The map is meant for horticulture, not agriculture, said Chris Kucharik, a plant and agrosystem sciences professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, because farmers in the Midwest have largely been planting the same crops for decades.
Since the last map was released in 2012, all of Wisconsin’s hardiness zones have shifted about half a zone warmer, said Laura Jull, associate professor in the plant and agrosystem sciences department at UW-Madison.
“These are issues that have festered for a quarter of a century or more,” says Peter Carstensen, an emeritus professor at the University of Wisconsin law school who focuses on antitrust issues in agriculture. “So we’ve finally got an administration that says: ‘We get it, there are some problems here. Maybe we should do something.’”
Column by Carolyn Ihde, Small Ruminant Outreach Specialist for UW-Madison Extension and Iowa State University Extension & Outreach
In a poorly ventilated room in a dairy lab on ninth floor of UW-Madison’s Animal and Dairy Sciences building, more than $1 million of research equipment sits on decades-old desks. An average-looking air purifier on the floor nearby keeps the machines running.
When the University of Wisconsin’s Center for Dairy Research publicized it was looking for a new crew of cheese tasters, the response was exuberant, as you might expect in a state known as the country’s cheese capital.
Dane County is home to more than 170 dairy farms, according to state records. It’s unknown how many provide housing to workers, but a recent statewide study on immigrant dairy workers by the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School for Workers found that close to three-quarters of surveyed workers lived in employer-provided housing, typically on the farm
With support from the agriculture industry, UW-River Falls agreed the program was a good fit for the university, given its strong ag programs. Faculty in the university’s College of Agriculture, Food and Environmental Sciences (CAFES) designed a program and worked to recruit students. They sought funding, some of which could come through a proposed bill currently before the state Legislature.
Lola Loustaunau, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School for Workers, said that “it would really open the door for a lot of protections for workers” if OSHA consistently inspected small dairy farms that provide housing to immigrant workers.
“If they are politically interested in doing something,” she added, “it looks like they have all the basis to do it.”
A new cow pen created by a UW-Madison researcher includes a feed bunk, salt blocks and and beds of straw on which the animals can lounge between milkings. Only the pen isn’t on a plot of prime Dane County farmland or nestled in the rolling hills of Green County.
Instead the pen is part of a new game on an app designed to help dairy farmers better understand and learn more about how to interact safely with their cows.
Ron Kean, poultry specialist for the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Division of Extension, said prices are still elevated compared to before last year thanks to the broad impact of inflation.
“We’ve seen transportation costs increase and feed costs increase and labor costs and things like that,” Kean said. “I don’t know if we’ll ever get back to the prices we saw pre-COVID, but they’re certainly down from what they’ve been in the last year.”
Sandra Stuttgen, a former veterinarian and current agriculture educator for the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Division of Extension, said the new requirements are a part of the federal agency’s efforts to address how animal use of common drugs is contributing to the global problem of antibiotic resistance.
“As humans, if we have a condition where we need antibiotics, we want them to work,” she said. “They’re trying to protect the antibiotics that are of human significance, so it’s the drugs that humans and animals share.”
Amanda Gevens, potato and vegetable pathologist for the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Division of Extension, said potatoes are already generating heat heading into harvest through a process called respiration. If weather conditions raise the temperature of the tubers even further, that can make it difficult for farmers to properly cool them down for storage.
“There may not be adequate cooling air available to get control of this heat load,” Gevens said in an email. “Refrigeration is a great option to cool potatoes at harvest, although the system must have the capacity to handle the high heat load and fresh air also must be provided to purge carbon dioxide.”
Some of the early results over the weekend included the Intercollegiate Dairy Cattle Judging Contest won by the University of Minnesota, with three Wisconsin schools, UW-Platteville, UW-Madison and UW-River Falls, finishing fifth, seventh and eighth, respectively.
