Quoted: “Stock markets tend to react very quickly, but then unless there’s some real material damage, you’re gonna get a reversion.” said Mark Copelovitch, Professor of Political Science and Public Affairs at University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Noted: Scientists say the last two decades have been the warmest on record in Wisconsin. Among them is Steve Vavrus, a senior scientist with the Nelson Institute Center for Climatic Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“No season has been immune to the warming trend,” he said. “Winter has warmed the most. That has been true in the past, and it’s expected to be true in the future.”
Quoted: Heather Schlesser is an agriculture educator for the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Division of Extension in Marathon County. She said the state has seen many producers transition out of dairy farming, which requires a lot of land for growing feed.
“They were transitioning out of dairy, making that decision to retire because they’re getting older. Or maybe they’re still younger, but they’re switching into beef production,” Schlesser said. “You can only do that for so long before you’re like, ‘You know what, I really don’t need this land. I don’t want to deal with the renters anymore. There’s no one new coming on the farm.’ And then they’re just deciding to sell it off.”
Intentional conversations around farm succession and developing future plans for the farm provides a better chance of transition success. University of Wisconsin-Madison Division of Extension will provide resources during the webinars to assist families in transition discussions and planning for the future.
Quoted: America’s Dairyland continues to set the bar high, and some of the credit can go to the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Dairy Research, which just added a cheese cave and copper vats to continue helping cheesemakers develop recipes and grow.
“This is part of our new building,” said Andy Johnson, who also holds the role of program coordinator for the Wisconsin Master Cheesemaker program. “Outside of Europe, the ripening caves, there is nothing like it particularly for research and development. We have 10 different ripening rooms or aging caves, each with their own controlled environment. We’ll be able to make any style of cheese.”
Researchers from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and other universities recently published the findings of a four-year study called Baby’s First Years, which looked at the impact of “poverty reduction on family life and infant and toddlers’ cognitive, emotional, and brain development.”
Quoted: UW-Madison Environmental Science expert Andrea Hicks says the news is fantastic.
“It’s really, really exciting, actually,” Hicks said. “We need to reduce the environmental impact of aviation.”
Aviation, Hicks explains, puts a considerable amount of carbon dioxide into air every year. “Biofuels” like the ones being produced at Virent are one solution.
“What’s really exciting is these are ‘drop in replacement’ biofuels,” Hicks said. “What that means is you can use them just the same way you use traditional aviation fuels, but they’re made from plants. And that has a lower carbon footprint. So there’s less environmental impact. It’s really, potentially the future of sustainable aviation.”
The University of Wisconsin Traffic Operations and Safety Lab is studying autonomous vehicle technology using a new autonomous shuttle called the Badger.
Noted: The report found nitrogen from manure and fertilizer exceeded rates recommended by University of Wisconsin scientists in eight of the nine counties. In four counties, nitrogen from the two sources went more than 50 percent beyond proposed rates, including Kewaunee County where it was applied at nearly double recommended levels. Residents there have long struggled with nitrate contamination of private wells.
A new report by the Environmental Working Group and Midwest Environmental Advocates (MEA) has found that in nine counties, animal manure is over-applied to farmland, exacerbating rural Wisconsin’s water quality struggles. According to the report, four counties applied manure at more than 50% above the rate recommended by University of Wisconsin researchers to minimize pollution.
Quoted: What’s not good is to be the town that’s only a short ways from a retail hub because people will easily go there instead of shopping locally, according to Steven Deller, a professor and community development specialist with University of Wisconsin-Madison Extension.
“You don’t try to compete head-on with a Walmart because they will chew you up and spit you out,” Deller said. However, businesses can gain customers from being in the same plaza as one of the big chains, or at least near it.
Noted: Fetch Rewards has offered customers incentives for purchasing products from partner brands like General Mills, Frito Lay and Unilever. Points earned on purchases can be redeemed for gift cards from Amazon, Target and Starbucks.
“We see a huge opportunity in that there’s probably 100 million U.S. households we should be very well plugged into, but today we only have 13 million active monthly users,” said company founder and CEO Wes Schroll.
Schroll started the company in 2013 when he was a sophomore at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It’s now valued at more than $1 billion, making it part of an elite group of startups called “unicorns.”
Quoted: Menzie Chinn, an economist with the Robert M. LaFollette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is skeptical of the idea that federal pandemic relief spending is the primary cause of recent inflation.
“It’s certainly part of the explanation – but other economies (UK, Euro Area) have also seen an acceleration of inflation,” Chinn says, with higher oil prices, continued supply disruptions and other factors being the main contributors. “One could argue that part of the inflation is due to too little spending, say, on childcare support, which would enable parents to work.”
