According to the most recent data, a University of Wisconsin-Madison School for Workers survey found 70% of the labor on Wisconsin dairy farms is performed by people living in the country illegally.
Aldo Leopold was born in Burlington, Iowa and moved to Wisconsin in 1925. He taught game management at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, one of the first courses for it in the country. Leopold is best known for his collection of essays “Sand County Almanac” that explains the way the natural world works and ways conservation could be used to preserve it.
While conflict can feel messy, it’s not a sign something is broken. According to Hernando Duarte, farm labor outreach specialist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, it’s a reality of farm work.
“In labor-intensive environments like farms and other agricultural operations, conflict between employees [and family] can happen,” Duarte explains. And on farms, that friction is hard to avoid.
“Conflict doesn’t have to be a negative thing,” Duarte says. “When handled properly, it can lead to stronger communication, better teamwork and long-term improvements and innovation.”
Paul Mitchell, chairman of the Agricultural and Applied Economics program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said many farmers weren’t prepared for the drop seen in soybean prices in recent years, and the tariffs compounded the situation.
“It creates a lot of uncertainty,” he said. “That’s the effect of these trade wars.”
The “Old Timer” is gone.
Jerry Apps told the Wisconsin stories of barns, cheese, one-room school houses and circuses. He encouraged children to eat rutabagas, made regular appearances on Wisconsin Public Television and Radio and, when he was not writing from his home in Madison or teaching at UW-Madison, could be found on his farm property in Waushara County, where deer roamed and he grew potatoes in his garden.
Apps, an award-winning author and one of the most prolific storytellers in Wisconsin history, died Tuesday at Agrace Hospice in Fitchburg. He was 91.
Left to expand without any check, our robust deer populations would overrun our natural environment (Wisconsin’s is 1.8 million, up two-thirds from just 10 years ago). As the Journal Sentinel reported, one UW-Madison study found 40 percent of species changes in northern Wisconsin and Michigan forests were tied to over-eating of plant life by deer, from stunting native tree regeneration to wiping out some plants altogether.
“It will help a lot—especially with cash flow issues—because by then, they will be finishing up paying for a lot of the inputs for the ’26 crops,” said Paul Mitchell, University of Wisconsin-Madison Agricultural and Applied Economics Professor. “It will be nice to get some cash flow in from not selling your crop from the payments.”
When Brayan Riascos looks at the Wisconsin cattle herds, he sees untapped potential.
A third-year Ph.D. civil and environmental engineering student from Colombia, Riascos’ research looks at what most consider the least attractive part of dairy and beef cattle — the piles of manure — and he sees what could someday be the building block of a more sustainable plastic than traditional petroleum-based production.
Any plastic made from manure undergoes several chemical makeovers before it’s a finished product, and certainly looks — and thankfully, smells — nothing like its source material.
According to data from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, organic farming in the state supports more than 2,000 jobs and results in about $424 million in revenue. Wisconsin is home to 1,455 certified organic farms, covering 245,333 acres, second only to California, according to the Wisconsin State Farmer.
Anne Pringle, a professor of mycology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said there is a litany of poisoning cases in which people misidentify something because their experience is not relevant to a new region: “That’s a story that comes up over and over again.”
Supporters of isocycloseram said it could help with a pest that’s long shown resistance to insecticides. Russ Groves, an entomology professor and Extension specialist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the insecticide has been evaluated in Wisconsin to gauge its effectiveness at controlling the Colorado potato beetle. The pest eats the leaves off potato plants, resulting in serious yield losses.
“We’ve evaluated this tool alongside others, and we see that it’s a very good fit,” Groves said. “It performs well in controlling the insect.”
Several attempts to reestablish a population of turkeys in the wild in Wisconsin failed. All attempted to use game farm or other captive-reared birds.
But a 1976 change in strategy and source birds proved dramatically different. That project, a partnership between the DNR and Missouri Department of Conservation with assistance from the National Wild Turkey Federation and University of Wisconsin-Madison, transferred wild turkeys from Missouri to southwestern Wisconsin.
Leonard Polzin, dairy markets and policy outreach specialist for the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Division of Extension, said whole milk has benefited from the diet craze around protein, driven in large part by health and fitness influencers online.
“The more protein, the better. Consumers are all about that,” he said. “The other portion is kind of a shift towards healthy fats too. So for example, cottage cheese is having a real moment right now.”
“If we want land to be available to new or beginning farmers, figuring out ways that the land can be affordable for them and still provide the income that the owner generation needs is key,” said Joy Kirkpatrick, a farm succession outreach specialist for the University of Wisconsin-Madison Division of Extension.
