Welcome, everyone, to Midday Magazine for this April 11th, 2024.
Have your host, James J. Mail, off here.
We're joined right now by our good friend UW Extension Ag Agent Matt Lippert, who's with
us.
Matt, always good to see you.
Good to see you.
Thanks for being here.
Appreciate the time.
I want to get into a couple of things with you, whatever we have time for today, Matt.
But one of the things that I came across was the the wet start to the Wisconsin 24 growing
season.
And I got this article from Wisconsin AgConnection.com.
If you can curious to check out the whole article, Wisconsin AgConnection.org.
I know Pam was kind of talking to your ear off a little bit too, like I was about this
crazy weather season we've had and how this might affect our ag industry and our farmers
out there.
So I think what was most unusual, what you're referring to, is our non-winter, and most
of that, most people prefer a little less winter-like conditions, so we didn't have much snow
to push.
We didn't have extreme temperature.
Sometimes we're worried about if there's no snow that then it gets cold and then we have
the soil temperature gets really cold and we can have some damage to plant crowns, plant
roots.
I think we're starting to know a little bit already that we didn't have much problem
that way.
I'm a little intrigued by your article, a wet beginning to the season because we had
drought all of last year, one of the most severe we've had in probably like 20 years.
Then we got in October, and depending where you were, we got like eight to 11 inches
of rain in the last two weeks of October, which actually, you know, that sounds like
too much too quick, but it was so dry that I think we captured a lot of that.
But then there was a lot of concern through the winter without the snow being previously
dry, that it was dry.
We were concerned about El Nino as supposed to be switching to La Niña, that's supposed
to actually, La Niña does the maps I've seen don't have as dramatic impacts on the upper
Midwest as some other areas.
So actually, the little bit, I wouldn't call it a wet spring yet, and as far as in Southern
Wisconsin, it's April, maybe even in the March, they will do some planting of some crops.
But we usually in this area, I was even talking to potato growers last week, you know, they
are just starting, they're right on schedule.
The people on the heavier soil have done some spring tillage that's way ahead of normal.
So it wouldn't have been, we locally here would not call it a wet spring, but now that it
is starting to get to be closer to more legitimate time to do it, we're back to a more normal
situation that there is moisture in some situations, the field, and we can't just go out
and do everything, but that's really normal.
I wouldn't call this a wet spring.
So with that being said, is there, with the season we've had, as consumers, are we going
to be seeing some effects from this, or are we going to even notice?
At this point, I don't think there is anything that would be noticeable.
As I said, it's very early in the season.
Yeah, very hard to tell it, and I hate that making you look at your crystal ball.
I don't like doing that to you, but especially with this industry.
But it is something that I think that we, a lot of people, I should say, when we're
talking weather, we all do from people with making small talk in that.
One of the things that would come up was the concern of that, and it was actually reassuring
to me in just the sense of, oh, people are thinking of this, people are thinking of farmers,
people are thinking of it.
Now maybe they're thinking of it in part because of how it affects them personally, but
it's building on this empathy that, not only you and I, but I think a lot of people in
this state really try to create, of getting people to understand what it is to be a farmer
and having some empathy for that.
There is a little bit of that that comes from this conversation that is good, but it's
interesting to see that not that we know right now, of course, but how this weather affects,
of course, where things are.
There's one thing that is maybe a little weather-related, is people have noticed in the stores
that beef has gotten really high priced.
We have the smallest cattle herd, so let's dairy and beef together, since I think it's
like 1951 or 1953, and a little of that is how we've gotten more efficient, but it's
noticeable.
We have a really small, we don't have many mother beef cows making baby animals that are
going to turn into meat in the grocery store.
That is, there's other factors, but one of the main ones is it has been dry on the areas,
the beef industry, you hear about feedlots where these animals get finished on a high-grained
diet to get them marbling in their meat, but the typical beef production in the US starts
out on pastures with cows that live on pastures all their lives, and they, in the spring
this time of year, they're dropping calves and the calves nurse on their mothers, and
then those calves stay out in the pasture, the range, whichever you want to call it, and
then later in life they get finished.
Well, the range areas in the southern US, southern Midwest plains have been dry and there's
not been feed, so there's maybe other factors, but there's just not many cows around, and
I think that would be a weather-related thing.