Mark Copelovitch, a La Follette School political scientist whose work looks at the intersection of economics and politics, says that the ability of the U.S. to finance its debt at virtually no interest shows that the marketplace — essentially, the world’s lenders — isn’t worried about the sustainability of the economy.
On inflation, he considers shortages such as in semiconductors, a key component of cars, or the spike in energy prices, not pandemic relief aid, as leading culprits for rising prices. “Most of what’s driving the inflation is global supply chain issues during a pandemic,” Copelovitch says.
He credits pandemic relief, in the form of direct aid to households as well as other forms of support as well as directly to the state, for preserving incomes, keeping businesses going in the pandemic, and enabling the economy to recover much more quickly than it might have otherwise.
“The reason we have this big surplus now in Wisconsin and elsewhere is because all the other things basically prevented people’s incomes from going down — which meant tax revenue didn’t crater like we worried it was going to,” Copelovitch says.
There are plenty of indicators that farmers across the country are starting 2022 in a strong financial position, said Paul Mitchell, director of the Renk Agribusiness Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
While the roots of JK Williams Distilling in Peoria, Ill., go back to prohibition, the business is a career change for UW-Madison alumni Andy Faris and his wife, Stacy Shunk Faris, a Madison native. The former co-owner of Taste of Minnesota, Faris bought the business in 2019.
Quoted: While other states brag big dairy and crop industries, Wisconsin’s insulation from fertilizer price spikes is thanks to having more cows per acre than corn per acre, according to Paul Mitchell, a professor in the UW-Madison department for Agriculture and Applied Economics.
“About a third of our nitrogen for corn comes from dairy manure,” Mitchell said. “And we have more cows per acre of cropland.”
However, manure isn’t easily accessible. It’s difficult to transport due to its high water content and therefore large volume, so it can’t usually go beyond it’s own farmland or crop farms neighboring dairy farms.
But it’s lack of transport ability shouldn’t dissuade you from seeking it out, according to Matt Ruark, a professor of soil science at UW-Madison and soil nutrient expert.
“We think of [manure] as a waste stream, but it is has relatively high nutrient value in terms of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. Those are big three nutrient inputs into our corn production systems,” Ruark said.
Jeremy Solin’s earliest memory from his family’s longtime syrup business is with his grandma, sitting at a kitchen table, pounding a nail through the top of a metal Folgers coffee can.
They wound a piece of wire through the can so they could hang it from the spout on a tree.
“We just used whatever we had, right?” he said.
Solin is a fourth-generation syrup producer with a farm just north of Antigo. He’s the maple syrup project manager for the University of Wisconsin-Extension and he runs Tapped Maple Syrup in Stevens Point.
Part of the UW Institute for Business and Entrepreneurship, the Food Finance Institute expects to take on four cohorts of 15 businesses grouped by specialty.
Construction crews will erect the research facility next to Exact’s corporate headquarters on 5505 Endeavor Lane inside University Research Park on the West Side. The lab and warehouse are additions to Exact’s Discovery Campus on 1 Exact Lane, which is located between Schroeder Road and the Beltline on the Southwest Side.
Quoted: Last month, scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Michigan State University released results of a study revealing that society’s reliance on rock salt is salinating Lake Michigan.
Even small increases can trigger unknown ecosystem changes and secondary effects such as drinking water pipe corrosion, said Hilary Dugan, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Limnology and lead author of the study.
Lake Michigan is still “extremely fresh” water, Dugan said. “There’s no cause for alarm. But I think people should be aware that it is rising and that is fully because of human-derived salts.”
Aaron Olver is managing director of the nonprofit UW-Madison affiliate, which is designed to provide a space for commercializing discoveries made on campus. “At our core, we’re a real estate operation,” Olver said. “Our job is basically to create homes where innovation companies, particularly (ones) affiliated with the university, can get started and can grow and can thrive.”
A class of fourth graders from Green Bay public schools recently submitted questions about renewable energy and the environment to WPR’s “The Morning Show.”
Greg Nemet, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s La Follette School of Public Affairs, joined the show to answer those questions.
Valentin Picasso, an agronomist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said researchers in his field have known for a long time that planting perennial crops in farm fields has a long list of environmental benefits.
The plants’ year-round presence protects the soil from erosion and helps absorb nutrients that would otherwise runoff into lakes and rivers. The forages, which are used for livestock feed, also create an environment for increased biodiversity and can even help fix carbon into the soil, mediating the effects of climate change.