University of Wisconsin Madison Division of Extension’s Crops and Soils program defines a carbon credit as, “a certified, tradable carbon offset that is exchanged under a cap and trade system of emissions regulation.” Under that system, companies are allotted a certain number of credits to offset their emissions impact. Farmers who have generated their own credits may sell them to companies who, in turn, may release more harmful emissions into the atmosphere.
he Weather Guys’ Oct. 27 column noted that the Arctic is the world’s fastest-warming region. As the Arctic warms, the temperature contrast between the poles and mid-latitudes weakens, slowing weather systems over North America.
For Wisconsin, that means more multi-day heavy rains, multi-week summer droughts and occasional deep winter freezes, even as average temperatures rise.
Migratory birds are driving up avian flu cases across the country, reviving concerns about U.S. readiness to respond to outbreaks, especially during the government shutdown.
“Corn is one of the biggest contributors to the dairy industry, both in corn silage crop and a corn grain crop, which is also used for foraging,” said Harkirat Kaur, a corn agronomist with UW-Madison Division of Extension Crops and Soils program. Harvesting grain differs from producing silage because it focuses on using the corn plant’s kernels for human food and animal feed, as well as the basis for ethanol biofuel.
Despite worries over rising temperatures, it turns out anglers have a greater effect on fish populations than global warming. That’s according to a new study led by the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“We found that for the majority of the populations so far fishing has far more greater impact than warming on the fish populations,” said Luoliang Xu, postdoctoral researcher at UW-Madison’s Center for Limnology.
Wisconsin’s cranberry industry generates nearly $1 billion annually and supports over 4,000 jobs in the state, according to the University of Wisconsin-Madison Division of Extension. While 2025’s production of the fruit saw a slight decrease from the 6.01 million barrels harvested in 2024, the forecasted 5.3 million barrels will make up roughly 65% of the total U.S. supply.
In Wisconsin, grain farmers will likely face negative margins in 2025 as expected prices for corn and soybeans are below the estimated break-even points for Wisconsin producers, according to projections by the University of Wisconsin-Madison Extension.
In Wisconsin, there were 37,600 women farmers in 2022, accounting for 35.5% of the state’s total producers, according to the University of Wisconsin–Madison. However, some people have a hard time believing that.
“The tariffs are an insult to injury,” said Paul Mitchell, a professor of agriculture and applied economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Mitchell says farmers are now quietly rethinking the Trump administration’s strategies.
“We already have enough problems,” as he puts it. “Why are you making more for us?”
Wisconsin is welcoming guests from around the globe as the 2025 World Dairy Expo is now underway in Madison.
According to a report from the University of Wisconsin-Madison Extension Farm Management program, Wisconsin exported $3 billion of agricultural products in 2024, making agriculture a major economic driver for the state.
One of the University Wisconsin-Madison’s largest student organizations packed a lecture hall in Ingraham with over 200 students in attendance last week. The Badger Cheese Club’s goal is to bring Wisconsin’s cheese culture to their 500 official members.
The club of cheese connoisseurs — established in 2006 — offers its members a smorgasbord of cheese each meeting, educates its members on the differences between all the unique types of cheese made in Wisconsin and builds a strong community among its members with a variety of special events.
Amaya Atucha, a professor and chair of the department of plant and agroecosystem sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says many apple growers in northeast Wisconsin are reporting less-than-ideal crops.
“After a cold winter caused potential damage to apple trees, cool spring temperatures led to delayed and slower pollination, resulting in smaller crops in some orchards in Northeast Wisconsin,” Atucha said in her scouting report.
UW-Madison professor Jimena Laporta Sanchis wants to help dairy cows beat the heat.
While a 70-degree day is welcome news to most Wisconsinites, it’s approaching a heat danger zone for dairy cattle. Due to cows’ much larger bodies and the immense work they must do to process food through four stomachs and produce gallons of milk daily, they’re more prone to overheating and increasingly vulnerable to climate change.
“Honeybees are like livestock,” Hannah Gaines Day, a University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher who studies how pollinators interact with the environment and agricultural operations, told WPR’s “Wisconsin Today.” “They’re like little, tiny livestock that the beekeeper is taking care of, and so they have someone looking out for them and feeding them and giving them medicine if they need it if they’re sick. But the wild pollinators don’t have that.”
Laura Dresser, a co-author of the report and High Road Strategy Center associate director, said in a statement that the 2025 data shows “some real strengths for working Wisconsin owing to the strong recovery from pandemic shutdowns.”
“Long-standing inequalities are still with us, and federal policy puts substantial clouds on the horizon,” Dresser said. “I’m especially concerned about the administration’s attacks on the integrity of federal economic data.”
John Lucey, director of the Center for Dairy Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said there’s no convincing evidence that raw milk offers tangible nutritional or health benefits when compared with the pasteurized product. But even with the best dairy practices and sampling of milk, the risk of illness is far greater, he said.
