State plays limited role in dairy expansion
by Jacob Kushner
Wis. Center for Investigative _____________________ _J_o_u_r_n_alism
Owners of the Crave Brothers dairy and cheese company in Waterloo are good at finding federal and state assistance to help maintain their operations, and they ask for advice from state agricultural agents.
They received a $300,000 federal Value-Added Producer Grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 2008 to modernize their ricotta cheese production, and they hosted Wisconsin’s 2009 Farm Technology Days on their Waterloo farm last summer.
But none of their many dairy expansions were funded by loans or grants from current state programs designed to help dairies. In fact, few Wisconsin dairy farm expansions are.
Of the nearly $1 billion Wisconsin dairy farmers spent to expand or update their facilities between 2003 and 2007, only $22.4 million, or about 2 percent, came from the state Dairy 2020 Initiative, according to records provided in March by the Department of Commerce.
Dairy 2020 is designed to give dairy owners a financial incentive to modernize or expand their operations. Since 1997, 879 dairy farms have received just over $2 million through the Early Planning Grant program, which funds the creation of a business plan to modernize a dairy facility. Since 2002, 187 dairy farms received $20.3 million in low-interest loans to increase milk production through the Milk Volume Production program.
Dairy 2020 Executive Director Irv Possin said that sort of loan funds only a fraction of large dairy expansions. Rather, he said pure economics can explain why farm owners are deciding to go bigger – and to hire more immigrants in the process.
Possin said most dairy farms still milk their herds in stall barns, pretty much the way they have for 100 years, rather than using modern milking parlors, where multiple cows are taken to be milked at once by machines. Moving to a milking parlor is expensive, but more efficient and allows farmers to milk more cows.
The number of total dairies has been steadily decreasing. In 2010 there were 13,129 dairy farms in the state – half as many as in 1995. The number of farms with fewer than 100 cows decreased from 20,125 in 1997 to 11,403 a decade later.
