More Wisconsin farm struggles in the news - locally and internationally

I wanted to go over a couple of recent news articles that indicated Wisconsin's farm crisis is far from over.

The first was an article in The (UK) Guardian from Dominic Rushe. It centers on Jim Goodman, a farmer in western Wisconsin who had to sell his farm and his land in recent years because of the losing situation that he and his industry was facing.

[Jim] Goodman was born on the farm. Growing up, local towns would have their own grocery stores, a drugstore, car dealers, machine dealers, says Goodman. “Our little town down the road [Wonewoc in Juneau County], had a movie theater, lumber yard. You know, they were all doing well.”

As those farms have gone so have the businesses. School districts don’t have enough children to stay open. “Now you can drive through any small town and if they don’t have a good share of their main street boarded up, they’re doing really well.”

The economics are tough. Milk prices have come back recently to about $17.55 per hundredweight in February 2020, but that is still way down from around $25 in 2014. Prices are expected to rise but in the meantime global forces have battered farmers. Feed prices rose as ethanol production took more crops, China bought more soy and tariffs increased equipment prices. For too many small farmers even as prices recover from a long slump, the cost of producing milk exceeds the prices they can sell it for.

And if you look at the USDA report that Rushe mentions, that $17.55 per hundredweight figure is well below the $19.33 that farmers were getting in December, and futures for milk have dropped by 10 percent in the last month.

Goodman also notes that his 50-cow herd has little chance of competing with mega-farms, both in-state and out-of-state. Even when he shifted over to organic milk in 2014, because even that got undercut by the huge producers.

The huge farms were shipping organic milk from Texas into Wisconsin for a lower price than Goodman was getting paid. “You know, you can’t compete with that,” he says.

As prices collapsed a planned sale fell through. He sold the land and then the cows. “I guess for me, that may have been harder than actually selling land because here you tend to be pretty attached to your cattle.”

It seems noteworthy that after $23 billion was handed out in farm subsidies last year by the US Department of Agriculture, and with Trump saying he might give out more money for this year, that nothing is being done by Republicans to support prices for small farmers or limit supplies. They just throw money in the short term, hope some of that money reaches the small farmers to keep them in business, and later on the conditions will improve…somehow.

This leads to the other article I saw today on Wisconsin dairy farmers a Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel article that included Washington County farmer Ross Bishop claiming that Trump’s tariffs and related trade policies are “good things for America.” (SUCKER!)

But even with the MAGA on the brain, Bishop and others in the article admit that current market fundamentals are failing farmers.

“Trump money is what I call it,” Bishop said. “If not for all that assistance from the federal government last year … farmers would have been broke in 2019.”

But for many farmers, it wasn’t nearly enough to offset the hardship they experienced.

The trade group Wisconsin Farmers Union said a 55-cow dairy farm stood to receive a one-time payment of $725 but would lose between $36,000 and $48,000 in 2019.

An 80-cow dairy would get $889, barely enough to cover its electric bill for a month. Meanwhile, it would lose $35,000.

Farmers say the underlying causes for low milk prices and the dairy crisis — including runaway production — haven’t been addressed by government or the industry.

We can hope that the worst of the farm crisis has passed in Wisconsin, but I'm not counting on it, given the recent plunge in prices and ongoing higher costs for family farms. And while a property tax cut for Wisconsin farmers and some industrial policy to boost exports might do something (assuming it passes the Legislature), if the market fundamentals aren’t changed, how much good will that really do?