2026 New York State Fair "Pauses" Dairy Cow Birthing Center

Good News Arrives:

Tuesday, July 6th, we received unexpected but long hoped-for news. The New York Animal Agriculture Coalition announced via their facebook page that the Dairy Cow Birthing Center would be “taking a pause” and would not be featured at the fair this year. We were thrilled to hear this. We continually run an awareness campaign and coalition focused on animal agriculture exhibitions and exploitation at state and county fairs. As part of that campaign, a primary goal has been to close The Dairy Cow Birthing Center at the New York State Fair in Syracuse.

Notably, the announcement from the NYAAC and the fair did not include any specifics about the reasons for the decision. While they remain purposefully vague about their reasons, we know that over four years of pressure has not gone unnoticed. We continue to see more and more people discovering the negatives of live birth demonstrations every year, in part due to our advocacy work. So, what actions might have contributed to this decision? Let’s look back at the last few years.

But first…

What is the Dairy Cow Birthing Center?

The Dairy Cow Birthing Center at the New York State Fair is a program of the New York Animal Agriculture Coalition (NYAAC). While the NY State Fair is taxpayer-funded, The Birthing Center is funded by the NYAAC and corporate sponsors.

The NYAAC chooses dairy farms to participate in the Birthing Center. The farms transport five or six cows who are due to give birth around the time of the Fair to the Birthing Center, where they are induced so that they will give birth in front of the audience. The farms switch out every two days. In 2025, 29 calves were born at the Fair. They were all separated from their mothers within minutes, never to be reunited.

The Campaign to Close It

In 2022, as a part of our fair coalition, we published this page about fair exploitation, and specifically about the Dairy Cow Birthing Center. That was the beginning of several years of advocacy against this exhibition. Next, we launched a petition asking for the end of the Birthing Center exhibition. We hoped for 6,000 signatures and, over the years, we gathered thousands more as the public continued to learn.

Several years in a row, we attended the New York State Fair with the goal of capturing footage of the animals being exploited. We watched mothers laboring, babies being born and taken away within an hour, and volunteers explaining away the issues involved in dairy farming. We saw posters proclaiming the environmental benefits of dairy farming and the family-friendly nature of the industry. Then we got to work showing the public how skewed all of this information was and how much harm it truly did to the cows involved. From a 2023 post:

5 Things We Saw At The New York State Fair Birthing Center:



1. We saw signage saying how dangerous it is for calves to be around their mothers. In the background, cows were gentle around newborns and only posed a danger when humans came in to disrupt them and move the mother cow into a chute.

2. We saw volunteers say that cows have some maternal instincts, but don’t really care about their babies and are ultimately bad mothers. In the background, cows tried to care for their calves before these calves were taken away.

3. We heard volunteers say how much safer calves were with humans. In the background, a newborn calf fell out of the sled he was placed in while volunteers were distracted.

4. We saw volunteers stress how calves are born with no immune system, while putting 30 minute old newborn calves in pens where the general public could touch them, before the calves ever received colostrum (milk from their mother which helps build their immune system)

5. We saw signage saying that these farms are “family owned” — evoking small facilities. In the background, farmers talked about their farms with thousands of cows on site.

6. (Bonus!) We were told as attendees that we could find out more information about how dairy farmers are conservationists in the horticulture tent. When we went there, there was no information. Please sign our petition to end this display.

This is dairy.

We began to see subtle but clear changes made to the exhibition based on our coverage. For example, our 2023 viral video about “bakery waste” showcased as feed at the Birthing Center reached hundreds of thousands of people. They were alarmed to see that plastic refuse was being fed to dairy cows. In 2024, the feed exhibit was still there, but the bakery waste sample was absent.

Also in 2024, after we published the video of the calf falling out of the sled from the previous year, we noticed that the exhibition did not use the sled to move calves while we were on site taking photos. We later saw on the livestream that they went back to using the sled after we had left. That year, we continued to garner signatures on our petition and even ran a billboard in Syracuse directing the public to a website that detailed why the Birthing Center, and fairs at large, are unfair to animals.

In 2025, after confirming that local and beloved grocery store chain Wegmans was still a sponsor of the Birthing Center, we published a new petition asking them to pull their support. Over 2,000 people signed this, and many reached out to Wegmans publicly as well. Pressure was mounting and we hoped to see Wegmans off the list of sponsors the following year. However, the news that came this year was even better than we could have hoped. No Dairy Cow Birthing Center at the NY State Fair in 2026!

It’s been a lot of work, but from 2022-2026, we have reached millions through social and traditional media, educating and advocating for the closing of the Dairy Cow Birthing Center. From year to year, we have seen the NYAAC make subtle adjustments to their practices that appear to line up with specific critiques we have made, and finally we’re seeing a pause on this exhibition that we hope will become permanent.