Heavy machinery is pushing dirt at the site of a new dairy feed mill in Livingston County, where CNY Feeds is betting on continued growth in New York’s dairy industry.
Growth isn't limited to the Rochester area, where Fairlife is building a major facility in Webster. Chobani is planning a $1.2 billion facility in Rome and Cayuga Milk Ingredients completed a facility to more than double its Aurelius workforce in 2025.
“There’s a lot of expansion on the processing side,” said Karl Bitz, president of CNY Feeds. “Once you have all that extra processing, that unlocks the opportunity for these dairy farms to have more cows.”
The facility in Avon will be built on 17 acres off of William Bruckel Drive — a location shielded by trees but close to Interstate
390 and the Livonia, Avon and Lakeville Railroad, with a spur servicing the feed plant. The new facility is within the Greater Rochester Transload and Logistics Park operated by the railroad. Construction is expected to finish in summer 2027.
The industrial park is within a planned development district within the Town of Avon, which made for an easy, if thorough, approval process, Bitz said.
Transportation costs limit how far feed can be shipped competitively, so ready access to rail and highway connections is a benefit, as well as a facility to tap into one of the state’s major dairy regions.
“At a certain point, if you have to drive a truck too far, you can’t really compete,” Bitz said.
The family-owned company has operated out of the same feed facility in Jordan for 35 years, which currently feeds more than 125,000 cows daily. It’s the largest independent dairy feed mill in New York and provides custom feed blends based on plans typically developed by the farmer’s nutritionist.
The initial facility provided feed for the Bitz family’s Plainville Turkey Farm before transitioning to exclusively dairy farm feed. The Avon facility is the first geographic expansion for the company and Bitz expects it to be very different in layout and philosophy, with a focus on efficiency and automation. The new facility is expected to match the current one in capacity, but with phased expansion could process as much as 50% more.
“My philosophy has always kind of been if you’re not growing, you’re just dying slowly,” Bitz said. “If we don’t do this, someone else is going to do it, right?”
CNY Feeds expects to hire about six to eight employees at the new facility, growing to 12-15 if a second shift is added. Aside from maintenance, the positions are specialized so everyone has experience with receiving the feed mixes, making the feed mixes and loading the trucks, as well as general upkeep and cleaning.
The facility blends feed, so there aren’t any energy intensive processes on site, and farmers provide their own formulations, so there aren’t on-staff nutritionists. So the complexity is not in the blending, but in doing a lot of it and doing it efficiently, Bitz said.
The approach has been successful in Central New York, with the business growing almost entirely through word-of-mouth referrals and no advertising or sales staff. Now the same approach is coming to see if it can compete in Western New York.
“It’s exciting,” Bitz said. “And it’s going to be interesting to come out here and compete with all the other operations around here.”
This article originally appeared on Rochester Democrat and Chronicle: Dairy feed company expands into WNY with Avon mill | Exclusive
