Farm Foundation’s Meet Your Farmer podcast featured Steve Kaufman in season 1, episode 3.

Steve is a fifth-generation farmer. He returned to his family’s Idaho farm full time in 2014 when his uncles and father were ready to retire. He and his two brothers farm 14,000 dryland crop acres, growing primarily winter wheat, spring wheat, peas, garbanzo beans, and canola. Prior to that, he worked at Northwest Farm Credit Services while also farming part time. Steve is an alum of Farm Foundation’s Young Farmer Accelerator Program.

In this episode, Steve talks about how gratifying it is to produce enough grain for 30 million loaves of bread on his farm, the hard work of trying to balance life with young kids and farm life, and what the process was like to switch over to no-till.

Listen to the episode.

Music: “Country Roads” by Sergii Pavkin from Pixabay

Reach us at communication@farmfoundation.org.

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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 Those other communities have faced legal challenges to their ordinances and one rescinded its regulation after a change in elected leadership.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.”

Full Circle Farm’s efforts to minimize impacts on the natural environment and wildlife won the family the 2024 Leopold Conservation Award from the Sand County Foundation.

The post Leopold Conservation Award recognizes farm near Green Bay for its sustainability efforts appeared first on WPR.

There was a time, not so long ago, when insects were being touted as the solution to food’s emissions problem. The logic went...

The post Insect Farming: Making the Leap from Protein Pipedream to Bio-commodities appeared first on Cleantech Group.

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.