Local businesses brace for Trump’s imposed tariffs to tap out local breweries, milk dairy industry

BUFFALO, N.Y. (WIVB) — The recently imposed tariffs by President Donald Trump are already affecting several businesses in Western New York, including a local brewery that’s concerned that the extra cost of goods could tap out the beer industry.

Flying Bison Brewing Company in Buffalo gets a lot of its grain and cans from Canada. With those prices going up, founder Tim Herzog said the brewery will have no choice but to raise its prices. He said this won’t just impact his business, but breweries across the region.

The base malt for a popular type of IPA, called a hazy IPA, comes from Canada. Herzog said a lot of breweries get the malt for this type of IPA from up north. The rising costs will end up spilling over to the customer.

“It stops growth in these companies and it raises prices to consumers,” Herzog said.

After crunching the numbers, Herzog said the 25 percent on tariffs will cost the brewery an extra $53,000 a year.

“That’s a full-time job here, that’s two or three part-time jobs behind the counter or taproom,” he said.

For dairy farms, the problem is even more unsolvable.

AJ Wormuth owns Half Full Dairy, which has locations in Wyoming and Genesee counties, and is also the vice chair of the Northeast Dairy Producers Association. He’s worried the tariffs on goods from Mexico and Canada will milk the dairy industry dry.

“It’s going to have some negative consequences pretty quick for us if they can’t get together and negotiate some solutions,” he said.

The tariffs are raising the price of fertilizer and wood shavings used at many farms in the area. If the cost to produce milk increases, the farm ends up losing that money since milk prices are set by the federal government.

“We don’t have the ability to change that price, so as the costs go up and we can’t recover that in the market and makes our margins even that much tighter,” Wormuth said. “On dairy farms it’s kind of a double whammy.”

The farm was also looking at updating one of its facilities and was told it would cost them more.

“We wanted to renovate one of our heifer barns and we had an order in for stalls, which are steel,” he said. “It was $85,000 dollars and we got a quick phone call saying if we wanted to do it we need to pull the trigger because it was going to be $106,000 dollars really fast.”

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Sarah Minkewicz is an Emmy-nominated reporter and Buffalo native who has been a part of the News 4 team since 2019. Follow Sarah on Twitter @SarahMinkewicz and click here to see more of her work.

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