“As a physician, I believe that these deaths are almost completely preventable,” said Bill Kinsey, a physician and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Until we determine as a society the importance of a human right for people to work in healthy situations, we are going to see continued illness and death in this population.”
The nonprofit National Young Farmers Coalition surveyed more than 4,300 farmers ages 40 and younger in 2022, with the help of the University of Wisconsin Survey Center. The biggest challenge faced by current, former and aspiring young farmers: finding land.
The Farming and Industry Short Course is moving to UW-River Falls after over a century at UW-Madison.
Rains like Monday’s downpour will help catch up on lost rain and relieve crop stress from the drought earlier this summer despite rainfall being “fairly normal” during the corn pollination period from July 15 to Aug. 4 compared to the past 30 years, said Joe Lauer, an agronomist at UW-Madison and expert in corn research.
A conservative estimate from a recent University of Wisconsin-Madison study puts the number of undocumented Hispanic workers on medium-to-large farms at roughly 6,200. That figure excludes the many immigrant workers on smaller farms, those with fewer than 500 cows.
Dairy farmer Sarah Lloyd says consolidation in the industry has allowed processors, distributors, and retailers to keep consumer prices high even as farmers are paid less. “There’s been reduced competition in the marketplace,” said Lloyd, who’s worked as a food systems scientist for the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems.
“Farmers don’t have the power to push back…and consumers are also getting a raw deal,” she said.
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.
For 37 years, the Center for Dairy Research (CDR) has helped innovate the dairy industry.
“Cheese-making has been around, there are lots of different guesses right now, but probably somewhere in the region of 8000 years,” CDR and University of Wisconsin Madison Professor of Food Science John Lucey said.
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.”
The University of Wisconsin-Madison and Alliant Energy are partnering to build a solar park that will also serve as a research center to explore mixing solar and agriculture, soil impacts, water issues and more.
Shereen Siewert welcomes Wisconsin bestselling author Michael Perry and University of Wisconsin Center for Dairy Profitability Farm Succession Outreach Specialist Joy Kirkpatrick for a discussion on farmer well-being and mental health.
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.”
A new solar farm is being developed on land owned by the University of Wisconsin southwest of Madison with the aim of finding a better balance between green energy and agriculture.
00:12 / 01:02UW-Madison looking for cheese tastersYou can now make money eating cheese. But before all of you apply for the job, the Center for Dairy Research says it’s not all fun and games.
Few places will pay you to eat a bunch of cheese—but the University of Wisconsin-Madison is one of them.
Before you dust off your resume, it is worth noting that the job is based in Madison, Wisconsin. But if you think you’re up for the job, you can apply directly to the position by visiting the University of Wisconsin-Madison website. Best of luck!
“Not that it’s not a good job or anything, but I think sometimes people see us as fanciful. It’s just eating cheese,” said Brandon Prochaska, the center’s sensory coordinator.
“But when people see us operate, they’re kind of impressed with how intensive it is, how quickly we can evaluate things,” he said.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Dairy Research is looking to hire a descriptive sensory panelist – in other words, a dairy taste tester – to join “a group of expert tasters” who can talk about their sensory experience, according to the job posting.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison recently put out a job advert for a “descriptive sensory panelist” at its Center for Dairy Research — basically, a fancy way of saying “food taster.”
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.”
Emma Vos spent much of her childhood feeding calves and milking cows on her family’s 120-herd dairy farm. Now, she’s a sophomore at the University of Wisconsin-Madison studying agriculture business management with plans to run the family farm in Maribel, just south of Green Bay, after graduation.
Noted: Thanks to more than $3 million in grant funding, the University of Wisconsin-Madison now plans to establish 90 sites to monitor weather and soil conditions throughout the state by fall of 2026. The state currently has 14 weather stations.
Chris Kucharik, a UW-Madison agronomy professor, is overseeing the university’s effort to build the new network. He recently joined Wisconsin Public Radio’s “The Morning Show” to discuss how more weather and soil reports could be used and how researchers will decide where to build the new stations.
