BC’s Interior Milk is being shipped to Alberta for processing

Dairy farm in BC’s Interior are dealing, like everyone else, with the aftermath of hurricane BC and flooding.

With the closure of the Coquihalla Highway and the flooding of Highway 1 in Abbotsford, raw milk typically processed in the Lower Mainland can no longer make that route.

John Schut, president of Beatrix Farms, said: “There is certainly concern that our milk will not reach the shore, and we received an email saying that until further notice, all milk will not be available. Ours will have to be dumped.

Schut said it was a terrible email to receive, but fortunately an alternative was found before any of his milk had to be spilled.

Schut told Global News on Friday: “Luckily within a few hours we got a phone call saying they had found a home for our milk and indeed our milk was being shipped to Alberta. (for processing).

The whole situation demonstrated that BC’s Interior needed to be able to process its own raw milk, according to Schut and other dairy farmers he spoke to at the Interior.

“It shows that the entire infrastructure of the province needs to be looked at,” Schut said.

“Ideally we would like to see (milk) processing in the interior of BC because most of the milk has to go to the lower mainland for processing.”

The president of the BC Dairy Association, who is also a dairy farmer in Agassiz, said some farms have been forced to dump their milk due to inaccessibility to pickup trucks, including one their camp.

“We had to pour our milk too, we were tall and dry and there was no way for the truck to reach so we had to dump our milk on Tuesday,” Holger Schwichtenberg said. .

At this time, many dairy farmers across the province are in a state of waiting, waiting for the highway, specifically National Highway 3, to reopen, which only reopened on Friday afternoon.

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