Category: Agriculture

Shawn Conley is a soybean and small grain specialist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He said many farmers who just finished harvesting winter wheat brought in quality grain. Conley said soybean fields are also doing OK, but they’ll need at least an inch of rain per week until September to reach their best yields.

“If we don’t get rain, we’ll start seeing a yield hit on the soybean side of things,” Conley said. “Corn is a different matter. I think we’ve already started to see some corn yield losses out there.”

Leonard Polzin tracks dairy markets at the UW-Madison Division of Extension. He said the state is feeling the effects of a post-pandemic lag in milk demand.

“Total supply is up, and demand is down. We’re increasing inventory, cows keep producing every day, and we just can’t turn it off. Our inventory numbers of all dairy products are increasing, and buyers know that. Buyers are not hungry for product,” explained Polzin.

Leonard Polzin is dairy markets and policy specialist for the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Division of Extension. He told Wisconsin Public Radio’s “Central Time” that most dairy processors have ongoing recruitment efforts and continue to think about ways to compete with employers hiring from the same labor pool. But he said processors are also starting to pay more attention to advancements in technology and how automation could make jobs easier or replace them altogether.

“If they can take what once was done by 10 people and do it by one person through the advent of additional investment, that’s always a topic of discussion,” he said.

Farmers across the Midwest are again dumping volumes of milk down the drain as an oversupply floods the markets. We talk with Leonard Polzin, UW-Madison Extention’s Dairy Markets and Policy Outreach specialist, about what’s causing the milk surplus and how long it may last.

Josh Kamps is a crops and soils educator for the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Division of Extension in the southwestern region. He said crop conditions vary greatly across his area, even from farm to farm.

Kamps said producers who were able to plant early in the season got enough rain to get crops started, allowing the plants to grow deeper roots that tapped into water farther below the surface as soils dried out.

“We have areas where crops were planted a little bit later, maybe toward the end of May,” he said. “Those crops are really struggling. These last couple of rain showers this week are going to definitely help.”

July is a key month for corn pollination, making the next few weeks all the more critical for the crop. That’s according to Jason Otkin, an associate research professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who specializes in drought.

“We’re entering a really important time of the year now for the corn crop — pollination in July is so critical. So if we stay dry, and if we get really unlucky and have a big heat wave, that’s going to do quite the number on the corn crop,” he told “The Morning Show.”

Quoted: “A lot of things obviously have changed in 15 years, including a lot of cost increases particularly for things like labor and for utilities,” said Chuck Nicholson, an ag economist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “So it has become harder and harder to use that old value to accurately represent what it takes to transform a pound of farm milk into a certain amount of cheese.”

Quoted: At the 2023 Wisconsin Agricultural Outlook Forum this week, Paul Mitchell, director of the Renk Agribusiness Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said part of the decline is likely from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s move to stop past-due debt collections and farm foreclosures during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Quoted: Andrew Stevens, assistant professor of agricultural and applied economics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, said this percentage has been fairly consistent over time and includes forestland, pasture and cropland.

“The analyses that have been done with the data that are currently available really show that foreign ownership of agricultural land in the United States is a pretty miniscule issue, if it’s an issue at all,” he said. “There are no systematic differences across communities with more or less foreign ownership. Land prices don’t seem to systematically differ.”

Quoted: Steve Deller, ag economics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said agriculture experienced the same supply chain issues that almost every industry faced in 2021.

“A lot of the stuff that farmers need to operate were in very low supply. So essentially it’s more expensive for farmers to operate,” Deller said. “It’s like any business. You know, I need to buy a new piece of equipment, but I can’t find it and prices go up.”

Interview with Steve Deller, Professor, Agricultural and Applied Economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison