Deans from the University of Wisconsin System’s three leading agriculture programs were in Grantsburg on Tuesday promoting new funding from state lawmakers aimed at helping the Wisconsin’s struggling dairy industry
Last month, the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Dairy Research and the Wisconsin Cheese Makers Association were selected to host one of three initiative sites. The group received $454,392 to provide grants and workshops to producers and processors in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, South Dakota and Illinois.
Noted: From the moment she interviewed for the then soon-to-opened University of Wisconsin School of Veterinary Medicine, this veterinarian embraced her new community and its grand cow show at World Dairy Expo. Throughout the process, McGuirk helped transform dairy cattle health care.
Quoted: “It’s a shake-out. This is not just a bump on a trend line. This is a pretty big change,” said Mark Stephenson, Director of Dairy Policy Analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
During a visit to a Westby creamery on Monday, U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., says she’s hopeful the Senate will approve an $18 million increase for the Dairy Business Innovation Initiative.
“We’ve not been able to get the corn/sileage off nor the other crops in order to make those applications. A lot of farmers have been waiting for weather conditions to improve so they can get that manure out there,” said Kevin Erb, conservation professional training coordinator with the University of Wisconsin-Madison Division of Extension.
Other items: Members of the committee also voted unanimously to release $1 million this year and nearly $8 million next year provided in the state budget for a UW System Dairy Innovation Hub housed at UW-Madison, UW-Platteville and UW-River Falls. Committee members also voted to release $22.5 million annually in performance-based funding to the UW System.
It’s no secret it’s another tight year for row crop farmers in the Corn Belt and Upper Midwest. Analysts say the uncertainty hasn’t changed.
“That’s the status of the farm economy,” said Paul Mitchell, an economist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “It’s waiting for results for this uncertainty while we go in to harvest.”
Noted: If Wisconsin were to legalize cannabis for medical uses, there would be a net $1.1 billion positive effect, bringing in additional fees and health benefits while potentially reducing opioid overdoses, addiction and traffic fatalities over five years, according to a cost-benefit analysis by the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s La Follette School of Public Affairs. If the state were to decriminalize cannabis, it would save an additional $30 million in decreased criminal justice costs.
When Pyran’s chemical engineering team from the University of Wisconsin-Madison embarked on their new project aimed at tackling the enormous problem of replacing oil to make paints and plastics, they had a feeling they would generate some interesting research, but the discovery they made surprised even them.
Quoted: “Is it backfiring?” Mark Hagedorn, a dairy expert at the University of Wisconsin-Extension, asked about farmers’ decision to back Trump. “I think we can argue that six ways to Sunday.”
UW-Madison is receiving more than $450,000 in federal funding for an initiative aiding farmers and businesses in Wisconsin to innovate and modernize the dairy industry.
Sen. Patrick Leahy says the state of Vermont has won a grant to create one of three regional dairy business innovation centers across the country. The recipients, which includes centers at the University of Wisconsin and the University of Tennessee, were announced Wednesday.
What started as a small tasting in a church basement five years ago has grown to a full-fledged foodie event bringing together hundreds of people to meet UW-Madison professors, plant breeders, farmers and some of Madison’s top chefs.
Quoted: “Usually we’re (harvesting silage) pretty heavily by about the middle of September,” said Joe Lauer, agronomist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “It’s going to be delayed a week or two due to not only some of the cool weather we had in the spring but also due to the fact that there’s a lot of corn that was just planted late.”
White is an associate professor of environmental justice within the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies and the department of Community and Environmental Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the author of the new book “Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement” (UNC Press/2018).
Noted: Under one bill, $224,000 would pay for two new employees within the University of Wisconsin Center for Dairy Profitability in Madison to help farmers with financial decisions related to the transfer of their operations to a new generation or new owners.
The “Our Farms, Our Future” package would create two farm-succession planning positions at the University of Wisconsin Extension, implement a student loan assistance program for beginning farmers, and provide grants to small, diverse farms.
