Quoted: Dry conditions have been holding pretty steady for the past month or so, said Christopher Kucharik, a climate researcher and professor of agronomy and environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The longer they continue, though, the more intense drought becomes, with southeast Wisconsin moving from a moderate to severe level as June started and hot weather descended.
For the first time, cotton seeds will germinate and grow in space over the next few days, under the supervision down here of UW-Madison botany professor Simon Gilroy.
Gilroy says he wants to clarify this is not to supply fabric for those in orbit. “Yeah, our classic joke when talking about the experiment is the astronauts are going to make their own suits. It’s not what’s its for,” Gilroy tells WUWM.
A professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is taking his experiments to new heights at the International Space Station (ISS).
Dr. Simon Gilroy is a botany professor at the university. An experiment he and colleagues have been working on for the past three years is now making its way to the ISS after being launched Thursday.
Perhaps you are a person who works full time at another job but dreams of owning a small farm someday. Or maybe you already operate a farm but want to add another enterprise or start a side business. Whatever your aspirations may be, some of the first steps in making this goal a reality is to create a plan and secure funding.
That was the topic discussed in a University of Wisconsin Division of Extension webinar, titled “Your farm startup: where to begin and who can help?” One of the speakers was Andy Larson, the Farm Outreach Specialist for the Food Finance Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. With personal experience as a banker, extension educator, and farmer, one of his first pieces of advice was to “get some dirt under your fingernails.”
“Try it first,” Larson said. “Only real-life, on the ground experience can tell you whether your passion stands up to the daily grind.”
Quoted: “The denominator part, or the biggest piece of that, was really that imports declined,” said Mark Stephenson Director of Dairy Policy Analysis at UW Madison.
While it’s too soon to tell now, experts believe that increase could widen because of the pandemic.
“We had restaurants and other institutional portions of sales just decline precipitously during much of 2020,” Stephenson said.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket scheduled to blast off Thursday from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center will carry 48 seeds from the UW-Madison botanist’s lab to the International Space Station, where astronauts will attempt to grow them in a system developed in Madison.
Quoted: “Cows in cities were milked every day, and people would bring milk in carts back to their neighbourhoods to sell it,” says John Lucey, food science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“As cities got bigger, milk got further away and took longer to get to the consumer, which meant pathogens could multiply.”
Quoted: “If it’s going to be dry at any point during the growing season, this is a good time of year for it to be dry,” said Mike Ballweg, Sheboygan County crops and soils agriculture agent at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Extension.
Noted: The DNR worked with the Wisconsin Geological and Natural History Survey, the United States Geological Survey and the University of Wisconsin System to complete the research. The agencies looked at several different potential impacts, including recreation, fish, aquatic plants and water chemistry.
Noted: Jumping worms were first identified in Wisconsin in 2013 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Arboretum. Just eight years later, the worms have been reported just about everywhere in the state and are highlighted as an invasive species by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.
“They are, if not in every county, close to it,” said Brad Herrick, an ecologist at the UW Arboretum.
Quoted: The lack of data on queer BIPOC farmers is also prevalent in academia, said Jaclyn Wypler, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies queer and transgender sustainable farmers in conservative rural communities. Wypler was recently hired as the Northeast project manager of the Farm and Ranch Stress Assistance Network at the National Young Farmers Coalition.
“There is discrimination for BIPOC folks and queer folks within academia, including within the environmental and rural and agricultural departments,” Wypler said. As a result, research studies that highlight their experiences are difficult to adequately fund.
Quoted: Sarah Botham teaches agriculture and life sciences marketing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She said the Cheeselandia campaign is a successful example of the way that agriculture is trying to “market smarter” and with a new customer in mind.
“They are reaching, first of all, people who are really interested in Wisconsin cheese and secondly people who are of a younger demographic,” Botham said. “That generation is interested in not just eating but in understanding where their food comes from, in experiencing the food and sharing it with friends.”
