The sudden closing of Castelli America’s plant in Blockville last week is bad news for nearly 100 Amish families who sold their milk to the cheese plant.

It’s also yet another troubling sign for companies that try to do business in New York state.

New York state and Chautauqua County combined to throw roughly $8 million at Castelli America as well as roughly $600,000 at Empire Specialty Cheese, Castelli’s predecessor in the former Fairbank Farms building, in 2013. Despite that massive investment, 67 people find themselves out of a job three weeks before Christmas while the aforementioned Amish families face uncertainty as well.

What happened?

A combination of production issues and the loss of a couple of big customers made the Blockville plant unprofitable, and the Italy-based Reggio Emilia, Castelli’s parent company, decided it wasn’t in a position to keep the Blockville plant afloat.

An economic development strategy that focuses on throwing money at companies to get them to locate in New York state is an absolute crapshoot for taxpayers. New York state and Chautauqua County economic development officials have thrown heaping piles of money at two companies to fill the Blockville location. Empire Specialty Cheese ran out of money despite millions of dollars of investment. More free money didn’t keep Castelli America in business, either.

It turns out, according to NPR, that there is a glut of cheese in the United States. NPR reported earlier this year that there is 900,000 cubic yards of cheese in storage — enough to wrap around the U.S. Capitol building. The stockpile started to build several years ago, in large part because the pace of milk production began to exceed the rates of consumption, says Andrew Novakovic, professor of agricultural economics at Cornell University. Over the past 10 years, milk production has increased by 13 percent because of high prices. But what dairy farmers failed to realize was that Americans are drinking less milk. According to data from the USDA, Americans drank just 149 pounds of milk per capita in 2017, down from 247 pounds in 1975.

“What has changed — and changed fairly noticeably and fairly recently — is people are turning away from processed cheese,” Andrew Novakovic, a professor of agricultural economics at Cornell University, told NPR. “It’s also the case that we’re seeing increased sales of kind of more exotic, specialty, European-style cheeses. Some of those are made in the U.S. A lot of them aren’t.”

Why, then, have New York state and Chautauqua County thrown money at two cheese companies? Smaller, craft-type operations stand a chance. Processed cheese makers seemingly do not. Rather than throw money around like a drunken sailor, perhaps our economic development officials need to do a bit of research before approving loans and incentives.

That isn’t to say that no incentives are needed to get companies to locate in both New York and, more specifically, Chautauqua County. They will be. It’s the unfortunate nature of the beast. Development officials can be much more discerning before giving your money away. It may not have been known in 2016 that processed cheese consumption was going to decrease precipitiously, but it was likely known in 2018, when New York state grants were given to Castelli to help the company expand. Simply granting money at that point was probably a bad investment of state tax dollars. A simple phone call to Cornell University officials likely could have predicted the grants were a shaky bet — if anyone had thought to ask.