us into some tourist playground, and we won’t have any actual production capacity here,” Janoo said. ➆

The original print version of this article was headlined “Sour Milk | The loss of four processing plants in Vermont has the dairy industry on edge”