“We’ve shown, in looking at long term research here in Wisconsin, that the more diversity we have in a cropping system, the more resilient it is to weather extremes like drought. And we’ve also shown that the more perennials in the system, we have more stability in production,” Picasso said.
Quoted: At the beginning of the pandemic, the rate of inflation was almost zero and prices were falling, said Dr. Menzie Chinn, an economics professor at the UW-Madison La Follette School of Public Affairs.
In response, the government passed robust support packages — including stimulus checks, enhances unemployment benefits and tax cuts — to boost spending. The spending those programs created was concentrated more on goods than services, Chinn said.
“We have kind of a weird time where people have shifted more towards buying goods and we get a lot of our goods from China and abroad,” Chinn said. “So that means you have this collision, at least in the goods sector, of enhanced demand and not quite enough supply to keep up. And what happens is prices go up. Supply and demand.”
Quoted: Recruitment and retention has always been difficult in corrections due to grueling work conditions and lower pay, according to Jirs Meuris, assistant professor of management and human resources at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“You have a job that’s already difficult to get people to apply to, to join and then to retain those people. And then you add a labor shortage, as well as a pandemic, that’s going to make that job even harder to do,” said Meuris.
Noted: Jeff Sindelar, associate professor in the meat and science department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, agrees 100% with the European influence when it comes to Wisconsin’s sausage skills.
It started with people with strong meat-processing skill sets putting down roots here, but having people who wanted to purchase those foods provided a sustainable market throughout the generations.
Wisconsin was also well-positioned geographically to help carry on those traditions, Sindelar said. Being located between the large population centers of the Twin Cities and Chicago, the latter with its famous stockyards, brought railways to Wisconsin.
A study released by UW-Madison economist Noah Williams says eliminating the personal income tax and raising the sales tax would jump start Wisconsin’s economy.
Quoted: The U.S. last experienced rampant inflation four decades ago. “We have very short memories,” says Steven Deller, an economist in the University of Wisconsin College of Agriculture & Life Sciences. “We don’t remember what it was like during the 1970s and early 80s, so this is unusual.”
In a recent analysis, Menzie Chinn, an economist at the UW’s Robert M. La Follette School of Public Affairs, writes that inflation averaged just 1.7% in the last decade, at times “raising concerns that inflation was too low.”
But while the current inflation might have first looked like the economy playing catch-up after prices tumbled early in the pandemic, it has since “overshot the trend,” Chinn adds. Big-ticket purchases — cars, appliances and other so-called durable goods — are showing the sharpest increases, Chinn writes on his blog Econbrowser. High real estate prices and rental costs have also been a factor.
Quoted: People are quitting their jobs at nearly twice the rate they did before the pandemic. And they’re not in a rush to come back, Michael Childers, University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Business professor, said.
“Workers are more selective and have that opportunity right now based on the job market. And that almost becomes self-fulfilling. It’s sort of this sustaining cycle that we’re in,” Childers said at Tuesday’s event.
Quoted: Jeff Sindelar is a meat specialist for the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Division of Extension. He said most of the price increases have been in fresh meat products, with more processed items like hot dogs or lunch meat seeing small price growth or none at all.
But Sindelar said the meat industry is “too dynamic” to clearly point to the factor that is driving up prices.
He said farmers are facing increased costs to raise animals. But price changes are more likely to come from the processing companies, which have a greater influence on what consumers pay for products. Sindelar travels the state to work with all sizes of meat processors, and he said they’re seeing higher production costs, too.
“Regardless of where I go, I get the same response: they can’t hire enough people, they have open positions. When they’re trying to produce products, it’s taking them seven days to produce five days worth of product,” Sindelar said. “So 20 to 25 percent more resources to produce the same amount of product as they once did.”
Mark Stephenson, UW-Madison’s director of dairy policy analysis, said mixed market signals for dairy farmers could be keeping prices from increasing as rapidly as other food groups.
“Our future markets are showing that we would expect higher (commodity) prices over the next several months. But we’ve also had a few reports that are kind of pulling back on those reigns a little bit. One of them are the stocks reports,” Stephenson said.
Casavant, 34, who has a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, founded the company in 2012 with his UW lab-mate Erwin Berthier, 38, who is the company’s chief technology officer. They had studied microfluidics, which deals with the behavior and control of very small volumes of fluids in networks of channels, in the lab of UW-Madison professor David Beebe.
Quoted: “We’re learning that it’s pretty easy to turn the economy off. But it’s really hard just to flip the switch and turn it back on,” said Steve Deller, a professor in agriculture and applied economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“What COVID has done is, among other things, it’s changed the risk-benefit calculation that workers do,” said Menzie Chinn, a professor of public affairs and economics at UW-Madison.
