I suppose now is as good of time as any to talk specifically about what we are doing with our farm. In a nutshell, Wegmueller Farm is a fourth-generation, quintessential Wisconsin dairy farm. We milk about 60 head of dairy cows and farm about 350 acres. In the winter, cows are housed in a big red barn, and during the summer months they graze on grass pastures — the idyllic image, but rooted in reality.
In my lifetime, we have gone from being considered a “large” dairy, to now being an outlier as a “small” dairy. In the 1980s, milking 60 cows was impressive. Today, the average size of a Wisconsin dairy farm is over 200 cows. This growth is indicative of a nation-wide trend of consolidation and centralization, and is nothing new — in the 1970s, Nixon-appointed US Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz remarked about farming: “Get big or get out.” Meaning, for generations, the mentality of farming from the very top echelons of U.S. leadership is to disregard individuality in favor of the economic collective.
The greatest political juxtaposition of all time, is that the American Farmer tends to be reliably conservative, yet benefits from one of the greatest welfare programs to ever exist: The Farm Subsidy Program. In theory, farm subsidy payments were designed to protect farmers from financial ruin as a result of the inevitable fluctuation of commodity prices — think 1930s Great Depression. The thought was, pay farmers to NOT overproduce.
Then, in the 1990s, the Freedom to Farm Act replaced subsidy payments with disaster relief payments. Since everything in farming can be qualified as a disaster, in one year, direct payments to farmers nearly doubled — $12.4 billion in 1998 to $21.5 billion in 1999. Worst of all, Freedom to Farm eliminated production caps. As predictable as the sun rising in the east and setting in the west, U.S. production soared and commodity prices tanked.
To date, the U.S. Federal Government spends more than $30 billion per year on payments to farm businesses and agriculture. Most of these payments go toward commodity crops like corn and soybeans, rather than the production of actual food. To the individual producer, risk management is as American as it gets: Slap an insurance policy on it and hope for the best.
For all the billions of dollars spent on large-scale farming, the average American consumer is criminally undereducated about how food is produced, and where their food comes from. Without question, there is a deficit of knowledge between farmers and consumers. As shouted from the mountaintop: All you need to know about what is wrong with the U.S. Dairy industry is to understand that here in Wisconsin, it is easier to get raw fish sushi than it is to go to a farm and get milk.
This God’s-eye view of the state of ag is precisely the impetus for my farm’s diversification into direct-to-consumer relations. In the early 2000s, on the heels of Freedom to Farm, I found myself traveling across Europe on an international agricultural exchange program. For 6 months, I worked on a dairy farm in Switzerland not as a tourist, but as a functioning, contributing citizen of Europe. It was not unusual at all for me to be milking cows, and to have random people walk into the dairy barn to observe the cows and interact with the farm hands.
The interactions were intrusive at first, but soon began to reveal a unique benefit. Practically every farm in my Swiss community boasted a direct-to-consumer relationship of some sort. Individual farms sold fruit, vegetables, schnapps, baked goods — my host farm maintained a greenhouse and sold ornamental plants.
During one memorable conversation, my Swiss host father remarked, “The Swiss Government pays us to stay small.”
This opposite approach to agriculture trickles down to two undeniable truths: Europeans trust their food supply, and their farmers, far more than Americans trust theirs. Second, Europeans are undeniably healthier than Americans. As the age-old adage goes — we are what we eat.
“My God, what is that smell?” In this bigger-is-better age of CAFO farming, where industrial feedlots literally create their own weather and you can smell them from an airplane, and at a time where Wisconsin proudly leads the nation in farm bankruptcies, I looked up, expecting a look of disgust on her face. Rather than a look of disgust, her face carried a sense of wonder.
As farms have industrialized and food production has been centralized, there is an equal but opposite desire for connection. Thus, we were hosting a family from New Jersey at the Wegmueller Dairy Farmstay, and I was in the middle of the complimentary tour that we always provide our guests. I paused, and realized the odor was a compliment. We had just taken our first cutting of alfalfa, and the wind was such, that the scent of 40 acres of freshly-mowed hay was wafting across the farm.
She continued, “I’ve never smelled anything so wonderful. Is this normal?”
I’ll tell you what — a direct connection to the land, and individualized relationships with those we serve — these are the aspects of farming that are worth fighting for.
— Dan Wegmueller is the owner of Wegmueller Farms and his column appears regularly in the Times. His website is www.farmforthought.org.
