Cows in a western Wisconsin dairy farm. (Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)

A Pierce County town of about 600 residents passed an ordinance requiring factory farms to obtain permits before moving into or expanding in the community. 

The decision follows a handful of other western Wisconsin communities in passing similar ordinances to limit the proliferation of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) in the region. Those other communities have faced legal challenges to their ordinances and one rescinded its regulation after a change in elected leadership. 

The town of Maiden Rock overlooks the Mississippi River’s Lake Pepin. On Monday, the town’s board unanimously passed the ordinance which will require any proposed CAFOs within the community to obtain a license to operate from the town board. When applying, CAFO operators must have a third-party engineer supply plan for how the farm will manage its waste, emissions and runoff.

Pierce County has seen increased expansion of factory farms this year, with a dairy in the town of Salem announcing plans to expand from 1,700 to 6,500 cows. 

Once an application is received, the ordinance requires the board to send a letter to all residents within a three mile radius of the proposed farm informing them of a public hearing. The board will be able to grant or deny the license and if granted, impose conditions on how the CAFO must operate. 

The ordinance also requires the CAFO to fund third-party enforcement of the permit conditions. 

In the board’s materials about the ordinance, the board highlighted the enforcement mechanisms, noting that state regulations surrounding CAFOs in the state largely rely on self-reporting to the state Department of Natural Resources — a system that has resulted in large manure spills going unreported. The materials also note that a pending lawsuit from the state’s largest business lobby is attempting to strip the DNR of its authority to regulate CAFOs. 

The ordinance was drafted by a commission appointed by the board to study CAFOs. At a public hearing on the ordinance, nearly 100 residents attended and all spoke in favor of its passage. The first 23 pages of the ordinance document outline the threats CAFOs can pose to a community’s groundwater, air quality, public health, local agricultural economy and infrastructure. 

“Our town is blessed with a stunning mix of farmland, woods and bluffs overlooking the Mississippi River’s Lake Pepin,” a fact sheet about the ordinance states. “Rush River, a Class 1 trout fishing destination, is sustained by cool spring-fed streams. Everyone relies on private wells for human and animal consumption. CAFOs with thousands of animals are proposing to spread thousands of truckloads of waste in the Town. State and county laws have almost no control over these huge facilities. Without an ordinance, their impact on roads, wells, health and the economy are unknown.”

Western Wisconsin advocacy group, Grassroots Organizing Western Wisconsin (GROWW) celebrated the ordinance’s passage, saying it’s a victory for communities standing up to protect themselves. 

“I think the town board heard loud and clear that the residents of the town wanted the ordinance,” Danny Akenson, a field organizer for GROWW, said in a statement. “It’s a result of the community banding together and sharing their stories and fears. We’ve heard it all. Landowners have had their land used for manure spreading without permission. Residents have had to call the Sheriff’s Department to escort them out of their own driveway due to heavy truck traffic on country roads. Families have had to live with poisoned water that causes sickness and cancer.”

“We know that one town standing up and protecting themselves isn’t enough,”  Akenson continued. “Everyone deserves to have access to clean water and safe roads. Across Wisconsin, whether you’re in Maiden Rock or Milwaukee, corporate greed gets in the way of that dream becoming reality. In 2025, we hope to see even more towns stand up and pass ordinances of their own.”

Several other communities in the region have passed similarly constructed ordinances and have faced opposition from industry groups. The town of Eureka in Polk County is currently fighting a lawsuit against its ordinance. A ruling in that case is expected in early January. 

The board’s fact sheet on the ordinance notes that at a state Senate hearing in March, a Wisconsin Farm Bureau representative testified that farm groups want the state government to preempt operations ordinances against CAFOs because state law currently allows them. 

Akenson told the Wisconsin Examiner that the ordinances are allowed under the state constitution. 

“Maiden Rock’s ordinance is backed up by both Wisconsin’s Constitution and our state statutes. We’re a state that values local control,” he said. “Corporate industry groups show up with lawsuits to try and bury small towns in legal costs and paperwork. Checks and balances threaten their profits and power to consolidate markets, and they hope to scare other communities from taking action.”