Noted: University of Wisconsin Administration: Up to $5.7 million to create a “workforce-ready curriculum” for students who are incarcerated “to teach employable skills to students while incarcerated and continue supporting them post-release through program completion and career placement.” The program will pilot at UW-Oshkosh, UW-Milwaukee, UW-Parkside, UW-Green Bay, and UW-Madison.
The Flambeau test, rather than needing a swab from inside a patient’s nose, is saliva-based, said Dave Beebe, who is also a biomedical engineering professor at UW-Madison. That makes the test less invasive, and therefore more rapid than traditional ones.
The Entrepreneurial Training Program provides grants of up to $750 to entrepreneurs who complete startup coursework by the Small Business Development Center at the University of Wisconsin. Entrepreneurs must match at least $250, and the coursework must focus on business modeling or business planning.
Jake Wood was a few months out of the Marine Corps in 2010 when a catastrophic earthquake hit Haiti. On the spur of the moment, he and a few other veterans headed to Port-au-Prince and started looking for ways to help. With no organization and no supply chain, it was a haphazard response. “The only thing we got right is that none of us died,” he said.
Noted: Jake Wood is a Wisconsin School of Business alumnus and played football for the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Quoted: Joe Lauer, agronomy professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, reviewed historical weather data at the UW Research Station in Arlington to see how dry 2021 was. The statistics date back to 1963.
He found this summer was similar to some of the driest years the station had on record, including 1988 when the station saw some of its worst corn yields.
“In the southern two tiers of counties in Wisconsin, we had some pretty dramatic drought conditions that farmers were experiencing. And it really didn’t let up until probably the end of September,” Lauer said. “We were dry most of that time. But having said that, we seemed to get a little bit of rain … that allowed the crop to keep going.”
Quoted: “Much of that is because they themselves don’t necessarily feel like they are experts in money management,” said Melody Harvey, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies how public policies affect financial capability.
“I imagine that most parents wouldn’t want to intentionally mislead their children or give wrong information,” she said.
A decade ago, Urban and J. Michael Collins, a professor and financial security researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, were part of the team that examined outcomes in Texas and Georgia after those states implemented a financial education requirement.
They looked at students’ credit reports through age 22 and found students were less likely to have a negative item on their credit report. They also borrowed more — showing they could better fill out applications for things like credit cards or a car loan — and had a lower delinquency rate on those loans than their peers in states without the graduation requirement.
“We saw that those kids who had the financial education had basically fewer mistakes in their early 20s,” Collins said.
Quoted: “I think we are in a very good position because of the number of dollars that are flowing in this direction. The federal government is now turning on the hose,” said one of Tuesday’s panelists, Barry Orton, professor emeritus, telecommunications, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“I would say that for municipalities and other public entities that are looking to provide broadband to their citizens, this is going to be their window of opportunity,” Orton said.
Quoted: “Prices have clearly gone up, and we’re seeing that trend continue,” said Peter Lukszys, University of Wisconsin School of Business expert on logistics and supply chain management. “Consumption during last year was down because fewer Thanksgivings were being celebrated. This year there is more demand, and when there is more demand, it is more likely to have shortages.”
ACanadian nonprofit that seeks to sow the seeds of entrepreneurship around the world has joined forces with UW-Madison and major employers to teach startups and college students how to run a company.
By all accounts, University of Wisconsin-Madison Chancellor Rebecca Blank brought much-needed administrative skills to an organization that had taken its share of hits.
But now that she’s headed to the top job at Northwestern University the future of the state’s flagship university — and in some sense, of the state itself — hangs on one key question:
Will the Board of Regents bring in another administrative guru or will it seek out a leader who can finally unlock the potential we all know is there? Someone who can oversee the translation of UW-Madison’s world-class technology into world-class applications for the global marketplace.
Dr. Vallabh (Samba) Sambamurthy is the Albert O. Nicholas Dean of the Wisconsin School of Business. A leading expert on how businesses compete in the digital economy, Dr. Sambamurthy’s work has been featured in leading academic journals. Several Fortune 500 firms have engaged him as a consultant.
Interview with Peter Lukszys, senior lecturer with the Grainger Center for Supply Chain Management.
Interview with Heather Kirkorian, a professor of Human Development and Family Studies at UW-Madison.
Jake Dean, director of the Grangier Center for Supply Chain Management at UW-Madison, discusses why the flow of consumer products has slowed across the nation and how it is affecting Wisconsin.
Noted: Joe Lauer is an agronomy professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and UW-Madison Agronomy and UWEX state corn specialist
Quoted: For many growers and researchers, this points to one thing.