UW-Madison Division of Extension has a new farm management podcast series based on the Wisconsin Agriculturist magazine’s Agrivision column. Katie Wantoch, associate professor and agriculture agent in Dunn County, hosts the podcast episodes and chats with fellow Extension educators to answer questions from farmers and share their knowledge and expertise on how farmers can improve their farm management skills.
Steve Deller, ag economist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said he agrees that many traditional lenders like banks and credit unions have remained conservative about investing in new projects since the Great Recession.
But Mark Stephenson, dairy policy analyst at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said you would never know it just by looking at Wisconsin’s total milk production for the year.
A new memorial scholarship at University of Wisconsin-Madison is honoring former dairy science professor Dave Wieckert, who died in May 2020 at age 88.
Growing cow numbers and increased milk production have dairy experts walking on a knives edge when predicting the trajectory of milk prices for the coming year.
Mark Stephenson, director of Dairy Policy Analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and director of the Center for Dairy Profitability and Bob Cropp, emeritus professor in the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics, delved into the factors impacting milk prices for 2021 during the February “Dairy Situation and Outlook” podcast this week.
The conversation came from a panel at the Growing Stronger virtual farming conference, hosted by the Midwest Organic and Sustainable Education Service (MOSES), University of Wisconsin-Madison programs and other farming organizations.
UW-Madison and its affiliated entities are an economic engine contributing $30.8 billion a year to the Wisconsin economy, according to a new report commissioned by the university and funded by UW Foundation.
Amy Wallner is one of the farmers who enjoy digging up data for the University of Wisconsin’s Seed to Kitchen Collaborative. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison in horticulture and soil science, she learned through the Department of Horticulture website about the collaboration, which aims to come up with delicious vegetable varieties that grow well in the Upper Midwest
Quoted: Melissa Kono is an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who works in community development and is raising a family on a farm. “Work-life balance,” she said, is not a farming staple.
Paul Mitchell, director of the Renk Agribusiness Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said farmers, like many people, faced a lot of stress in 2020. He said the pandemic brought both emotional stress, as COVID-19 spread in rural areas, and stress for their profession, due to disruptions to supply chains and consumer eating habits.
Joy Kirkpatrick is an outreach specialist for the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Dairy Profitability who meets with farmers to help them navigate farm succession planning.
Kirkpatrick said she thinks the opportunity for anonymity online could make some farmers feel more comfortable sharing tough realities.
Professor emeritus of dairy science and former dean of the University of Wisconsin-Madison College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, Neal Jorgensen, passed away at 85 on Dec. 22.
Quoted: Paul Mitchell, director of the Renk Agribusiness Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the forecast is slightly higher than last quarter’s estimate, partly because of a price rally for corn and soybeans seen around harvest time.
“Cash revenues, from soybeans especially, are up compared to where they were in September. It’s rare to have prices go up at harvest when everyone is bringing crops in,” Mitchell said
Quoted: Some native plants are tied to the survival of a specific species. Like milkweed and monarch butterflies. Experts at UW-Madison say people planting milkweed in midwest have helped monarch populations survive.
“Basically right now we have thousands of people that are working to preserve monarch habitat, and i really think that without these efforts monarchs would be a lot worse off,” said Karen Oberhauser, director of the UW-Madison Arboretum.
Quoted: “It’s really important that we don’t just anthropomorphize cows based on our human experience, but we do know that they can experience negative emotions like pain and fear that we want to minimize,” said Jennifer Van Os, an animal welfare scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “On the flip side, they can have positive experiences like pleasure, reward and contentment that we want to try to promote.”
Quoted: “Pandemic cooking is a real thing,” said Mark Stephenson, head of dairy policy analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Restaurants have used a lot of butter, but we’re seeing greater sales even going through retail now than we did the sum of retail and restaurants before that.”
Noted: Dairy farming is 365 days a year, and James Baerwolf grew up knowing exactly what that meant. His parents made him look at other careers, but as soon as he was done with college at UW-Madison he returned right to the farm.
