Welcome, everybody, to Midday Magazine for this Thursday, February 6, 2025.
Have your host, James J. Mailoff here.
Welcome in the studio.
Our good friend, Matt Lippert, with Connie Ag Agent with UW Extension.
Matt, good to have you.
Thanks for being here.
Good morning.
Appreciate the time, as always, from you, sir.
And always love catching up with you in this industry.
I learned something every time you're with us, Matt, and I do appreciate that and the
time with you.
And I wanted to start right here.
I came across an article about the US, Wisconsin, the US, UW Madison Department of Agriculture
released their five-year report.
It showed a 16% increase and added 52, that we added 52.8 billion to these states' economy.
Yeah.
So we have a pretty good shop in Madison that's ag economists that are very good at using
scientific methods to ferret out, you know, there's survey data like how much money farmers
receive for their goods.
And so farmers are more productive, or if their prices get better, that number goes up.
And still, that doesn't cover if they're making money or not, it's just what they're receiving.
But then in Wisconsin, we have a huge, and that study, when they quote those numbers processing
industry, you know, most of our milk, like 90% in the range, is made into cheese, so that's
a value added.
And then of course, there's different amounts of value added on artisanal cheese versus
really bulk generic cheese.
And so they have information on that.
We make a lot of sausage, you know, and so more value added numbers.
So some of the, I've had to write about it a little bit already.
Some of the numbers are that there's fewer people employed in agriculture than there were
five years ago, but they're making more money.
So I think that's a good thing because we've, it means farmers are getting more efficient
because they're not becoming less productive.
So it just means that between the owners and their employers, there's slightly fewer,
but we need these people to be earning better per person.
So that's good news.
And like you said, the number is up.
We don't, we, I think a lot of industries have had to adapt and relate to this in a similar
way, very differently in other ways, but similar in some radio is no different.
When I first started in here, you had this set job and you did this and that's kind of
what you did.
And then I found out, no, that's, that's the first part.
You got hired for that.
You were just saying you're pretty busy, yeah, everyone's busy, it seems.
Yeah, and, and you get these added on jobs and everything because we all have to wear
many hats at our jobs because a lot of industries have been hit hard.
Yeah.
How have farmers adapted to this?
How, how have they, when we've talked about before, I've done open houses on farms.
We have not the majority, but we have more cows.
It's not a rare thing anymore to be getting milked by a robot.
You know, so that doesn't mean that there's not, that the robot takes care of everything
and the farmer forgets about them.
But it does usually is a replacement of capital investment in the robots with labor.
So that means the farmer has to invest more money.
So it's not a, but, and then the labor that is left is different.
So you have to learn how to repair and manage that robot.
The robot generates all sorts of data and so you look at that data and you help identify
if a cow looks like she's having a healthy vent or something like that.
So instead of physically attaching milking units to a cow, the people that are there are
doing different things.
And in the robot case, it's also tends to be an improvement in quality of life because
family farmers who used to never be able to watch their high school and junior high
kids at sporting events because they had a milk house can now schedule.
They're still doing the same amount of work, but they can schedule their life a little
better.
That's a great thing.
Yeah.
So Matt, you mentioned workers and kind of adapting to the times in some of that.
One of the things that has really, I would say, that always been the cases, the use
of other, other, other, other workforce and, and by that immigrants.
Yeah.
And I think immigrants is sometimes you hear the word migrant and like our vegetable production
over in the Sands and Portage County and there have long relied on seasonal workers.
But the dairy industry, I talked about the robots milking, but on the large dairies,
which we've got fewer, fewer dairies in general, about the same number of cows, the cows
are milking more.
But then the dairies that are left are larger.
It's really a pretty extreme trend.
We have more farms going out of business and the ones remaining getting larger.
And the larger dairies, a lot of the milkers across the country tend to be Hispanic.
If they're not Hispanic, they might be some other from abroad.
And so, it's been a large replacement of family labor that often wasn't paid.
You know, it was children and parents and household.
And now we have these Hispanic workers.
I can tell you that I'm pretty familiar with that because we have a number of farms in
the county that employ these people, certainly with the...
So a farmer isn't required to prove that they're legal, all right?
What they're required to do is the worker upon hire prevents papers that say they're legal.
And then the farmer is not allowed to question that or not.
So we don't really know on many farms if they're here legally or not.
But they're children.
They have children here.
So we know that's currently an issue because their children at least are definitely US citizens.
But I think in general, the dairy industry has been pretty passionate about standing up
for their workforce.
They become like family for them, you know, and so they love to work hard.
They like to maximize income.
