Farm Aid comes to Wisconsin! And boy, is it needed

Well this was an interesting story to see this morning.

With dairy farms in Wisconsin experiencing unprecedented struggles, Farm Aid is coming to the state to lend a hand.

The nonprofit is bringing its annual, star-studded benefit concert to Wisconsin for the second time in its 34-year history.
Board members Willie Nelson, Neil Young, John Mellencamp and Dave Matthews — plus at least nine other acts — will perform at Alpine Valley Music Theatre in East Troy Sept. 21.

Too bad for me that Bucky is playing Michigan in football in Madison that day. But it sounds like a great event, and it’s especially needed these days, particularly in Wisconsin, whose dairy industry has been in depression-like conditions for the past few years.

The return to the Dairy State is in part a response to Wisconsin's dairy farm crisis, said communications director Jennifer Fahy.

Nearly half of the $88 billion that Wisconsin agriculture contributes to the state economy comes from dairy farms. But since 2014, the price farmers receive for their milk has fallen nearly 40%, due to overproduction and failing export markets. Dairy herds in the state are down 40% from a decade earlier, according to Wisconsin Department of Agriculture data.

Wisconsin has led the country in farm bankruptcies for three years in a row. The state lost almost 700 dairy farms in 2018, an unprecedented rate of nearly two a day. More than 300 more dairy farms in Wisconsin have since shut down, including 90 in April alone.

"We needed to be there to talk about what this means for the state and what it means for the country," Fahy said of bringing Farm Aid to Wisconsin.

While there has been a needed bump up in dairy prices in 2019, with cheese up around 20% since January and milk up nearly 15% over the last 6 months, that hasn’t done much to slow down the rash of dairy farms closing in the state. The recently released update from the USDA shows that 61 more Wisconsin dairy farms went under in June, more than 800 have closed in the last year, and more than 1,700 have gone away since Donald Trump was elected in November 2016.

And with GOP politicians doing nothing to stop overproduction and surpluses caused by a drop in ag exports, these structural problems seem likely to continue for the near future. Which likely means more farms going under, and other farmers possibly deciding to take advantage of higher land prices to sell out to developers.

Naturally, the rise in the price of farmland plays to the advantage of Big Ag and other corporate interests.

Mark Akers, a rural appraiser in Wisconsin and Illinois, said he thinks outside influences, such as urban sprawl and foreign investors looking to buy farmland, are affecting land prices in some areas of the state.

"I think that's probably where we're seeing our little bit of a push up. But there are also large farmers that are doing well even in a tough economy," Akers said.

He said large farms are generally willing to pay more for land in order to keep expanding. It's especially a factor on the eastern side of the state where land prices are some of the highest in Wisconsin.

The tough reality of our state’s agricultural economy is why I nodded and said “That fits” when I found out that Wisconsin was the site for 2019’s Farm Aid. And I’m betting this song will be played by the guy who's been there since the first one in 1985, as it resonates every bit as well today as it did 34 years ago.