"This may be an opportunity to improve our farmer-owned business," he adds. The dairy cooperative will explore tax breaks and other financial assistance from local, state or federal governments to rebuild the plant. Insurance will cover most of the structural and equipment damage and the loss of three million pounds of butter that was at the plant at the time of the fire. Even with that coverage, Furth says some changes in a rebuilt plant are necessary to account for new building code requirements and technology changes.
AMPI says construction could begin in the spring. Some of the butter-processing and packaging equipment that wasn't destroyed by fire has been moved to an undamaged area of the plant and a limited amount of production has resumed, the dairy co-op says.
About half of the plant's 130 employees have been retained to work on cleaning up the plant site.
AMPI is a dairy cooperative owned by farmers in Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin and adjoining counties in neighboring states with annual sales of more than $1 billion from processing and marketing dairy products. The New Ulm plant was the co-op's only butter-making plant among its 13 facilities.
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