“In our view, that’s what’s happening in Eureka right now,” he added. “Despite these threats, more and more towns are taking steps to protect themselves by passing ordinances. People are tired of the intimidation tactics by industry representatives. The people on the ground in Pierce County and all across the state aren’t backing down.”

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Photo by Gregory Conniff for Wisconsin Examiner

If President-elect Donald Trump follows through on his pledge to deport millions of immigrants, it could upend the economies of states where farming and other food-related industries are crucial — and where labor shortages abound.

Immigrants make up about two-thirds of the nation’s crop farmworkers, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, and roughly 2 in 5 of them are not legally authorized to work in the United States.

Agricultural industries such as meatpacking, dairy farms and poultry and livestock farms also rely heavily on immigrants.

“We have five to six employees that do the work that nobody else will do. We wouldn’t survive without them,” said Bruce Lampman, who owns Lampman Dairy Farm, in Bruneau, Idaho. His farm, which has been in the family three decades, has 350 cows producing some 26,000 pounds of milk a day.

“My business and every agriculture business in the U.S. will be crippled if they want to get rid of everybody who does the work,” said Lampman, adding that his workers are worried about what’s to come.

Anita Alves Pena, a Colorado State University professor of economics who studies immigration, noted that many agricultural employers already can’t find enough laborers. Without farm subsidies or other protections to make up for the loss of immigrant workers, she said, the harm to state economies could be significant.

“Farmers across the country, producers in a lot of different parts, are often talking about labor shortages — and that’s even with the current status quo of having a fairly high percentage of unauthorized individuals in the workforce,” Pena said. “A policy like this, if it was not coupled with something else, would exacerbate that.”

Employers have a hard time hiring enough farm laborers because such workers generally are paid low wages for arduous work.

In addition to hiring immigrant laborers who are in the country illegally, agricultural employers rely on the federal H-2A visa program. H-2A visas usually are for seasonal work, often for about six to 10 months. However, they can be extended for up to three years before a worker must return to their home country.

Employers must pay H-2A workers a state-specific minimum wage and provide no-cost transportation and housing. Still, employers’ applications for H-2A visas have soared in the past 18 years, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, a trend reflecting the shortage of U.S.-born laborers willing to do the work. The number of H-2A positions has surged from just over 48,000 in 2005 to more than 378,000 in 2023.

But agricultural employers that operate year-round, such as poultry, dairy and livestock producers, can’t use the seasonal visa to fill gaps, according to the USDA.

Farmers also employ foreign nationals who have “temporary protected status” under a 1990 law that allows immigrants to remain if the U.S. has determined their home countries are unsafe because of violence or other reasons. There are about 1.2 million people in the U.S. under the program or eligible for it, from countries including El Salvador, Ethiopia, Haiti, Honduras, Lebanon and Ukraine. Many have been here for decades, and Trump has threatened to end the program.

Support for the program

Immigration advocates want a pathway for H-2A workers to gain permanent legal status, and agricultural trade organizations are pushing for an expansion of the H-2A program to include year-round operations.

The National Milk Producers Federation says it’s too early to say how it would cope with mass deportations under the Trump administration. But the group states it “strongly supports efforts to pass agriculture labor reform that provides permanent legal status to current workers and their families and gives dairy farmers access to a workable guestworker program.”

Immigrants make up 51% of labor at dairy farms across states, and farms that employ immigrants produce nearly 80% of the nation’s milk supply, according to the organization.

“Foreign workers are important to the success of U.S. dairy, and we will work closely with members of Congress and federal officials to show the importance of foreign workers to the dairy industry and farm communities,” Jaime Castaneda, the group’s executive vice president for policy development and strategy, wrote in an email.

Adam Croissant, the former vice president of research and development at yogurt company Chobani, which has manufacturing plants in Idaho and New York, said he’s seen a lot of misinformation around immigrants’ workforce contributions.

“The dairy industry as a whole understands that without immigrant labor, the dairy industry doesn’t exist. It’s as simple as that,” said Croissant.

Tom Super, a spokesperson for the National Chicken Council, lambasted U.S. immigration policy and said the poultry industry “wants a stable, legal, and permanent workforce.”