A new initiative based at UW-Madison is helping others do the same in a bid to boost Wisconsin’s struggling ag economy while promoting healthy food and the environment.
25. Grassland 2.0 Aims to Replace Soy and Corn Farming with Perennial Pasture in the Upper MidwestThe University of Wisconsin-Madison project will help farmers transition to pasture-based systems to protect the environment and boost rural livelihoods while meeting demand for grassfed meat and dairy.
Joe Lauer, an agronomy professor for the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said farmers were grateful for more normal weather patterns this year after an extremely wet season in 2019.
No longer sequestered in an aging building in a space that was about equal to a garage with a few chest freezers, Bucky’s Varsity Meats, formally Bucky’s Butchery, has a shiny new home with a glistening meat counter, several glass doors for refrigerated and frozen products and bunkers filled with hot dogs, snack sticks and tubes of summer sausage.
Quoted: Joe Lauer, an agronomy professor for the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said farmers were grateful for more normal weather patterns this year after an extremely wet season in 2019.
“There’s a little more peace of mind, if you will, in kind of going through what I just call an average normal production season,” Lauer said. “We’re going to end up with record yields but it’s just kind of easier psychologically to take.”
Shawn Conley, soybean and wheat specialist for UW-Madison’s Division of Extension, said a lack of precipitation throughout the state at the end of summer caused the USDA to lower their forecasted yields to 53 bushels per acre. That’s six bushels, or almost 13 percent, higher than last year.
But Conley said most farmers were happy to have the dry weather.
“That allowed farmers to have a lot of days in the field that they can push through and get their crops out of the field in a timely manner,” Conley said.
“We’re shedding farms,” Randy Jackson remarks grimly one autumn day over video conference. A professor of grassland ecology in the department of agronomy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Jackson points to the fact that a record 10 percent of dairy farms in his state of Wisconsin shuttered in 2019, another milestone for a local economy that led the nation in farm bankruptcies last year.
Restaurants nervous about ordering cheese they can’t use are buying products just one month in advance versus their typical approach of booking purchases up to a year early, said Mark Stephenson, director of dairy policy analysis with the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The population of students at the University of Wisconsin interested in farming reflect these numbers — only 8% of UW’s Black students are in the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences. Senior Assistant Dean of CALS Thomas Browne said this lower diversity is largely due to Black students having less familiarity and knowledge of agriculture.
“The vicious cycle between climate impacts on disease and disease impacts on climate is striking,” said co-author Aimée Classen, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and director of the University of Michigan Biological Station. “Our study highlights that scientists need to incorporate both animals and disease into the experiments and models used to predict future carbon emissions.
In addition to Ezenwa, Koltz, Deem and Classen, the study’s co-authors are David J. Civitello and Matthew Malishev of Emory University; Brandon T. Barton and Zoë E. Johnson of Mississippi State University; Daniel J. Becker of Indiana University; Maris Brenn-White of the Saint Louis Zoo; Susan Kutz of the University of Calgary; Rachel M. Penczykowski of Washington University; Daniel L. Preston of the University of Wisconsin-Madison; and J. Trevor Vannatta of Purdue University.
Paul Mitchell, director of the Renk Agribusiness Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said farmers were already expected to receive $37.2 billion in direct government payments this year, according to projections from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Working with the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the department surveyed 2,871 farmers at the start of the year. It’s the first time the agency has done the survey since 2010.
The University of Wisconsin- Madison and Wisconsin Cheese Makers Association received $6.13 million to help dairy farmers amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
The survey was developed by DATCP with UW-Madison College of Agricultural and Life Sciences (UW-CALS) and distributed in March, just before the outbreak of COVID-19, according to a DATCP news release.
UW meat science program partners with Vita Plus to distribute surplus pork.
The Wisconsin Farm-Related Fatality Report, which was inactive between 2006 and 2020, is now being updated again to offer insight on the state’s ag-related deaths.
