JD Greenwalt, president and CEO of Westby Cooperative Creamery, said the new equipment will increase their cottage cheese making capacity by 50 percent and allow them to make a more consistent product by using automation.

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American farmers are bracing for the impact of new tariffs exchanged between the U.S. and Canada on both their supply costs and their sales.

The post As the US and Canada slap new tariffs on goods, American farmers are stuck in the middle appeared first on WPR.

Wisconsin-based cheese company Sargento is hoping to update the processed classic to reflect how consumers are eating today.

The post ‘Natural’ American cheese? Wisconsin company says it’s made a low-ingredient alternative appeared first on WPR.

A western Wisconsin factory dairy farm will have to restart its effort to obtain a permit after an administrative law judge found this week that the Department of Natural Resource’s initial approval failed to do enough to protect local groundwater. 

The Ridge Breeze Dairy in Pierce County has applied to expand from a 1,700 cow farm to 6,500 cows. The expansion is expected to generate 78 million gallons of manure per year. Since proposing the expansion, residents in the region have protested against the effects that operating the largest factory farm in western Wisconsin will have on the local water. 

Residents worked to oppose the DNR’s permitting decision along each step and previously raised concerns that the dairy had named properties as sites for planned manure spreading although those property owners were never contacted. 

Last year, the DNR granted a modified permit for the dairy to expand. Pierce County residents and a western Wisconsin-based advocacy group petitioned for a contested case hearing against the DNR decision. That hearing was held in Eau Claire in March.

In a decision issued Monday, Administrative Law Judge Angela Chaput Foy stated that the permit doesn’t do enough to ensure Ridge Breeze’s operations protect the groundwater. 

Communities across western Wisconsin have struggled with nitrate contamination in their groundwater, the source of drinking water for much of rural Wisconsin. Nitrate contamination has been linked to blue-baby syndrome, thyroid disease and colon cancer. 

The driftless region of western Wisconsin is especially vulnerable to groundwater contamination because parts of the bedrock are susceptible to sinkholes and fracturing. 

Residents in the area have pointed to the vulnerability of streams near the Ridge Breeze site and previous manure spills on farms operated by Ridge Breeze’s owner, Breeze Dairy Group. 

“The permit conditions set Ridge Breeze up for anticipated compliance, they also command compliance, but the permit lacks a mechanism to verify compliance,” Foy wrote. “By omitting a mechanism to verify actual compliance, the (DNR) has issued a mandate while simultaneously denying itself the tools or data necessary to know whether that mandate is broken.”

Foy’s order sends the permit back to the DNR, which will now have to include additional conditions in the permit to detect if the state’s groundwater standards are being violated. This could include installing monitoring wells, a step that some farmers and agricultural industry advocates say is too costly. 

“Protecting groundwater requires more than simply telling Ridge Breeze to comply with the law,” said Adam Voskuil, senior staff attorney at Midwest Environmental Advocates. “The DNR must have a way to determine whether those requirements are actually being followed and whether groundwater is being protected. This ruling makes clear that paper promises are not enough.”

Residents who spent years fighting the farm’s expansion celebrated the decision.

“This victory started when a handful of neighbors sat down together in the a garage down the road from Ridge Breeze and decided that we wouldn’t let our health, water, or our farming heritage be treated as an afterthought,” said Ty Fisher, a Pierce County farmer and member of Grassroots Organizing Western Wisconsin. “For more than three years, locals here have organized, testified, and stood together. This decision proves that when we’re organized we can take on corporate ag special interests and win.”

Gregg Wolf, the CEO of Breeze Dairy Group, told Wisconsin Public Radio that the farm has already completed construction on the new buildings for the expansion and currently houses about 6,000 cows. He said the decision will simply require the farm to do more to reassure neighbors that the state’s rules are being followed. 

“Ridge Breeze has always been committed to protecting the environment and all the resources, including groundwater, and doing things properly, and having enough acres to manage nutrients properly,” Wolf said. “This is just another avenue that is going to be added to the permit to reassure the community that’s being achieved.”

Danny Akenson, an organizer with GROWW, said that successfully overturning a DNR permit decision is a sign that residents opposed to the influence of factory farms over state policy can secure wins. 

“This isn’t the end of our fight, but it is proof that our organizing works,” Akenson said. “We’re going to celebrate what Pierce County residents won, and then we’re going to carry that people power to Madison to win the common sense accountability we need over corporate factory farms like these. Communities in Wisconsin shouldn’t have to fight for protections one factory farm and one permit at a time.”

The Wisconsin State Fair got underway Thursday. The 11-day event in Milwaukee County has no shortage of cows, horses, games, unique foods, music and pickles.

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Federal officials say dairy farms will gain broader access to the H-2A visa program, though questions remain about which jobs will qualify and how the changes will work.

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Wisconsin dairy farmers may have a new avenue to hire workers under new seasonal labor visa rules the Trump administration announced Wednesday.

The U.S. Department of Labor and Department of Homeland Security will give dairy farmers broader access to the federal H-2A program, through which farmers can secure temporary visas for seasonal agricultural workers. 

The dairy industry has lobbied for years to ease program rules barring visas for ostensibly year-round farm roles like milking; those rules also exclude many livestock and mushroom farms from the program. 

“This is a welcomed policy change for our dairy members, and we are hopeful it is just the beginning of continued H-2A program expansion,” John Hollay, president of the National Council of Agricultural Employers, wrote in a press release. “By opening the door for the dairy industry to take advantage of the only legal program for foreign agricultural workers, President Trump continues to move us in a direction of needed reform.”

