(CN) — Jake Gehring lives on a 500-acre dairy farm situated in the same pocket of Wisconsin’s Kettle Moraine his ancestors staked out in 1856, making him the sixth generation to operate Gehring Stone House Dairy in the small town of Hartford, which he runs with his wife, Molly, and father, LeRoy.
Gehring’s 5-month-old daughter, already a fixture in the milking stalls, would be the seventh generation should she choose to take up the family mantle.
For Wisconsin dairy farmers, however, the future is uncertain. Hard times are nothing new, but the myriad impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic, coupled with preexisting marketplace strains largely outside farmers’ control, paint a dire picture for the $45 billion dollar a year flagship industry in America’s Dairyland.
The decline of the small, family-owned Wisconsin dairy farm has occurred over the last half century, fueled by a global surplus of milk driving down prices, the competition of gigantic megafarms milking thousands of cows, costly tariffs and trade wars, and shifts in consumer taste toward dairy alternatives like soy and almond milks.
Wisconsin lost more than one-third of its dairy farms between 2011 and 2018. In 2019 alone, 818 dairy farms shuttered, a disappearance of more than 10% of the state’s dairies at a rate of roughly two per day. Wisconsin leads the nation in farm foreclosures and has seen a troublingly steady rise in farmers dying by suicide in recent years.
Then Covid-19 tore across the world, tanking markets, limiting movement and snarling supply lines, which include the now partially shutdown food service industry where more than half of Wisconsin’s dairy goes.
This leaves farmers like Gehring, whose herd clocks in around 185 cows, stuck with huge quantities of unbottled, unpasteurized milk, for which they still have to pay fees to state and national dairy cooperatives but cannot sell or give away.
The 26-year-old Gehring laid out in an interview that “our expenses are all the same but our most recent pay was half.”
Tom Oberhaus, who operates Cozy Nook Farm in Waukesha with his wife Joan, is in a similar situation. Before Covid-19, the milk from his 80 dairy cows sold for about $17 per 100-pound parcel, or hundredweight, but post-coronavirus that same hundredweight only brings in about $11.
“To put that in perspective,” Oberhaus said, “it’s like saying ‘now we’re requesting you to continue coming to work but instead of a paycheck on Friday we’re handing you a bill.’”
Oberhaus estimated the current coronavirus maelstrom is causing him to hemorrhage about $300 per day.
Both Oberhaus and Gehring admitted they have made next to nothing off dairy in recent years, necessitating side hustles to make ends meet. Oberhaus seasonally sells pumpkins and Christmas trees, while Gehring moves 30 acres of winter wheat when the time is right.
With prices too low and supplies too high, some farmers have been faced with the agonizing choice to dump thousands of pounds of surplus milk, although neither Oberhaus nor Gehring have had to do so yet.
All of which begs the question: what is getting done at the state and federal level to assist farmers in crisis? What can be done?
At the state level, Democratic Governor Tony Evers and the GOP-controlled Wisconsin Legislature eventually overcame their public-facing animosity and worked on broad farm aid legislation after Evers called a special session on the matter in January.
That legislation, which featured property tax credits for farmers and other financial aid, passed the State Assembly and went on to the Senate, where it waits today.
Wisconsin also earmarked $8.8 million in annual funding for the state’s Dairy Innovation Hub, a coalition between divisions of three Wisconsin universities dedicated to broadly-defined dairy research, in the 2019 biennial budget over which the governor and the legislature are still fighting in court.