The measures unveiled Tuesday, which are part of the “Our Farms, Our Future” legislative package, are sponsored by Democrats but have bipartisan support, increasing their chances of being considered by the Republican-controlled Legislature.
That has made it difficult for farmers to decide when to apply fungicide to crops because it’s based on specific growth stages of the plants, said plant pathologist Damon Smith from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. But an app is helping farmers make better decisions about when to do so.
Quoted: “When I grew up, my mom poured a glass of milk at every meal and you were expected to drink it,” said Mark Stephenson, director of dairy policy analysis at UW-Madison. “My mother would say, ‘Drink your milk because it is good for you,’ and scientists said ‘It’s good for you’ and you believed them.”
In a corn field near Black River Falls, plant pathologist Damon Smith from the University of Wisconsin-Madison points to a section on the edge of the field where the corn stalks get shorter and paler in color.
ARLINGTON — Farmers and corn seed salespeople received an inside look Wednesday at research into corn diseases taking place at the University of Wisconsin’s Arlington Research Station.
Wisconsin’s agricultural economy has been growing even with a steep decline in the number of dairy farms, a new report from University of Wisconsin-Madison shows.
Paul Mitchell, director of the Renk Agribusiness Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the numbers make up a significant amount of the state’s typical corn and soybean production.
Quoted: “The cows did not go away. They were bought up by other farms,” said Steven Deller, a UW-Madison agricultural economist and author of the report.
Quoted: According to Bill Tracy, an agronomy professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, none of the canned or frozen corn at the grocery store is GMO. (Because labeling standards established by the National Bioengineered Food Disclosure Law aren’t compulsory until January 2022, stores don’t have to indicate which corn on the cob is GMO.) As of 2018, only about 10 percent of the sweet-corn acreage planted in the United States and Canada was genetically modified.
The way soil is managed can have a big impact on carbon in the atmosphere, according to Thea Whitman, assistant professor of soil science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: Morgan Robertson, a University of Wisconsin-Madison geography professor who studies market-based environmental policy, is less certain. In the past, lawmakers and industry groups across the country have been too optimistic about farmer participation in water quality trading programs, he said.
“To the extent that that’s an attractive strategy at the state level — the 30,000-foot level — for somebody planning a statewide political response, it’s not necessarily an attractive strategy for Joe and Jane Farmer in Kewaunee County who have other kitchen-table concerns,” he said.
Noted: According to Jessica Cederquist, the administrator for the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s dairy herd, dairy farmers plan well in advance for extreme weather conditions.
Faculty in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s departments of dairy science and animal sciences are preparing a proposal to merge, a move that aims to reorganize and revitalize the university’s historic and internationally known research divisions.
Fischbach co-leads the Upper Midwest Hazelnut Development Initiative, which was formed by the University of Wisconsin and University of Minnesota in 2007.
His seed came from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s titan arum plant, but the plants grow naturally only in the limestone hills of Sumatra. They bloom after seven to 10 years and then once every four years over an expected 40-year lifespan.
That capability is only one among an expanding suite of remote sensing functions made possible by satellite imagery, as well as advances in computing technologies, that researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and elsewhere are using to better understand the planet’s croplands.
Quoted: “Usually we say (corn is) ’knee high by the Fourth of July’ but most of the time, corn is chest high or more by the Fourth of July in many areas of Wisconsin. That’s just not the case this year,” said Joe Lauer, agronomist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: Mark Stephenson, director of dairy policy analysis at University of Wisconsin-Madison, agreed with Bianchi’s assessment.
A new study on the irrigated farms of Wisconsin’s central sands region is suggesting that something farmers in more arid climates have known for a long time is also true in the Midwest: a high concentration of irrigated farms can cool regional climate.And while that initially sounds like a good thing, viewing irrigation as a defense against climate change is not the message, according to Mallika Nocco, lead author of the study out of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The $81 billion state budget the Republican-run Legislature is approving this week includes $8.8 million for research on dairy farming at UW-Madison, UW-Platteville and UW-River Falls. Democratic Gov. Tony Evers is expected to — and should — issue partial vetoes to improve the Republican-proposed budget. But he should leave the Dairy Innovation Hub intact.
