NE-DBIC Impacts
At the Northeast Dairy Business Innovation Center (NE-DBIC), we support dairy farmers and processors through grants, access to technical services, education, and events that promote the development, production, marketing, and distribution of regional dairy products.
We serve an 11-state region:
Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont.
As of October 2023, we’ve been awarded $45.8 million in funding through the USDA-AMS for projects extending through 2026.
Our funding comes through the USDA-AMS and was established in the 2018 Farm Bill.
At NE-DBIC, we prioritize using funds as grants to dairy businesses.
View our interactive Power BI Dashboard to see regional and state-by-state funding awards:
Past and current grant and contract projects include health and safety training, marketing strategies, grazing transition support, technical assistance, processor expansion, farm innovation, and funding for specialized equipment.
Specific grants include: On-Farm Milk Storage & Handling, Food Safety & Certification, Agritourism, Marketing & Branding Services, Dairy Farm Innovation & Alternative Management, and Processor Research & Development Innovation, among others.
See the current funding programs on our Dairy Grants & Contracts page.
Read what some of our grantees have to say:
In the aftermath and the continuing saga that is COVID, our community (like so many others) has experienced a wide range of disappointments and cancelled events.
This grant encouraged us to continue even during the darkest hours.
The Festival and Trail have been a bright spot and the community has been incredibly grateful and supportive as a result.
~ Jones Family Farm of NY, 2021 Dairy Agritourism Grant
“Having access to a regional resource like NE-DBIC has been a game changer for us. By working with NE-DBIC, the Center for Dairy Excellence has been able to extend our resources to farms outside of Pennsylvania and even more farms in the Commonwealth.
We were able to offer discounts to educational programs that provide much needed training to both producers and their employees through our Summit, the Animal Care Workshops, and the Farm Spanish Basics webinar. This funding also helped us offer technical assistance to sixteen dairy farms looking to grow and expand their value-added businesses in this region.”
~ Jayne Sebright of Center for Dairy Excellence in PA, Dairy Business Viability & Technical Assistance Grant
“The NE-DBIC has provided funding, programming and services that have turned aspirational goals for our farm into reality.
This included opportunities for in-person grazing education, food safety training, and equipment purchase necessary to complete an agroforestry project that will strengthen our farm’s resiliency and respond to the changing climate.
Programming at NE-DBIC has been responsive to the needs of our dairy community and addressed timely, scaled responses to real issues dairy farmers are facing today.”
~ Balfour Farm of ME, Food Safety / Farm Innovation Grant
“The Food Safety Grant was critical in helping us make decisions about our expansion facility and to assess its suitability for a GMP-audit.
In addition, we built a strong HACCP plan and gained knowledge necessary to improve our practices and set ourselves up to serve a broader customer base.”
~ Haven Farmstead of PA, Dairy Food Safety & Certification Grant
“Maine’s dairy farms have experienced difficult years of late, and our organic dairy farms face uncertainty in their markets as well as radical cost increases for organic grain.
For many of these farmers, DBIC grants have been a crucial lifeline, providing individual technical assistance, funding infrastructure improvements that enabled access to new markets, support to help maintain their certification compliance, and the financial backing needed to pursue innovations critical to the success of their businesses that may have otherwise been out of reach.”
~Jacki Martinez Perkins, Organic Dairy and Livestock Specialist at MOFGA
“The most important accomplishment of this project was meeting and exceeding our goal of improving the quality of our milk.
Since this system has been installed, our milk quality numbers have never been better. This has translated into an immediate impact on our monthly bottom line.
The project has improved and strengthened the business relationship our farm has with both our milk processor and its hauling contractor.”
~Bedrock Farm of VT, On-Farm Milk Storage & Handling Grant
Read more about our impact in our Grantee Spotlights on the blog.
We fund research to support dairy businesses across the region.
Along with grants and contracts, NE-DBIC funds research on dairy distribution, market conditions, and marketing to support dairy businesses throughout the region.
Dairy farmers and processors can access the research and resulting resources for free: