By Mary Drier
Staff Writer
CASS CITY — Operations at the Thumb’s first milk processing plant are m-o-o-o-ving along.
On Sunday, Dairy Farmers of America’s (DFA) accept its first load of milk at its milk processing plant in Cass City to start testing the production equipment. From there, sporadic deliveries will be done as the system gets ready to start full-time processing.
“The start up on Sunday went fantastic… Monday things weren’t so good,” said Tuscola County Economic Development Corporation Director Steve Erickson during Thursday’s Tuscola County Commissioners’ meeting. “They are working the bugs out…”
As the system is tested and problems worked out, milk deliveries will be increased.
Construction on the $40,000 million, 33,000-square foot milk processing plant started in September 2013.
When fully operational, the plant is expected to be able to process up to 3 million pounds of fresh milk each day provided by local DFA members in the Thumb, which will be a boon because milk production has been steadily outpacing capacity at other processing plants.
Milk is about 8 percent water which will be extracted to produce condensed milk and cream. From Cass City, the product will go to Ohio or Pennsylvania to be further processed in to milk, cheese, or yogurt.
“To date, there are 26 employees (at the plant),” said Erickson.
However, when commissioners asked him about the DFA’s phase two construction and the 200 jobs expected, Erickson said, “I can’t discuss it at this point…”
DFA’s original plan was to build the plant in two phases. Phase one was to build a plant that extracts the water from the milk. The proposed phase two of the project was instead of sending condensed milk from Cass City out of state for further processing, to that at the same site.
However since construction started, the plant run into some obstacles. One was a $10 million in unexpected overrun costs when DFA had to build their own wastewater treatment plant. Initially, Cass City Village was going to issue revenue-sharing bonds to upgrade their 30-year old system and to handle the additional discharge from the milk plant. The plan was for DFA pay the money back that money back to Cass City in their monthly sewer bill; but that didn’t work out, so DFA had to build their own wastewater treatment plant.
The additional cost of constructing the phase-one aspect of the plant, calls into question if phase two will be done.
Although Erickson declined to give specifics on the issue during a public meeting, he did note that “something will happen,” and that “it might not employ 200 people” but there will be jobs created.
Mary Drier is a staff writer for the Tuscola County Advertiser. She can be reached at drier@tcadvertiser.com.