“A high percentage of the people who get sick are children,” he said. “That’s the thing that really disappoints me. And scares me.”
Johanna Oosterwyk, manager of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s instructional D.C. Smith Greenhouse, says that in general, fall is a great time for planting divided perennials, since the weather is cooler and there is usually plenty of rain to help plants establish. “This applies to digging up and dividing existing plants as well as planting new ones,” she adds.
“So far, Wisconsin’s summer has been warmer than average and also wetter than average,” said Amanda Schwabe, a climate outreach specialist with the Wisconsin State Climatology Office at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Across the state, we’ve been about two degrees warmer than the average and the state has also been about 25% wetter than average.”
An invasive mushroom is spreading across southern Wisconsin and North America, severely reducing the biodiversity of other fungi, according to a new study led by a University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher.
Aishwarya Veerabahu and a team of mycologists from UW-Madison and USDA Forest Service studied the edible golden oyster mushroom, which was brought from East Asia to the United States by mushroom cultivators in recent decades and has spread in the wild.
Christelle Guédot, a fruit crop entomologist and extension specialist in the Department of Entomology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, says that Japanese beetles were once the bane of gardeners and farmers in the southern half of the state, but their range has since spread northwards.
“Over the past 10 years, they have been detected by the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection up in Bayfield. We also trap many hundreds in Spooner and we see them now in Door County,” Guédot said. The beetles have also been wreaking havoc in the northeastern counties, including Oneida and Vilas.
According to the Applied Population Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Green County, where Monroe is located, has experienced a 229% increase in Latinos from 2000 to 2019. That growth has not been accompanied by a surge in murders, robberies, pet-eatings or any other crimes that the current administration has leveled against migrants. Instead Monroe has seen a rise in the number of Mexican restaurants and bilingual masses at the local Catholic church, as well as hardworking community members hoping to make a better life for themselves.
Dane Demo Farms, a collaboration between local farmers, USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service, Dane County Land & Water Resources Department, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison Division of Extension, provides opportunities for farmers to directly research local impacts of conservation practices.
Wisconsin lost thousands of dairy farms in the ‘90s. At one point, farmers received inflation-adjusted milk prices that were 20% lower than in 1960 and about half of the peak price in 1979, according to the University of Wisconsin-Madison Extension.
“Tariffs, either on our part or on the part of our export market destinations, are not helpful for farmers in Wisconsin,” Chuck Nicholson, an agricultural economist at UW-Madison, said. “The longer we keep them in place, the bigger the negative impacts will be.”
“Precipitation for the most part has been maybe a little bit above normal, but not that much,” said Jerry Clark, the regional crops and soils educator at UW-Madison Extension in Chippewa County. “We’ve just had several high humidity, lot of moisture, precipitation days.”
Michaela Hoffelmeyer, an assistant professor of public engagement in agriculture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, recalled interviewing early-career queer farmers who worried that valuable internships and apprenticeships would place them in hostile work environments or unsafe communities.
Queer farmers may also be forgoing good farmland because they want to avoid harassment, Hoffelmeyer said.
A recent survey by UW-Madison shows that 80% of Americans say they go to a farmers market at least once a year.
One study by the University of Wisconsin-Madison found there are “no official statistics on the number of unauthorized immigrant dairy workers.”
“Estimates range from 46 percent; to as high as 90 percent, with the most used estimate being 70 percent,” the report said on Page 11.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison Insect Diagnostic Lab, created in 1978, supports the public and local county extension offices by receiving and analyzing several thousand insect samples each year. Every year, about two or three non-native insect species are discovered in Wisconsin. Some are only annoyances; others bring serious trouble. The latter is the case with the viburnum leaf beetle.
In Wisconsin, the beetle was first discovered in 2014 in counties west of Milwaukee. In 2019, UW-Madison entomologist P.J. Liesch, on a walk with his family, found an infested shrub. This spring, Liesch fielded dozens of questions from gardeners asking about it, as did Lisa Johnson, a Dane County Extension horticulture educator.
While the Wisconsin dairy industry is known to rely on unauthorized workers (it’s believed about 70% of the workforce is working illegally), the majority in the state actually work elsewhere, said Laura Dresser, a labor economist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
From Dresser’s perspective, undocumented workers are especially vulnerable when law enforcement agencies focus more on immigration status and less on violations of workers’ rights.
That culture of fear can create “incentives for some employers to find a way to drive wages and standards down,” Dresser said.
The aesthetic damage is more than just cosmetic. “It’s the most common sawfly found infesting landscapes and Christmas tree plantations,” according to the University of Wisconsin, which notes these sawflies thrive in pines like Scots, red, Jack, and Mugo—common species in holiday tree lots.