And it's not like these people are not well paid, actually, they're often a multiple of
what a minimum wage would be.
And they're often getting other benefits housing and so forth.
And they do have a limitation.
The main limitation would be that their English is a second or nearly non-existent language.
So they do have that as a disadvantage, but highly utilized in the industry and very
essential.
Matt, if we lose a good portion, if not all of that workforce, what is the confidence
you have in being able to replace that with your everyday America?
Well, first off, it's imponderable.
I don't expect not to get political here.
But I think the people that are in charge of, say, deportations or whatever are not going
to go first to dairy farms.
But I think you also asked an extension.
So we just did a civil rights review, as a required thing, we do every five years.
And we have to document our efforts as educators on how we reach out to underserved and minority
audiences.
And so in Wood County, we talk about Hispanic speaking people.
We talk about the Hmong population.
And those are both larger groups than like Native Americans or Blacks in this area.
I also work in Clark County, and they're not a protected class, but they're an underserved
audience.
We talk about the plain faith community.
And so we, whether they're legal or not, we have to figure out, like if we're having
an event that we'd like Hispanic people come to, would they be intimidated by having
that event in the courthouse?
You know?
So we have to, and then we, for Hmong community, are we putting up notices where they shop
for groceries or we have to think about those things?
Are we offering translation, interpretation, are the topics we're offering things that
they're interested in?
These are all efforts that we're required to do as an extension office because we receive
federal funding.
I remember growing up, my dad's side telling me about how her relatives, when they first
came to this country, had a hard time finding work, because there would be signs that said,
no Italians need a ply.
No, it didn't say telling us that something else, but I'm just cleaning this up for the
airwaves.
We are a country of immigrants.
We are a country of this.
We are built on this.
And when we talk about the backbone of our country, it is our ag industry.
And being able to, anything that, you know, affects that, I think it needs to be noted.
That $52.8 billion doesn't happen without these workers.
For sure.
That's a gigantic thing in our economy.
This, there are so many layers to this, and I'm with you.
I think that this is a topic that is not necessarily ag related, but it is because these
all bleed into each other, and I think it's an important one.
I appreciate you having that conversation with us, Matt.
I wanted to get into another thing with you, if you don't mind.
The Wisconsin, we saw out of the, I saw this article at midwestfarmreport.com, a shout
out to Pam in the writing that she does over there.
You can find this article there, if you'd like, Wisconsin, midwestfarmreport.com.
Wisconsin cattle numbers are up this year, but nationally they are down, Matt.
Yeah.
So cattle in the country, there are more beef cattle than dairy cattle.
But in our state of Wisconsin, we talk about dairy cattle, all right?
So the beef industry has had, so that's dominated by two systems.
There's mama cows and cow calf operation.
These are grazed animals out on pastures here in the Midwest, but in the West they're
on range, so really extensive areas that just grow short grass, and these animals kind
of replace the bison herd, you know, so are they contrary to nature, no, they're kind
of doing their ruminants out on the prairie like we used to have.
And between droughts and economics and different things, that population is down.
And that's not unusual.
Population trends up and down, there's a regular cycle of population goes down, all of a sudden
beef cattle and meat are worth more, and it's more rewarding and so more heifers are retained
and the herd gets built.
But we do have, we haven't had drought for a couple of years now, but we had a lot of
drought in different areas of the country that really forced those populations down in
some of those areas.
And now prices for beef are really, beef is expensive in the store.
And so it's more profitable for a farmer at least in the short term to sell more of their
potential breeding herd to get for meat production.
And so we have not seen the populations recover.
So that's a story, the big story why populations are down.
They're the lowest, I think since a pre-World War II.
So there is a cycle, but it's a really low pronounced cycle.
And it's questionable if it's actually going to ever attain levels where it was.
We don't know that.
But in our dairy industry, it's impacted us as well.
We have a number of technologies that we use.
We now use sexed semen on a lot of our dairy cattle.
So we identify who we think our best cows are.
And we use AI, which in our industry is artificial insemination, not intelligence.
And we breed them to sex semen.
So we're nearly not a hundred percent, but we're nearly guaranteed that the animals we
want to produce the future herd have heifers that will be part of the future herd.
And then that means that we don't, before sex semen, every cow that had a heifer, that
heifer had to be saved.
But now we can make more bull calves or not dairy calves, because we have identified
this subgroup that are going to be heifers.
And we make those bull calves beef.
We breed a dairy cow to an angus or a charlée or some type of beef bowl.
And they produce a meteor type calf than if they would have been bred back to a dairy
bowl.
And these calves are worth a lot of money right now, because the beef industry is screaming
for the market driven hand is wanting more beef type animals.
