Despite severe flooding, British Columbia milk is flowing to market and meeting demand for fluid milk and 80 per cent of demand for industrial milk to make products such as cheese and butter said Sarah Sache, a dairy farmer in Chilliwack and the vice chair of the B.C. Dairy Association.
She was interviewed by the CTV network.
She said Sumas Prairie was hardest hit and it accounts for about 14 per cent of the province’s milk production.
An estimated 420 cows died.
More than 6,000 cows were moved from affected farms to farms outside the flood zone, according to Sache.
“It’s just been amazing to see the community come together and the way that everyone has worked to support each other,” she said, adding that relocating that many cattle was a challenge.
But road closures in the Okanagan in the province's interior have nowhere to send their milk to be processed, and as a result, have to dump some of the product.
“Farmers are reimbursed through a national pooling system, but it’s not easy watching your milk go down the drain,” chair of the B.C. Dairy Association Holger Schwichtenberg said.
“It all depends on Highway 3 and 7 being open for the milk trucks to get from the interior to the processing plants around Vancouver. We’re completely dependent on that one road.”
There are smaller milk processing plants in the Interior, including Blackwell Dairy Farm in Kamloops that have taken on the extra workload to help farmers get their milk processed.
