INTERLAKEN, N.Y. (WENY) - Lively Run is a goat dairy farm and creamery that makes and sells award-winning artisan cheeses, and as farmers are being forced to dump milk due to oversupply, Lively Run is buying that milk, making cheese, and donating all of it to food banks for people in need during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The dairy farm has felt the impact of the pandemic just like a lot of other businesses as they lost about 50% of their sales in just one night when restaurants closed, so they are asking community members for some assistance to help cover the costs of making this cheese.

"We are buying all of our milk from our goat farms and still trying to maintain our employees at full-time employment so it's definitely put us in a cash crunch" said Lively Run Owner and Head Cheese Maker, Pete Messmer. "So the idea was if we could start a GoFundMe page and get some money rolling in, that would allow us to pay for the milk, and then we're going to be covering our own processing costs, so the ingredients and our employee salaries, and then donating all of the cheese from that to the food banks. We are not trying to profit from this, the money is not going to go into a profit."

After 2 days of creating the GoFundMe page, just under $19,000 has been donated, just shy their initial goal of $20,000.

"We've gotten a huge response on GoFundMe and we just want to thank everyone who's donated so far" said Messmer.

Lively Run plans on donating cheese to food banks by the end of this coming week.

To view the full story, click on the attached video, and to find out more about Lively Run's mission, you can head to their website: https://livelyrun.com/from-the-farmer/help-us-make-cheese-for-food-banks-with-dumped-milk/