So, there’s this controversy happening in my home community right now.
People are arguing online and calling each other names.
Strangers are threatening to fight each other in the streets — seriously.
Comment sections have been turned off, because it’s gotten nasty.
And it’s all because we can’t agree on where we should have Breakfast.
Every year the Green County Ag Chest puts on a community event lovingly known and referred to as the Green County Breakfast on the Farm. It happens every spring. A different farm hosts it each year, and it’s always a family you know. Family surnames that have been a part of the community for generations. Names you’ve heard in the schools, sports teams, FFA Officer Teams, and generally woven into the fabric of the community. Heck, Wegmueller Farm has hosted the Breakfast twice in my lifetime. The first time, in 1990. The second time, in 2015. And that’s the way it goes — a local farm hosts the Green County Breakfast on the Farm usually once per generation.
The Green County Breakfast on the Farm is, and I cannot stress this enough, the most wholesome thing you can possibly imagine. It is put on entirely by volunteers. People around the community donate, lend a hand, and otherwise work together to help out. “Hosting the Breakfast” is something every farmer in Green County references with a wink and a nod. This is because everyone knows it is the Hosts who put in the most work of all. As the local joke amongst farmers goes, “You spend a whole year getting the farm ready for just one day!”
At the Green County Breakfast on the Farm there are vendors, arts and crafts, animal and machinery displays, educational activities — all on an authentic working Green County farm. It truly is a celebration of the agricultural community, and getting to the Breakfast is a piece of cake. There is convenient public transport arranged. The Host Farm dedicates a portion of land for parking, and local law enforcement provides professional oversight. Every year, volunteers put up hand-painted signs pointing attendees in the direction of that year’s Host Farm. It is a special thing, to see those iconic signs go up.
A typical Breakfast can draw more than 5,000 people. From the Ag Chest website, more than 1,300 pounds of sausage, 2,400 eggs, 5,000 half-pints of milk, 126 gallons of ice cream, 3,500 cartons of orange juice, 500 pounds of cheese is served at each Breakfast. Oh, and an absolutely legendary coffee cake. I mean that — the Dairy Breakfast Coffee Cake is like something comforting and familiar from your grandmother’s kitchen.
So yeah, people are fighting over this year’s Breakfast.
The reason is because of this year’s host farm.
This year’s Breakfast will be held on, we can all say it — A Factory Farm.
People are fighting because the 2026 Green County Breakfast on the Farm will be held on a factory farm, and the comment section has had to be turned off because of the arguing.
This year’s Breakfast host farm is home to some 5,400 milk cows. They ship something like 56,000 gallons of milk per day — emphasis ‘per day’ — to nearby Grande
Cheese. If you tuned to 1260 AM WEKZ in the mornings you can most certainly recall the Grande Cheese radio jingle.
It’s probably stuck in your head now.
Personally, I think everyone should go. I think the Green County Breakfast on the Farm is an event that deserves to be supported by the community. I think the volunteers, hosts, and everyone involved should be thanked for their time and effort in putting together a — for lack of a better way to say it — thoroughly wholesome community event.
The factory farm is there, and we are being invited to have breakfast on it. The farm deserves to be toured, learned about, and understood in the same way that we need to tour and understand wastewater treatment plants, data centers, power plants, garbage and recycling centers, the workings of all levels of government, and all of the other systems that, as consumers, our spending habits promote.
I will editorialize only that not all farms are created equally. It is absolutely astounding to witness the agricultural industry, and farmers in general, circle the wagons to defend factory farming, particularly when you take a step back and recognize how the consolidation and industrialization of our food system is quantifiably destroying the fabric of our local communities — and contributing to a shocking decline in overall societal mental and physical health. Watching this brings to mind the proverb, ‘And the axe was welcomed into the forest because the handle was made of wood, and the trees thought it was one of them.’ But I digress.
But yes, with every fabric of decency, the Green County Breakfast on the Farm deserves to be supported and the hosts, volunteers, and sponsors thanked.
If nothing else, go for the Coffee Cake.
— Dan Wegmueller is the owner of Wegmueller Farms and his column appears regularly in the Times. His website is https://www.farmforthought.org.