The report said Wisconsin farm fatalities reached 41 in 2017 and 34 in 2018, a rise from the last report, which claimed 25 deaths in 2006. Researchers Bryan Weichelt and John Shutske recently resurrected the annual report, which was not updated for 14 years.
Shutske, an extension specialist and professor in several ag health and safety programs at University of Wisconsin-Madison, said it’s important to remember that these aren’t just statistics – every number represents a real person, someone’s parent or child. He said he hopes farmers have a self-interest in preserving farm safety and preventing accidents. Growing up as a child on a farm himself, Shutske said he knew people who wore farm injuries, like a missing limb, as a badge of honor.
Noted: Sandy Stuttgen, an ag educator for the University of Wisconsin-Madison extension, says the first signs of eye irritation are tearing, tear stains and squinting, which get progressively worse as pink eye continues to develop. Pink eye may also appear as an opaque spot on the cornea. Conjunctivitis and corneal ulceration may also occur, she writes.
Paul Mitchell, director of the Renk Agribusiness Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the list is not surprising given the geographic size of the counties and the number of farmers located there.
Mark Stephenson, director of dairy policy analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said that larger operations are able to contain certain costs in ways that smaller operations can’t.
In Wisconsin, for example, the state’s Department of Agriculture Trade and Consumer Protection produced an eight-point list of rules that farmers markets must follow during the COVID-19 pandemic. Meanwhile, the Wisconsin Department of Health Services produced a four-point list—which has since disappeared from the internet—that contradicted the eight-point list. Between May 1 and mid-June, however, the University of Wisconsin-Madison Division of Extension reconciled the two lists with a third set of instructions.
Joy Kirkpatrick is an outreach specialist for the Center for Dairy Profitability at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She thinks farm families will utilize the service, not only for its convenience but also for the anonymity telehealth services provide.
Planting of corn and soybeans was a week ahead of the five-year average this spring. But Jerry Clark, agricultural agent for the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Division of Extension in Chippewa County, said cooler-than-normal temperatures kept crops from growing at the usual pace.
Quoted: “The sharp drop in May was the result of the COVID-19 virus shutting down schools, universities, restaurants and food-service which caused a big drop in the sales of milk, cheese and butter,” Bob Cropp, a University of Wisconsin Cooperative Extension professor emeritus, wrote in a recent column.
Today, wild garlic is found only in parts of Central Asia, but it may once have grown wild from China to India, Egypt and Ukraine, according to Philipp W. Simon, a research leader at the Agriculture Department’s Agricultural Research Service and a professor in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s department of horticulture. From those ancient beginnings, garlic has traveled the globe to become one of the world’s most important vegetable crops.
Rebecca Larson, an associate professor of biological systems engineering at the University of Wisconsin, has studied the climate effects of agriculture and the biological processes that take place when microorganisms break apart manure.
Rebecca Larson, an associate professor of biological systems engineering at the University of Wisconsin, has studied the climate effects of agriculture and the biological processes that take place when microorganisms break apart manure.
The number of people who are uncertain where their next meal is coming from is likely beyond anything seen in recent history, according to Judi Bartfeld, food security research and policy specialist with the Division of Extension at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Mark Stephenson, director of dairy policy analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the USDA program likely focused on processors who already produce retail-size packages.
Quoted: “It’s kind of like a family that’s involved with their children in sports,” said Richard Halopka, a University of Wisconsin-Extension agent from Clark County.
“Not having the state fair would be a big letdown. But, unfortunately, this year it’s a sign of the times,” Halopka said.
“It looks like cow numbers are still going up and milk production is still going up, so there’s countervailing forces,” Jared Hutchins, a researcher in dairy economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said by phone.
Bob Cropp, emeritus professor of agricultural and applied economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the trend has already continued into 2020 despite price improvements at the end of 2019.
“We definitely can see shortage of products in the grocery stores,” said Jeff Sindelar, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s College of Agricultural and Life Sciences with an expertise in meat processing. If the larger processing plants continue to shut down or operate with limited capacity, certain products may be unavailable and others could get really expensive, he added.
