Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will see partly cloudy skies with a high of 84. Sunrise is 5:57 and sunset is 8:02, for 14 hours, 5 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 93.7 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Plan and Architectural Review Commission meets at 6 PM.
On this day in 1929, Babe Ruth becomes the first baseball player to hit 500 home runs in his career with a home run at League Park in Cleveland, Ohio.
We’re America’s Dairyland, and in America’s Dairyland of 2025, it’s more milk from fewer farms:
Since 2000, Wisconsin has lost more than 70% of its dairy herds.
As of Aug. 1, there were 5,222 licensed milk cow herds in the state, according to the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection. That’s down nearly 26% from only five years ago, and the lowest point on record.
Milk production has actually risen as the remaining farms have become larger and more efficient. The amount of milk produced per cow has also gone up.
But the loss of small and mid-size farms has harmed rural areas where they were the lifeblood of their communities. Consolidation of the nation’s food production into fewer and larger operations worries advocates for smaller farms that represent economic diversity.
See Rick Barrett, Wisconsin dairy farm count keeps falling amid hard times. Here are some farmers who persevere, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, August 11, 2025.
Economic change and cultural change would seem, for many, to run in opposite directions. Practical gains come at a sentimental loss. (Some of the same tensions are evident in opposition to solar power in rural areas. (The closer to one’s community, however — as with solar power for Whitewater — the more intense the sentiment, and the more likely that sentiment leads those who insist they “don’t take a position” to do exactly that when remixing and emphasizing arguments from only one side of a question.)
International news organizations (Reuters, below) cover area weather after cars abandoned in Wisconsin flooding: