'America's Dairyland': Wisconsin's farmers see bleak future
The Goodman family has been milking cows in Wisconsin since 1889. Jim Goodman is the last of his line. The 66-year-old farmer has sold his herd and the land where they grazed. His children have chosen other careers.
“One of our old neighbors used to say that farmers who encourage their children to farm could be charged with child abuse. It’s condemning them to a future where there is no certainty that they could even make a living,” says Goodman, sitting in his old farmstead near the tiny village of Wonewoc in the center of the state.
Wisconsin still styles itself the dairy state. Car number plates come with the slogan “America’s Dairyland”. Last year it was also the state with the highest number of farming bankruptcies – 57, its highest total in a decade. The number of dairy farms across the state has fallen by 49% over the past 15 years.
The decline is fundamentally changing Wisconsin’s rural landscape as schools and small businesses collapse taking the rural communities that supported them with them. Wisconsin is an avatar of a wider problem in the dairy industry. America’s largest milk producer, Dean Foods, filed for bankruptcy last November. Borden, founded in 1857, filed for bankruptcy in January.
The milk industry’s woes have been a long time in the making and no single factor accounts for them. Collapsing prices, the rise of mega farms in warmer states such as Texas and Arizona, the increasingly international trade in dry milk products like whey protein, Trump’s tariffs, the fluctuations in international trade and shifting consumer habits have all played a part.
The irony is that as the number of farms in bankruptcy rises, milk sales and prices are also on the rise. Percapita dairy consumption reached 646 pounds per person in 2018, the most popular year for dairy in the US since 1962.
America is not drinking as much milk as it once did but the popular narrative that milk alternatives are killing dairy doesn’t hold up. The percentage of milk sales lost to plant “milks” is small compared with other drinks – bottled water in particular – that have already taken a share and milk still outsells plant-based imitators by a margin of more than 11 to 1. And the US is still buying cheese, butter, yogurt, milk powders in infant formula and protein in bars and shakes.
For a state that has defined itself by dairy, the consequences of change are