A report from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Division of Extension found the average price of agricultural land sold in the state last year was $5,551 per acre. That’s 11 percent higher than in 2021 and nearly 24 percent higher than in 2020.
Heather Schlesser, the Extension agriculture educator who prepared the report, said the sustained increases trace back to the cash farmers received from federal COVID-19 assistance programs. She said at the same time, many farmers decided it was the right time to sell land.
“It’s all about give and take, supply and demand,” she said. “There’s not a lot of ag land out there. So if there’s more money out there and there’s less land, the farmers that are selling are going to want more for it. So I think that started driving it.”
Researchers surgically insert cannulas into the animals to study the ruminal digestive process. Cows are not fed through the porthole-like devices and “absolutely” need to eat with their mouths, Heather White, the Dairy Innovation Hub faculty director at the University of Wisconsin, told USA TODAY in an email.
Vice Chancellor for University Relations Charles Hoslet said that the university has positively impacted every part of the state since it was founded in 1848. “From the beginning, UW–Madison has been a vital contributor to the state’s industry and economy, and has helped raise people’s standard of living,” Hoslet said.
“Planting early with soybeans especially can be really profitable,” said Sam Bibby, a regional crops educator with the UW Extension, covering Sauk, Vernon and Juneau counties.
After nearly five years of construction, new upgrades to the Babcock Hall Dairy Plant and a three-story addition for the Center for Dairy Research are finally complete at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
State-of-the-art renovations to UW-Madison’s Babcock Hall are expected to revolutionize the Wisconsin cheese industry and bring the university’s iconic dairy production back to campus after a three-and-a-half year hiatus.
A 130-year-old program created to connect Wisconsin farmers with university research is getting a second chance at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls.
UW-Madison announced last year that the Farm and Industry Short Course would move from a 16-week, on-campus certificate program to a non-credit format that would use online learning. Officials said the change was due to a significant decline in enrollment, with less than 100 students each year over the last decade. With only 20 students projected to enroll in the program for 2022, officials said it no longer had enough students to run the self-funded program.
Dane County resident Dominic Ledesma is one hobbyist who jumped on the early warm weather. Ledesma, who is chief diversity officer for the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Division of Extension, started tapping trees at his home and his family’s cabin in Jackson County last year after learning about the craft from his colleagues. He said sap was flowing in when he first tapped his trees in February, but collection slowed down in Jackson County as the weather turned cold again.
“The season really didn’t take off,” he said. “In talking with other colleagues in Extension, I certainly noticed some very significant differences between the southern part of the state and Jackson County.”
“It’s no longer your grandmother’s pickled beets,” said Adam D’Angelo, a UW-Madison graduate student and plant biologist. “You go to the grocery store, and you find beet juice, beet chips, beet this and beet that.” D’Angelo and UW-Madison horticulture professor Irwin Goldman recently appeared on Wisconsin Public Radio’s “The Larry Meiller Show” to discuss their work redesigning beets for modern tastes. Goldman said people often complain “about the fact that they taste like dirt.”
“You look at it, and you think of the huddled masses of our ancestors and their old-style foods,” Goldman said. “But there’s something about its earthiness, about its color and its beauty that I find has grown on me over the years I’ve worked on it.”
The first runner-up, with a score of 98.61, was Vintage Cupola American Original Cheese, a hard raw milk cheese made by Door Artisan Cheese Company in Egg Harbor for Red Barn Family Farms in Appleton … The Cupola cheese was developed with the Center for Dairy Research at UW-Madison.
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.
Noted: Chicken flocks are still down 5% to 6%, said Lou Arrington, an emeritus professor of poultry sciences at University of Wisconsin-Extension who works with the Wisconsin Poultry & Egg Association. That may not seem a lot, but it has an outsized impact because demand for eggs is “inelastic” — it doesn’t vary much as prices rise or fall, he said. Bakeries and other food producers’ need for eggs hasn’t changed, and consumers have sucked it up and continue to pay prices that may make them gasp, Arrington said.
