Spilt Milk
The COVID-19 pandemic is an unwelcome complication in the life of a third-generation dairy farmer.
Leroy Bergbigler is the owner of the 300-acre Bergbigler Farm on 263 Game Reserve Road in Clearfield Township. He took over the dairy farm from his parents, who succeeded his grandparents.
Bergbigler has spent the past 40 years tending to his 200 heads of Holstein and Holstein/Jersey hybrids.
He said 100 cows make up his milking herd, which have to be milked twice a day — at 6 a.m. and again at 5 p.m.
He joked the stay-at-home orders haven't really affected his family because the cows still need to be tended and milked.
“They have to be milked twice a day, that takes around 90 minutes to two hours,” said Bergbigler. “And there's prep work to get ready to milk and then you have to clean up afterward.
“It takes about an hour to get the cows ready for milking — groom the stalls and scrape up the aisles — so I'm getting up at 4:30 a.m. But it's only seven days a week,” he joked.He's helped by his wife, Mary, who does most of the actual milking and his daughter, Marybeth, who feeds the cattle and works the crops. Marybeth's daughter, Mercedes, helps on the farm when she isn't trying to keep up with her schoolwork in the farm's office.“We grow corn, hay, oats. Our main focus is on the crops the cows can eat,” he said.The nature of the farming work keeps him and his family fairly close to home.But the pandemic has made itself felt in other ways. Bergbigler sells his milk to Schneider's Dairy in Pittsburgh. A truck comes every other day and picks up 14,000 pounds of milk to take to be processed.“Two weeks ago, we had to dump 14,000 pounds of milk in the fields,” Bergbigler said. “The dairy said they just didn't have any use for it because the pandemic had reduced demand.”“We put it on the fields. It was worth $1,500,” he said.He noted it's probably happened to other farms.
“There's no program yet to compensate us for this. Maybe there will be in the future, I don't know. So far, we are out of luck,” Bergbigler said.He's worked to cut his milk production by culling the herd, selling some cows and cutting down on the feed for the milking animals.But he worries he will be caught short if demand surges with the end of the pandemic.Production can be brought down fairly easily, he said, but it's a struggle to get it to increase.And even if future demand increases, Bergbigler said he's been told Schneider's will cut the price it will pay for his milk later this summer.“The dairy said there is less demand for milk,” he said. “Not as much demand means a price drop.”He said he was getting paid $18 per hundredweight (a hundredweight roughly equals 12 gallons) in January, and believes he will be paid $15 per hundredweight or less in June and July, a 30 percent cut in the price he gets for his milk.“It's a struggle, that's for sure. It seems a bit more extreme because of the virus effect,” Bergbigler said.“But we've still got to get up to prep the cows, milk them, take care of them, clean them. That hasn't changed.”At least, he noted, “The veterinarians say you can't get corona from cows.”