“That is definitely the expression of climate change,” said Professor Amaya Atucha, a fruit crop specialist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
She said increasingly extreme variability in temperature and precipitation is making it difficult for fruit trees to thrive.
Quoted: “About 31% of preventable transportation-related manure spills are due to operator error,” said Kevin Erb, University of Wisconsin-Madison Division of Extension conservation professional training program director. “An accidental spill is not illegal, but failing to properly report and clean it up is.”
Quoted: “There isn’t a lot of evidence in the data that people are staying home,” said Laura Dresser, an economist and associate director of COWS, a University of Wisconsin-Madison policy research center, noting the state’s continued above-average labor force participation.
Other factors, such as the continued difficulty in finding child care, are likely keeping people from working who would otherwise want to do so, she said. One reason for Wisconsin’s higher labor force participation rate is that more women are in the state’s workforce, and are likely to be disproportionately affected by the disruption in child care.
Dissatisfaction over pay and frustration with customers who angrily object to masking have given restaurant and hospitality workers reason to pursue other jobs instead, said Steven Deller, of the UW Extension’s agricultural and applied economics department. “There’s lots of little things going on here,” Deller said. “I think a lot of folks are simply saying, ‘No — do I really want to do that any more?’”
Noted: This year in Wisconsin, a fall armyworm population is present unlike anything most entomologists have ever seen. The pests are doing damage to alfalfa, winter wheat and other cover crops around the state. Bryan Jensen, UW-Extension Pest Management Specialist, shares that this warmer fall weather has helped to create a perfect storm for fall armyworms to thrive. Fall armyworms are different from the normal armyworms seen during late spring. The good news, according to Jensen, is they will most definitely not over-winter here in Wisconsin: they are a warm weather species, and will not survive the winter
Tom Erickson, the director of the new UW-Madison School of Computer, Data and Information Sciences, brought a message of statewide engagement with industry to a meeting of the Wisconsin Technology Council board of directors. From tourism to agriculture, and from manufacturing to transportation, computing and data is changing how those sectors perform while inventing new industries along the way.
Video: Dairy is a top industry in the Badger State, where more than a million cows produce some of the nation’s best cheese, milk and ice cream products.
Quoted: Megan Moreno, principal investigator of the Social Media and Adolescent Health Research Team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says Haugen’s interpretation of the internal research squares perfectly with other work done on social media, especially Instagram.
“For a certain population of youth, exposure to this content can be associated with diminished body image, or body image concerns,” Moreno says. “I didn’t feel like it was tremendously surprising.”
Many businesses are adopting sustainable principles and practices, which is changing the way business and economics are taught in higher education. We talk about how the UW-Madison School of Business is integrating concepts of environmental sustainability into its curriculum, and we learn how this fits within the new framework of capitalism.
Quoted: Steve Deller, professor of agricultural and applied economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said he thinks the new technology makes the plant a worthwhile investment for state tax credits and will hopefully help the state’s dairy industry move into the future.
“This is a pretty good shot in the arm for the Wisconsin dairy industry,” Deller said. “Any time we see new investment like this is a positive sign because a lot of the growth in the dairy industry has really not been occurring in Wisconsin.”
A recent survey by the Wisconsin Center for Nursing and the School of Nursing at UW Madison shows an impending nursing shortage.
Anywhere from 10-20,000 nurses plan to retire in the next 10 years, and that could cause a crisis for the state. Right now many healthcare companies are finding it hard to staff nurses, so many are offering bonuses and high salaries to professionals from out of town.
Quoted: Although Congress has come to this precipice many times before, the perception is that the two parties are more “locked-in” than before, and that has people worried, said Menzie Chinn, a professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin’s La Follette School of Public Affairs and expert on fiscal and monetary policy.
“This is the first time where it may not just be [political theater] but it is actually a case where they very well may not [pass an increase to the debt ceiling], and the consequences are big,” Chinn said. “When you shut down the government, essential services still continue, but if you hit the debt limit, you have to stop payments.”
Quoted: Amaya Atucha, fruit crop specialist for UW-Madison, said she and other researchers are grateful to the cranberry growers that let them host projects on their marshes. She said worrying about the crops was a common issue that held back progress.
“When we want to study things related to an invasive insect or a disease in which you really have to let that disease take over your marsh or your production bed, you’re not going to do that in a grower’s commercial marsh, because the grower makes their living out of the fruit,” Atucha said.
Interview with Christine Whelan, clinical professor in the Department of Consumer Science
at the School of Human Ecology, about new docuseries from Amazon Prime, detailing the rise and fall of LulaRoe, a multi-level marketing company.