“I don’t think the individual producer has a lot to say about it,” he said of the nationwide forces that have driven up prices.
The group (Farm Well Wisconsin), founded in 2020, is funded through a five-year grant associated with the Wisconsin Partnership Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health. Through trainings, community members work on building empathetic listening skills, connecting people with resources and discussing issues related to farm culture.
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.”
There might be a new way to think of one particular species of invasive snail being found in Wisconsin’s water: as a part of a gourmet meal.
At least that’s the approach Minneapolis chef Yia Vang and Titus Sielheimer, a fisheries outreach specialist for the University of Wisconsin Sea Grant, made this summer, when they filmed themselves harvesting and cooking up Chinese mystery snails in northern Wisconsin.
Noted: Soaring prices for cattle, land, and everything else, have made it difficult for someone to get started in dairy farming.
And soon there will be one fewer educational resource available as University of Wisconsin-Madison shuts down its School for Beginning Dairy and Livestock Farmers, which has graduated around 600 budding farmers since the 1990s.
The non-degree program has offered instruction in what’s called “grazing,” a type of dairy farming where cows graze on pastures for most of their food rather than consuming a diet of grain and spending most of their time indoors. In addition to classroom instruction, the program has offered on-farm internships, business planning assistance and mentoring.
Even after a year of record high inflation, economic forecasts show 2022 was a good year to be farming.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service estimated that national net farm income will reach $160.5 billion for the year. That’s 13.8 percent higher than in 2021 and roughly 50 percent higher than the 20-year average, according to ag economist Paul Mitchell.
Mitchell, who leads the Renk Agribusiness Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said part of the prosperity comes from COVID-19 aid from the federal government, which helped kick-start demand after an initial downturn at the start of the pandemic.
“We’ve had unprecedented levels of commodity support for agriculture for a couple years and then really good prices,” he said.
Quoted: “Farm fatality numbers remain alarmingly high, and because a farm is like any other dangerous industrial workplace, the types of hazards are many,” said John Shutske, Ph.D., professor and agricultural safety specialist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Many continue to be concerned with the high number of deaths on public roadways. Clearly, as farms get bigger and farmers need to spend more time on the road moving from farm to farm/field to field, we are going to see more and more risk on roadways.”
Quoted: “It may be hard to set another record in 2023, but there is a possibility of increased exports,” Robert Cropp, professor emeritus at University of Wisconsin-Madison Cooperative Extension professor said in a recent column.
Each dollar of net farm income results in an additional 60 cents of economic activity as farmers spend money in their local communities, according to University of Wisconsin research.
An unconventional yet burgeoning project looming on the horizon of the grow-your-own movement is the development of cultivated, or cultured meat. It is real animal meat and seafood that is produced by cultivating animal cells, according to the Good Food Institute (GFI). Backers say it reduces the land and water pollution caused by large-scale meat agriculture.
Masatoshi Suzuki is a researcher and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In recent years, Suzuki’s lab has worked in collaboration with GFI to create a prototype of a beef patty grown from the stem cells of a cow.
It looks as if the University of Wisconsin-Madison is getting ready to close down the School for Beginning Dairy and Livestock Farmers, which has graduated almost 600 budding farmers after training them in grazing practices as well as business planning for their new operations.
The school was founded and directed by Dick Cates, a Spring Green beef farmer who also served on the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection’s citizen policy board and various state sustainability panels.
Noted: Bleeding hearts (Dicentra spectabilis) are an extremely common plant grown all over the U.S. They show off unique flowers that are heart-shaped and white, pink, or red depending on the cultivar, notes the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This easy-to-grow plant thrives on its own with little human intervention. It will grow happily in shady gardens beneath large trees as long as the soil is well-draining.
