Wisconsin dairy farms keep going away. It won't change until pro-CAFO WisGOP is out of power.

Just because milk prices have gone up throughout this year, it doesn’t mean that the damage has already been done to Wisconsin dairy farmers. More of that was shown last week when the US Department of Agriculture gave their monthly update on the number of dairy farms in Wisconsin. And it continues a sad pattern that has picked up steam in the last 3 years.

To put it into further focus, the number of farm closings continues to go up, even as the prices rise and the number of overall farms decline. Take a look at the December numbers over the last 4 years.

Dairy farms in Wisconsin
Dec 2015 9,711
Dec 2016 9,343
Dec 2017 8,839
Dec 2018 8,163
Dec 2019 7,337

In other words, since Donald Trump’s election, more than 2,000 Wisconsin dairy farms have closed, and more than 10% of the state’s farms have gone under this year.

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel has had a series of articles on the turmoil in the dairy industry, and the latest installment from Lee Berquist and Rick Barrett went into detail about the advantages that CAFOs and other massive, corporate dairy farms have over smaller, family farmers in today’s economy.

More than half of the milk cows in the U.S. were on dairies with more than 1,000 cows as of 2017, according to the USDA's agricultural census. They accounted for 58% of the nation’s milk. Two decades earlier, those operations had less than 20% of the milk cows, according to USDA data.

On average, dairy farms with 2,000 or more cows have 12% lower feed costs and 20% lower operating costs — per hundred pounds of milk produced — than farms with 100 or 200 cows. The big farms also produce more milk per cow.

“The large-scale operations are making a lot of milk, and they’re doing it efficiently at low cost. It does put a lot of pressure on some of the smaller, often multigeneration, farms," said Ben Laine, a dairy industry analyst with Rabo AgriFinance in St. Louis.

While Wisconsin maintained a larger proportion of smaller dairy farms than most other states during the 20th Century, we also have increasingly seen large dairy operations in recent years, particularly as smaller ones die out.

Yet little will be done about this situation that keeps killing family farms. And a big reason why is because of GOP legislators and the corporate and Big Ag interests that they shill for. The Wisconsin Democracy Campaign connected the dots in a post today.

The state Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection Board was scheduled to meet this Thursday to discuss farm siting rules. But the proposed updates, which would be the first in 14 years, will likely be shelved and a new effort to update them will start next year. It’s likely any changes will not come before the board for several years, according to agriculture officials.

The siting rules enacted in 2006 give local governments siting permit regulations on property setbacks, manure storage, waste runoff management, and odor control. The proposed updates would have increased property line setbacks for manure storage and livestock facilities.

Agency rule changes must be approved by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers and the GOP-controlled legislature. Republican legislative leaders and other GOP senators said this fall the proposed rules would be too restrictive on farms after WMC, the Dairy Business Association, the Wisconsin Dairy Alliance, and the Wisconsin Farm Bureau Federation publicly opposed the changes…

Agriculture interests contributed about $3.8 million to legislative and statewide candidates between January 2014 and June 2019, including more than $1.3 million to current GOP legislators. The top recipients were:

Committee to Elect a Republican Senate, $268,165
Republican Assembly Campaign Committee, about $199,600
GOP Sen. Howard Marklein, of Spring Green, about $160,860.

By the way, Marklein was one of the 5 GOP Senators who approved of Brad Pfaff’s nomination in the Senate’s Agriculture Committee, but then reversed course and voted along with every other GOP Senator to reject Pfaff’s nomination last month.

And as the Journal-Sentinel article noted, any plans to limit the trend of “get big or get out” and its related overexpansion in dairy farming has been blocked in the Big Ag-controlled WisGOP Legislature in the 2010s. That’s despite the support for changes from organizations that promote the family farmer that Republicans portray themselves as the champions of.

“We felt very strongly that these modifications were long overdue after the tremendous changes we’ve seen in the agricultural industry and lots of concerns that have been expressed by people in rural communities,” said Kara O’Connor, the government relations director for the Wisconsin Farmers Union. 

“We have farms in Wisconsin now that are larger than anyone had ever contemplated in 2006 when this rule was first passed,” she said.

It isn’t going to get better for farmers and others in rural Wisconsin until rural Wisconsin chooses better legislators. What’s frustrating is that other than giving facts like this and trying to donate what I can out of my limited dollars available, there’s not a lot a city slicker like me can do to get things changed in the gerrymandered state Legislature.

So your choice, rural Wisconsin. Keep voting GOP based on cultural BS, and keep on losing. Or listen, learn, vote differently, and improve your chances of getting by.