And so we're actually because of that, also teetering in the dairy industry, of also having
low numbers.
But as the report said, actually in Wisconsin, we're up a little bit, but we're not up by
a lot.
Even with the still the need for it and everything, we're not, we don't know of course, but we're
not seeing necessarily an increase in the animal.
We're not seeing.
It's interesting to me.
Usually we create more product if we want more product.
That's what we do in America.
With this one, we're not seeing that.
Well, like I said, there's a immediate return and a less predictable future return.
So yeah, if you're looking at this as a beef producer, it's like I should retain more
of my heifers.
But oh, I can get a lot of money for those heifers.
So maybe I should just sell them.
So I'm sure it's market driven.
We just don't know all the motivations why the market is driven that way.
But in dairy, farmers keep their females.
They never leave their farm generally and they just get brought up to become cows.
But the bull calves are often sold at a week of age.
And a lot of people think that's inhumane and they're getting turned into veal and these
are misconceptions.
They're fed out as beef cattle.
And so they live longer than a pigwood or a sheepwood.
They live several years before they actually are harvested for meat.
But when we didn't have the shortage of beef cattle, these bull calves would be worth maybe
less than $100.
And now the ones, the whole steam bull calves are worth maybe $500.
And if they're a beef dairy crossbred, they're worth $700 to $900.
And so it's really, the market is driving, telling people to do certain things for a bit
of information about speaking with Matt Lippert, UW AG agent, and Matt, we're going to talk
a little bit about genomic testing and everything.
He were touching out of the little already.
Well, earlier I had mentioned that we breed our best dairy females to sex semen and they
make nearly all female heifers and that's our future herd.
Well now we use it as I think we know in human populations as well, we can genomically test
our females and we can have a better estimation when they're only young calf if they're going
to be outstanding or not.
And so actually in the, oh, I don't know, 15 to 20 years that this has been going on,
we've now tested over 10 million dairy cattle in the country.
So part of that, it's more powerful.
We have this huge database where we have a dairy herd improvement production records on
cows back to the 1950s and pedigrees so we know which cows out of which cows have been
healthy and productive.
We have records on their disease resistance, how long they stay in the herd.
And so we've really gotten pretty precise at identifying, we need all those numbers.
So we need the fact that whole steam is the main breed and they're kind of pretty much
related.
So the fact that we got this huge database and we connect it with a genomic test of their
genome and we can at a young age identify young bulls that are going to be outstanding
and young females.
And so we can build our herd faster and better.
And so that's a really neat story because genetic progress, there's also management progress
and so forth.
But genetic progress and dairy cattle has been going on since we've been using these
programs for like 100 years.
But it's improving faster now that we used to be, we would identify a bull that we thought
was better than average bull because he had a good sire and a good mother.
And then we'd collect and produce daughters in that bull and then once those daughters,
so it's like a five year process, once those daughters come into production, we'd find
out if we were right or not.
But now we can know all that level of information that took five to six years so we know that
at two months of age.
So generation interval, the faster you can turn that, the faster you can make progress.
So we're making great progress in dairy cattle.
And so I can look up online what the net merit of the animal is that combines all these
factors and we make progress so fast that to make those numbers meaningful, we adjust
the base every five years.
So in April, we're adjusting the base so that it doesn't look like they're a crazy superior
because we were comparing them to animals from 15 years ago, we move up the base.
So it's really a neat story about efficiency and technology and doing things better with
what we have.
Well, and it really speaks to what we were talking about before about the adapting and
having to adapt and how much our farmers and our ag industry in general has had to adapt
and how much technology has helped with that.
It's a really interesting story.
You also set me down a, so I can guarantee you around 11 o'clock midnight today I'm going
to be down a rabbit hole on this topic and just reading more about it and everything.
And looking forward to talking with you more about it when we get together again.
I think you again, so much for the time appreciate you and the whole team over at extension
say hi to everybody over there for us.
I'll do that.
Thank you.
You can find out more and reach the extension team by going to extension dot whisk dot
edu that's extension dot whisk dot edu be sure to follow them on social media as well.
It's great way to keep up the day with all the great things our friends from extension
are up to always a good conversation with a good friend Matt.
We got a great one lined up for you tomorrow as we wrap up the week on tomorrow's midday
magazine from four to five.
And it's in part one.
We'll speak with Wisconsin representative Scott Krueck and in part two Darla Allen from
the Charles and Joanne Lister library in the kusa going to be joining us looking forward
to both of those conversations.
And we will have more for you coming up then right here at 97 5 FM 13 20 AM WF HR.
We are locally grown radio.