Matt, since we're talking cows a little bit here, and I don't have my youngest daughter
around to talk cows because she loves cows, that's her favorite animal.
I didn't want to get into a subject that Melissa and I in our morning show we're talking
about, and it comes to us actually from your neck of the woods and UW Extension, encourage
people to find more great articles at the University of Wisconsin's website news.wisc.edu.
The headline was cows are getting sick in other states, what does it mean for Wisconsin?
Can we touch on this topic for a little bit?
Sure.
Well, when you first hear this news, what was the first news now?
How did this hit you?
How did this...
Well, there's a Texas panhandle, is actually an area where there's actually quite a few
large dairies now, and it started there.
The first news was we had these cows that are getting very sick, very few mortalities,
just suddenness of stopping eating temperatures, and these were large dairies where they actually
have monitors where they can tell the cow's stomach, her room, and how it's functioning,
and it's just like immediate cessation, you know, just nothing, and they didn't know what it was
from.
It took probably over a week before they said, well, this is bird flu, and so it's called
highly pathogenic avian bird, influenza flu.
And so we haven't had this in the cattle, we've had it, when we've had some egg shortages
in the last couple of years, this has been HPAI as well.
So it has jumped species, and it's actually been kind of quiet, I'd say the last week,
so we found it in Texas, then it was in Idaho and Kansas, then it was in Michigan,
and so I'd say still it would seem highly probable that this is going to spread, because it's
shown up in all these places, so it can spread cow to cow, it can spread from wild birds,
which are hard to control how that happens.
And it has a unique presentation in that it's not affecting our young animals, it's
affecting older animals, it's not affecting early lactation, which is actually a high production,
high stress period, seems to be affecting later lactation.
So it has a lot of, it presents, I don't know if they drink so little or whatever, that
they get dehydrated, but they present a thick, non-normal, yellowish milk.
So it's still evolving, it could be really major, the fact that we haven't had as much
news, and that we haven't had it reported here in Wisconsin yet, I think, it's a little
hope.
It also is zoonotic, which means that we knew this before, people on chicken farms can carry,
they can get bird flu.
And it's usually, it's not like a COVID outbreak yet, of course, because this thing is mutating,
that people can get like pink eye sort of effect from it.
And it's usually people that are directly working with the animals.
So you cook meat, we pasteurize milk, you should not be too alarmed, that all if I drink
milk from cows from Texas that I'm going to get bird flu, you shouldn't be thinking
that way, because it's pasteurized, and you cook your meat.
So we're not too concerned about that at this point.
But if it does continue to spread, we could have more production loss, and you'd be seeing
that in the store if we have less milk.
From the article, and from Keith Poulson, University of Wisconsin-Madison expert in zoonotic
disease and director of the Wisconsin-Vitinary Diagnostics Laboratory, there are a couple
of things that they wanted to stress from this article that pasteurized milk and cooked
meat, as Matt was saying, and all products are safe, and there is no reason to believe
there is no concern for dairy products.
The disease seems to be spreading from bird to cow, not cow to cow, though investigations
are underway to determine how the disease was spread to the Michigan dairy.
And at this time, the disease is not considered a high risk for public health.
So it is important to note those things, we can do two things at once, though, I think
that it's important to be able to chew gum and walk at the same time.
It's important to know about this stuff.
Not necessarily, we're not nobody's trying to scare people, though.
We're not trying to freaking anybody out or anything else.
You get out, people, rightly so.
I mean, people get scared, right?
So even if I tell them, don't worry, the milk is pasteurized, you cook your meat.
There's thousands of people, millions of people.
Some people are going to be alarmed, right?
Yeah, yeah.
So, we do a good job of freaking ourselves out.
We don't always need the scientists to do a force and everything, that's a good point.
But I do think, again, coming back to this where while we don't have concerns necessarily
for these things as far as consumers go, it is another reminder of how the diligent work
that is done behind the scenes and stuff before we even see this food on our plate and how
much work goes into this with the ag industry and the scientists and everybody involved in
the food and safety administration to try to make sure that the products once it lands
on your plate, it is safe.
Well, so background research.
