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Agriculture

Daily Bread for 10.16.22: Our Dairyland Needs Dairy Workers

Good morning. Sunday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 51. Sunrise is 7:10 AM and sunset 6:09 PM for 10h 59m 28s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 60.9% of its visible disk illuminated. On this day in 1923, The Walt Disney Company is founded. Embed from Getty Images…

Brain Drain Plagues Key USDA Research Service After Trump Administration Orders Relocation

When the Trump administration relocated the United States Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service to the Kansas City area last year, about two-thirds of its employees quit their jobs rather than move. Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, called the mass resignations a “wonderful way to streamline the government.” These departures have…

Worse Ahead for Farmers

The price of supporting Trumpism – whether on economics, immigration, or foreign policy – is decline. For it all, some farmers will choose their own humiliation, their own degradation, for the sake of supporting Trump. Tory Newmyer describes what awaits Midwestern agriculture in Farmers are bracing for more tariff pain. But they’re sticking with Trump…

‘Stung by Trump’s Trade Wars, Wisconsin’s Milk Farmers Face Extinction’

After years of the ignorant scheming of tax incremental financing, the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation, capital catalyst grants, the Trump tax bill, and now Trump’s trade war, Alan Rappeport reports Stung by Trump’s Trade Wars, Wisconsin’s Milk Farmers Face Extinction (“The flagship industry in a pivotal swing state faces an economic crisis”): KENDALL, Wis. —…

How Walker and Trump Destroyed Dairies in America’s Dairyland

One has heard so much these last eight years about how Wisconsin has been ‘open for business,’ and for Walker and the WEDC that has meant countless subsidies and tax breaks for conservatives’ preferred businesses. Walker was never a free-market man; his whole approach rested on state capitalism (government funding some producers) and crony capitalism…

Dairy Farmers’ Struggles

The AP reports Farm bankruptcies on the rise in Upper Midwest: The number of farms filing for bankruptcy is increasing across the Upper Midwest, following low prices for corn, soybeans, milk and beef, according to a new analysis from the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. The analysis found that 84 farms filed for bankruptcy in Wisconsin,…

Tales of Unrequited Support

Wisconsinites who went for Trump now find themselves economically disadvantaged despite their support.  It’s become an international tale: how some residents of America’s Dairyland foolishly hoped for better from Trump and now find themselves experiencing worse: Plymouth, Wisconsin, styles itself as “the cheese capital of the world”. The town of 8,445 people, about an hour north…