During Tuesday's hearing, Brenda McDuffie, chair of the board and president of the Buffalo Urban League, also highlighted an issue that must be resolved: What qualifies as a small farm?
It was McDuffie's lone question during roughly three hours of public comment. The other two members of the state-created board represent special interests, David Fisher, president of the New York Farm Bureau, and Denis Hughes, former president of the New York state AFL-CIO.
McDuffie's question came after the son of a dairy farmer in Lewis County, who is opposed to lowering the overtime threshold, conceded that if it will be changed, smaller farms should be exempted. The farmer's son, Zachary Makuch, who is also a high school teacher, said he would consider a dairy farm somewhere around 500 to 900 cows as small, particularly if family owned.
There are 625,000 dairy cows among the 3,600 dairy farms in New York, according to state data. New York dairy farms yielded $2.7 billion in gross income in 2020.
More than 96 percent of New York dairy farms had herd sizes of fewer than 1,000 cows, according to the most recent federal data from 2017, but more than half of the state's cows are on the 4 percent of farms with more than 1,000-plus cows.
The state is a top-level producer of many dairy products in the country and has remained so throughout the initial implementation of a 60-hour overtime threshold, although smaller farms have threatened they may close if the threshold is lowered to a 40-hour...
; ; ; agreed to pay $17.07 million to settle federal allegations of illegal diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) hiring practices on Friday, marking the Justice Department's first resolution unde...