This was very, I suppose it's three weeks ago now, very alarming.
These cows are getting really sick and it seems to be spreading, so, and we don't know
what it is.
So, you know, there was a lot of state veterinary departments in multiple states figuring
out that this was a, this HPAI that we've mainly seen in poultry had a strain had adapted
to affect cattle.
So there's a lot of work already that's been done on this, and, but yes, our state veterinary
and departments are incredible in the work that they do.
It really is impressive.
We're speaking with Matt Lippert, agricultural agent with UW Extension, Madison, and Matt,
one of the things that I want to send a shout out actually to our Wisconsin-Rabbit City
Times as well and some great reporting done by Jean and Mike and about our own little
neck of the woods here.
This is a wonderful place for connecting food and those who grow it.
There's the mission statement of the new Food Plus Farm Exploration Center located right
off of I-39 and Clover.
I wanted to talk about that facility a little bit and what it is, what it gives to the community
and the future of what it could bring as far as maybe sparking young minds and to get
into this industry, learning more about it and again, coming back to the empathy thing
at the very least, creating more of a bridge of that.
Sounds like a great facility.
It is an awesome facility.
I've been there once.
I would recommend everyone should, I mean, it's just over in Clover, Southside of Clover.
It's brand new.
It's state of the art.
I've seen some other versions of this, so there was a lot of groups that came together
to sponsor this and you actually, I'm intrigued that you picked that one up.
Maybe the newspaper wrote about that a little bit, but there's a concern about agriculture
is really a prevalent industry in the central Wisconsin area.
A lot of people don't realize that what I physically do is not, I don't get my hands dirty,
I don't handle a crop or an animal, but I do things that are serving agriculture.
It could be laboratory work.
It could be accounting functions.
It could be IT because the egg is getting more sophisticated.
So there's a concern in the egg that we don't have enough people realizing as they're
choosing, because we know there's not as many young children.
There's more people, the pyramid is the wrong way that my age is leaving the workforce
and there's not as many people to replace it.
There's a concern about will we have people that realize the great opportunities are
in agriculture.
So I think that's one of the reasons to create this facility is there's a lot of things
for families, preschool, elementary school, since it's new, there's just the parking lot
every day has got lots of buses from elementary schools.
But there's things for every age group, it's very interactive and it does a great job
of educating about protecting the earth, conservation, water, practices that we use,
areas that we're working on managing fertile it's it's it's so there I've seen others
like this.
There's one in the Faroaks area between Indianapolis and Chicago that's really famous for teaching
people about dairy production and hog production and you can go watch a cow calf, a live birth
there.
This one is dedicated a little more to our potato and vegetable production area in the irrigated
central sands, but they have a great deal of information on when they water the kind
of sprinkler heads they use, oh I'm just touching on it, it's really a neat place and I think
everybody would find it interesting to see.
Yeah, there's a lot of detail that goes that go went into this and so that you're going
in and you're not just seeing a tractor, you're seeing like Matt said some of the details
of that.
You're getting a little bit more of the nuts and bolts of the conversation with this and
I really think that that part is now the detail is going to help only more it's staying
their hearts and their heads and this information for these kids along with possibly sparking
you know an interest in the field.
I also appreciate you touching on the other aspects of ag that I personally I don't think
about all the time either and I know some listeners might not either about the accounting
and some of these other things that just doesn't get covered very often so I appreciate
you touching on that.
What was something like this Matt, I imagine that it's a great thing to have of course
and we're happy for all the reasons we've just said.
Does it help at all when you spent your life and dedicated so much to this industry, to
see things like this, to see efforts like this to help the industry, is it is I imagine
it goes some ways for you.
It's not easy for our ag industry these days and I imagine that it's got to be at least
some gift or something not gift but some good feeling to see such work being put into
a project like this.
I think it's very nicely done.
There's a concern sometimes that in schools that teachers are probably starved for media
and so they want to teach about food production or egg and they get a hold of oh some
alarmist material that implies that the main agricultural production system in the
country is I don't know inhumane or doesn't respect workers or doesn't respect the environment
and it's it's a lot more nuance than that you know and so I think this does a nice
job of talking about alternatives.