During a recent training session for crops and soils specialists, plant pathologist Damon Smith with the University of Wisconsin says growers are experiencing weather that is ideal for corn tar spot infection.
“It’s too early to see symptoms now,” he told them, “but it is likely that infections are occurring and that growers need to be vigilant in their scouting of susceptible fields in coming weeks.”
The grant-funded research will also send University of Wisconsin students to farmers’ markets in Marathon, Portage, Wood, Waupaca and Adams counties this summer through summer 2027 to collect data on things like where are people visiting from, how much money do they intend to spend at the market and other area businesses, and what they love about farmers’ markets, Haack said.
“With county fairs, there’s always a lot of movement of cattle whether it’s within the county or if there are open shows,” Jerry Clark, a crops and soils educator with UW-Madison’s Division of Extension, said. “These cattle are moving across county lines and so it’s just another way that fairs are doing their part.”
One of the greatest privileges of serving as Alice was working with the Dairy Innovation Hub, a collaboration between UW–Madison, UW–Platteville, and UW–River Falls. This partnership allowed me to highlight the incredible research being done in dairy science, from improving sustainability and animal health to advancing food safety and agricultural technology. These researchers and students are writing the next chapter of our state’s agricultural legacy, one data set at a time.
Keith Poulsen, director of the Wisconsin Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory, said the impact was disappointing last year, especially given the amount of work exhibitors put into getting an animal ready for show.
“I’m hoping that with one year of experience under their belt, they feel more comfortable to be able to submit that testing and make sure that we have robust cow classes in these shows,” said Poulsen, whose lab processes all of the avian flu samples taken in the state. “It’s part of our culture, and we missed that last year.”
The effect on U.S. forecasting will be “like losing your eyesight: slow and torturous,” said Jonathan Martin, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Wisconsin.
Americans who have grown up amid the “unheralded revolution” of ever-more-precise weather forecasts will find themselves in a world growing blurrier — even as the weather grows ever more volatile, Martin added.
Both large and small dairy farms in Wisconsin depend on immigrant laborers to fill positions that go unfilled by local workers. Undocumented workers perform an estimated 70% of the work on Wisconsin’s dairy farms, according to a University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Workers study.
The Emerging Crops Accelerator program through Extension at the University of Wisconsin-Madison included fiber flax production in its November 2024 strategic plan. The team has supported Schroeder’s studies through supporting her grant applications and finding her farming equipment.
Comfortable cows have less stress and fewer health problems, according to University of Wisconsin-Madison research.
Moreover, nearly everything in a dairy cow’s life these days is monitored by technology.
University of Wisconsin-Madison agriculture and economics professor Chuck Nicholson explained why the Trump administration’s recent tariffs will lower the price of milk while slashing incomes for American dairy farms, harshly impacting Wisconsin’s dairy industry.
When a Thai princess was looking to reinvigorate her country’s dairy industry, she quickly turned to the University of Wisconsin-Madison for help. The UW-College of Agricultural and Life Sciences answered her invitation with experts from the departments of animal and dairy sciences, and biological systems engineering. They, with financial support from Thailand, recently put their boots on the ground to start an exchange of ideas that will benefit both nations.
Chuck Nicholson is an associate professor of agriculture and economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He said 20% of the milk produced ends up outside the U.S.
Nicholson said he doesn’t expect the dairy export market with China to be significantly impacted for the time being and that’s a good thing for Wisconsin.
“Cheese is definitely important as an export product, and it’s obviously quite important in Wisconsin. The other part about that is that with cheese typically comes whey, and we’re also a major exporter — from the State of Wisconsin — of whey products, and China is also a major market for our whey products as well,” Nicholson said.
“Saving Hearts and Killing Rats: Karl Paul Link and the Discovery of Warfarin” (HenschelHAUS Publishing), by Doug Moe. University of Wisconsin-Madison biochemist led the team that transformed spoiled sweet clover hay into both lifesaving medication and deadly rat poison. In his spare time, this man with strong opinions liked to spar with authority and rivals.
A dangerous bird flu, in other words, was suddenly circulating in mammals — mammals with which people have ongoing, extensive contact. “Holy cow,” says Thomas Friedrich, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “This is how pandemics start.”
A recent survey of Wisconsin’s farmers found that 56 percent of them believe climate change is happening. Another 26 percent think it isn’t happening, and 18 percent are unsure.
Michael Bell, the University of Wisconsin-Madison professor who helped conduct the study, said attitudes and behaviors don’t always match up. Bell found encouragement in how the farmers are acting, not their beliefs. The same survey asked farmers if they are practicing any of 15 different sustainable agricultural practices.