The administration’s initial announcement was light on details about which dairy farm roles now qualify for H-2A visas.

The updates to the H-2A program are dairy-specific, and the USDA made no indication of changes to the visa’s one-year duration, or a maximum of three years with extensions.

Wisconsin’s agricultural sector increasingly relies on the H-2A program to meet its labor needs. Wisconsin farmers’ annual H-2A hiring increased at least six-fold over the past decade, and the White House’s ongoing immigration crackdown has amplified the program’s importance as a source of workers with legal status. 

Some dairy farms already hire H-2A workers for non-milking jobs; at least 14% of Wisconsin farms approved for visas this year have dairy herds, U.S. Department of Labor and Wisconsin milk producer license data shows. 

Calumet County dairy farmer Amy Woldt hired three H-2A workers from South Africa this year as heavy equipment operators. “We don’t really need them for working with the cattle,” she told Wisconsin Watch, but they do need a crew to run the farm’s skid steers and other farm machinery.

So far, nearly all H-2A workers on Wisconsin dairy farms are heavy equipment operators, at least according to farmers’ applications to the Department of Labor. Many, including the workers on Woldt’s farm, are from South Africa.

Fellow Calumet County farmer Kurt Schneider also hires South African H-2A workers to harvest his feed crops. “It’s because they speak English,” he said, and the ease of communication justifies the cost of flying in a crew from across the Atlantic. South Africans make up the second-largest cohort of H-2A workers after workers from Mexico, outnumbering the third-largest nationality — workers from Jamaica — more than 3-to-1 in 2024.

Schneider added that he would be thrilled to hire for his milking operations through the H-2A program. His current 35-person milking crew is mostly Spanish-speaking, so Schneider would favor H-2A workers from Mexico to supplement his dairy workforce. “That’s our culture,” he said. “We don’t want to change our culture.”

For Schneider, the H-2A program could offer a more stable workforce than the current cutthroat competition between farms allows. The pool of often-undocumented immigrant dairy workers is shrinking, in part because some workers are opting to return to their home countries amid the immigration enforcement push, and remaining workers can now hop between farms to earn higher wages. “I’m getting really sick of (it),” he said. “Somebody’s paying 50 cents an hour more and they jump ship.” 

The Trump administration cut the program’s minimum wage last year; workers on Wisconsin farms classified as “less-skilled” now receive a minimum $12 per hour this year, down more than a third from their 2025 minimum wage. Woldt says she hasn’t cut her crew’s wages, hoping “to keep the guys we have” rather than competing with other farmers for new workers next season.

The USDA’s announcement didn’t specify where dairy workers will fall on the wage scale.

While a seasonal H-2A crew would also require regular turnover, Schneider said his farm’s current attrition rate justifies the switch. “We’re having bottom 10% turnover anyway,” he said, as new dairy hands move along in search of higher wages. “They’re only there two weeks or a month, and they leave, and you’re constantly training.”

But he isn’t inclined to let go of his current crew. If the new rules allow him to hire dairy hands through the H-2A program, Schneider said he would apply for enough visas to backfill openings as they arise, even if that means some visas go unused. 

That strategy could also limit the risks of relying entirely on the H-2A program. A backlog at an American consulate in South Africa delayed the arrival of Schneider’s harvest crew this spring. Farmers pay steep overhead to secure H-2A visas, and when delays force workers to book last-minute flights, costs often skyrocket. Program rules require farmers to cover workers’ plane tickets and lodging, so delays can inflate the up-front costs of participating in the program — or, if a farm relied entirely on H-2A workers, possibly leave cows unmilked. 

Processing delays also hit Woldt’s team this year, forcing one of her workers to return to South Africa while awaiting approval of his visa extension. She has no immediate plans to hire dairy hands through the program. “We’re good in that department,” she said. 

National agricultural groups also tempered their praise of the new rule change with acknowledgement of the H-2A program’s capacity problems. 

“For this expansion to succeed and the H-2A program to work as intended, our federal agencies must have the resources and regulatory structures necessary to handle the increased volume efficiently,” Hollay wrote. 

Wisconsin Farmers Union President Darin Von Ruden noted that the policy shift may not benefit all Wisconsin farmers equally.

“I don’t think it’s going to help the small to medium-sized farmers very much,” he told Wisconsin Watch. The visa program can be cost-prohibitive for smaller farms that have survived decades of consolidation in the dairy industry, he said, but the new rules do give farms that can afford H-2A workers more room to maneuver.

Republican U.S Rep. Derrick Van Orden, who represents western Wisconsin, introduced legislation last fall to create an alternative to the H-2A program by allowing some undocumented agricultural workers to self-deport, pay a fine and return to the U.S. through a legal port of entry to resume working in agriculture. “The H-2A program is broken and it sucks,” he quipped during a presentation on immigrant labor at the World Dairy Expo in Madison last fall. Van Orden’s bill did not advance out of committee.

The Trump administration suspended Biden-era rules intended to crack down on abuses of H-2A workers last June. Wisconsin’s migrant labor law preserves some protections the Department of Labor no longer guarantees, including workers’ rights to invite legal aid providers and clergy into their employer-provided housing. 

Editor’s note: This story was updated June 19 to add comment from Wisconsin Farmers Union President Darin Von Ruden.

Wisconsin dairy farms could gain new hiring option under visa changes is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.