It talks about why you might want to use an organic food or an organic production system
and what it does on the other hand it talks about how conventional systems for many reasons
have to also be respectful of the environment.
So it's really nicely done and I think it's whenever you put a lot effort into education
you want to see it be balanced and I think it does that pretty well.
One of the other things that I noticed about this and reading in it was something that
I you mentioned something about what I was saying before about the importance of this
and you you touching that concern as well and certainly they do a nice job in the article
talking about that but I picked that up and go into school out here like working and working
alongside kids that come from an ag family and some of the concern there from their parents
or from them themselves about their brother and sister or somebody continuing that work
and continuing to stay in that field.
I've seen that a lot and one thing I've seen a lot of that is not only people that have
questioned whether or not they want to go into that field and then they ended up going into
the field but also people that have come back to the field.
People have gone off and gone to school, come back to town and this is you know what they
found out they write about other industries but this is the one that they want they want
to be a part of.
So it is interesting to see with that and then there is the other part and Matt you and I have
touched on this a bit before and you really opened my eyes to this along with Rachel White here
who used to work there as well about the tech and and ag industry and how hand in hand
those are and how much that's enhancing and making it that much better going forward for future
generations.
I just are doing some homework for our conversation here.
I saw an article on new scarecrows, lasers that aim to deter wild birds like we were even
updated the scarecroman't like we don't even have traditional scarecrows anymore like it's
pretty lazy.
Yeah.
It's pretty interesting.
It's pretty interesting.
It's pretty unique to see where this is going.
I imagine that that's got to be enticing to the young generation.
I think that that's got to be incentive maybe incentivizes the wrong word but maybe give
them even more encouragement of getting into this field and it's kind of wild to see.
I imagine especially for you somebody was growing up in this industry.
Well so a lot of people have left agriculture over the years out of concern of working outdoors
too many hours, too little pay, too much risk and I mean they watch their parents so these
are all real things and I'm not saying that it's just a plush easy life anymore but there's
been a lot of things addressed so as agriculture is essential so we have to we have to make
it manageable for the people that work in it.
If you're talking about technology I just had earlier this week on Tuesday I had a program
about robotic milking of cows.
So that is well we had 150 people there and typically and we didn't feed them a free
meal and usually in egg because extension doesn't feed free meals usually some cooperative
or something has a spring day and they feed people and they get a lot of people but this
we didn't do any of that we had 150 people at this farm it was up near Abbotsford and it's
about robotics.
So dairy producers have a lot of interest in the robotic milking so if you know a census
of agriculture recently came out and most the cows and most the milk in the country these
days are produced on farms over 2,000 cows which we have very few of those around here
and we think that's a this is a big dairy area but these really big farms have a lot of
cows and so when when you account for where the milk comes from it comes from those big farms.
So that's changed in agriculture a lot but they're and because of this cows and large farms
it's an incredible amount of the milk that is the people milking the cows are Hispanic
we hear all the fraught discussion about people crossing the border that tend to be Hispanic
Spanish speaking people and agriculture dairy farmers need those workers and they're they're
just you'll you'll hear well the native white population doesn't want a milkhouse Hispanics
don't necessarily want a milkhouse so we're finding that robots are becoming a really important
alternative and cows can like this too because instead of going to parlor to get milked when the
farmer says twice or three times a day in a robotic milking system the cow decides if she wants
to get milked five times a day or twice a day and the computer behind the robot if this cow
wants to go more often than the computer thinks it should yeah she's wasting the time the
computer the gate is closed the cow is not allowed to enter but if she's a heavy producer at the
time of her lactation when it's very legitimate that she should want to get milk five times a day it
opens up the door and welcome these are a pretty neat piece of equipment to see how an arm comes
under the utter and it's either like lasers or camera is identifying where where the attachments
crazy that's amazing yeah so there's a lot of interest in these they're quite expensive but
if you're hiring labor it's a trade-off right so they're actually popular amongst large
diaries that are putting in dozens of these things or smaller family sized diaries that just want
one or two of them yeah Matt I look forward to talking again real soon and getting you more into this
and in talking some more about these kind of subjects always appreciate the time and the insight
from you Matt thank you so much for it we'll talk again real soon very good well the
more midday magazine come for you coming up on WFHR locally ground radio