“The chicken industry is heavily affected by our nation’s immigration policy or, more pointedly, lack thereof. … The system is broken, and Washington has done nothing to fix it,” Super wrote in an email.

Changes ahead?

But major changes to the H-2A visa program are unlikely to happen before deportations begin. In an interview with NBC News’ “Meet the Press” over the weekend, Trump repeated his promise to start deporting some immigrants almost immediately.

He said he plans to begin with convicted criminals, but would then move to other immigrants. “We’re starting with the criminals, and we’ve got to do it. And then we’re starting with the others, and we’re going to see how it goes.”

Some farmers still hope that Trump’s actions won’t match his rhetoric. But “hoping isn’t a great business plan,” said Rick Naerebout, CEO of the Idaho Dairymen’s Association. “Our ability to feed ourselves as a country is completely jeopardized if you do see the mass deportations.”

If the deportations do happen, agricultural workers will disappear faster than they can be replaced, experts say.

“The H-2A program will not expand instantly to fill the gap. So, that’s going to be a problem,” said Jeffrey Dorfman, a professor of agricultural economics at North Carolina State University who was Georgia’s state economist from 2019 to 2023.

In Georgia, agriculture is an $83.6 billion industry that supports more than 323,000 jobs. It is one of the five states most reliant on the federal H-2A visa program, depending on those workers to fill about 60% of agricultural jobs.

Dorfman argued that even the fear of deportation will have an impact on the workforce.

“When farmworkers hear about ICE [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement] raids on a nearby farm, lots of them disappear. Even the legal ones often disappear for a few days. So, if everybody just gets scared and self-deports, just goes back home, I think that would be the worst disruption,” said Dorfman, adding that even more jobs would need to be filled if the administration revokes temporary protected status.

Antonio De Loera-Brust, communications director for the farmworker labor union United Farm Workers, said the nation’s focus should be on protecting workers, no matter their legal status.

“They deserve a lot better than just not getting deported,” he said. “They deserve better wages, they deserve labor rights, they deserve citizenship.”

And though economists and the agriculture industry have said that mass deportations could raise grocery store prices, De Loera-Brust called that particular argument a sign of “moral weakness.”

“As if the worst thing about hundreds of thousands of people getting separated from their families was going to be that consumers would have to pay more for a bag of strawberries or a bag of baby carrots,” De Loera-Brust said. “There’s a moral gap there.”

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Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org.

Wisconsin dairy CAFO (Photo courtesy of Wisconsin DNR)

Factory farms in Wisconsin produce 33 billion pounds of waste every year, about four times the amount of waste created by the state’s human population, according to a new report by Food and Water Watch tracking the growth of factory farming across the country. 

Wisconsin ranked 10th on a list of states that produce the highest amount of waste in the country. Iowa — with its massive hog farming industry — ranked first with 109 billion pounds of factory farming waste created every year. 

“America today has truly become a factory farming nation,” Food and Water Watch research director Amanda Starbuck said in a statement. “Industrial animal warehouses pockmark our rural communities, and litter our environment with tidal waves of unchecked pollution. While our politicians and regulators look the other way, these corporate cash cows are only getting bigger — and their impacts are only getting more catastrophic.”

According to the report, factory farming operations across the country create double the amount of waste produced by  the U.S. population. In Wisconsin, large dairy operations have regularly caused concerns over water quality and local health due to issues with manure management. 

“U.S. factory farms are raising more animals than ever before,” the report states. “Together, the 1.7 billion confined animals produce an appalling 941 billion pounds of manure each year — double the weight in human sewage produced by the entire U.S. population. This manure is typically not treated before being dumped into the environment, where it fouls rivers and streams, pollutes drinking water, and fuels climate change.”

The report notes that consolidation among dairy farms has occurred faster than other agricultural sectors, with the number of factory farms increasing 16-fold from 1987 to 2017. In Wisconsin, according to the report, the number of cows living on factory farming operations quadrupled from 2002 to 2022. 

Mapping the density of factory farming operations at the county level, the report shows how consolidation has hit Wisconsin, with a surge in the number of large dairy operations starting in eastern Wisconsin and steadily increasing to cover most of the state. The report names Brown, Manitowoc and Kewaunee counties as “extreme outliers” for the number of factory farms operating there.

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