Quoted: The filing itself does not guarantee that the government is going to bring charges, but it does suggest that the government is strongly considering them, said Peter C. Carstensen, an antitrust expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Law School.
Liz Binversie, an agriculture educator with the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Brown County Extension, urges cautious optimism for dairy farmers considering diversifying with hemp.
At the American Dairy Science Assn. annual meeting in Cincinnati, Ohio, research on this topic conducted by J. Leite de Campos and P.L. Ruegg of Michigan State along with A. Steinberger, T. Goldberg, N. Safdar, A. Kates, J. Shutske, A. Sethi and G. Suen of the University of Wisconsin was presented.
Quoted: Bob Bradley, a professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin, Madison Department of Food Science and author of two books on the topic of butter, said in an interview that such products are mislabeled. “It is not butter,” he said flatly.
Noted: Will Hsu, president of Hsu’s Ginseng Enterprises in Wausau, grew up on the family farm doing his share of weeding and picking seeds. A University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate in finance and Chinese literature who later went on to earn his MBA from Harvard, Hsu joked he’s likely the only farmer out of his 800 MBA classmates. His father started the business in 1974 and today they farm hundreds of acres, all in Marathon County.
Noted: Bill Tracy leads the sweet corn program at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His work is intended to help the state’s corn farmers.
Carrots have just one land-grant breeder: Irwin Goldman at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Hinchely’s, daughter, Anna, plans to return to the farm after she graduates from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a degree in dairy science next spring.
Noted: If love is a kind of deep knowledge, then it’s possible no one loves beets more than Irwin Goldman, a professor of horticulture at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Agriculture makes up 9% of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. However, farmers receive a disproportionate amount of attention because the heat-trapping emissions from agriculture are primarily due to methane, said Horacio Aguirre-Villegas, a scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison biological systems engineering program.
Quoted: Just how are red grapes turned into pastel-colored wine? We asked Nick Smith, University of Wisconsin Associate Outreach Specialist and Instructor of Wine Science.
“The most traditional version would be to take your red fruit and lightly press it or macerate it for a very short time on the skins to get a hint of color,” he said, noting that longer skin contact will give a deeper color. “And then you ferment it like you would any white wine.”
It may be that more money needs to be appropriated to research at University of Wisconsin System campuses to help the struggling dairy industry. But state Sen. Howard Marklein, R-Spring Green, and 27 other Republicans have taken a partisan path to address the problem.
Quoted: “All farmers know the good times end and the bad times come,” said Paul Mitchell, director of the Renk Agribusiness Institute at UW-Madison.
Each dollar of net farm income results in an additional 60 cents of economic activity, according to University of Wisconsin research.
Joe Lauer, an agronomist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said more rain this week means farmers will likely have to continue waiting. He warns planting late can have a big impact on the crop.
Two Republican legislators want to spend nearly $8 million annually to create dairy research programs at three University of Wisconsin System schools.
Noted: The 2015 price plunge can largely be explained by weakening export demand, according to Mark Stephenson, who directs University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Dairy Profitability and chairs a state dairy task force, that seeks to “maintain a viable and profitable dairy industry.”
Two Republican legislators want to spend nearly $8 million annually to create dairy research programs at three University of Wisconsin System schools.
Noted: Jerry Apps, born and raised on a Wisconsin farm, is Professor Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the author of more than 35 books, many of them on rural history and country life. For further information about Jerry’s writing and TV work go to www.jerryapps.com.
Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue announced the availability of a new web-based tool — developed in partnership with the University of Wisconsin — to help dairy producers evaluate various scenarios using different coverage levels through the new Dairy Margin Coverage program.
Quoted: “There have always been people farming who are women, who identify as women. What has changed is that we’re doing a better job now capturing it,” says Jaclyn Wypler, a PHD Sociology student at the University of Wisconsin.
Quoted: “Coffee drinkers should care. Every sip of coffee is a footprint on the earth, and is that footprint good for birds or not? It’s an open question which this study helps clarify,” says Paul Robbins, dean of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
