Quoted: “Everything just grinds to a halt,” said Mike Ballweg, a University of Wisconsin Extension agent in Sheboygan County.
The rules and policies to put the massive piece of legislation in place are largely written by USDA employees at many levels.
“And that’s a mad scramble. They really work hard to get all that in place as quickly as possible,” said Mark Stephenson, director of dairy policy analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The shutdown is “coming at a bad time, for sure,” Stephenson said.
USDA isn’t “writing the checks or doing the things to get payments out to dairy farmers, corn and soybean growers. So that’s a problem,” he added.