Hello, all. Welcome to WFHR's Rapids Report for this April 24th, 2025. Thank you so much
for joining us. I spread the word about the show moving streaming and keep in mind that
you can catch this show and pass shows at wpcharer.com and civicmedia.us. In with us right
now, our great friend from EW Extension Agricultural Agent Matt Lippert is with us right now.
Matt, thanks a lot for being here. How are you doing? I'm doing great. Matt reminded me
as a bad interviewer that I am of where I really wanted to start this the last time we talk Matt
because the last time he joined us, you were heading off to Europe, you were going to Italy. How did that go?
And what brought you over there? Yes, so I've been a regular with a group called the professional
dairy producers of Wisconsin, which is the largest dairy industry group in the state.
Their mission is pretty much strictly educational. They have a big conference in the spring
and they do workshops throughout the year, but every other year they do roughly every other year.
They do an international trip. I've been to Ireland with them, Germany, Netherlands, Australia,
and this year we went to Italy. When it comes to going to these different locations,
now certainly I think you can relate this to here in the states and you go even just in a state-by-state
basis, northern Wisconsin has different soil than southern Wisconsin. You and I have talked about that before.
You're going to have different soil and different things you're dealing with. I'm sure in England,
then Italy or vice versa or anything. Have you experienced some of that? Have you seen some of that?
Yeah, for sure. So I think probably for tourists, general, not egg or dairy-related tourists,
that they want to go to Venice and they want to go to, which Venice is not an agricultural experience.
Obviously it's archipelago, it's all in water, right? And Rome, they want to go to Rome,
which we did both of those. I think a lot of people like to go to Tuscany,
which is where Florence is and we, in getting to Rome, we also went to Tuscany.
It's very hilly, very Mediterranean, climate-wise. You know, they can grow all sorts of pretty warm season props,
but it's not like our Midwestern experience, which is a big flat fields or central Valley, California.
But I really wanted to see, because as an agriculturalist, I knew this,
the north of Italy has a big flat valley, it's called the Poe,
and it's a pretty unique landscape in the world for agriculture, and it is.
It's pretty comparable weather-wise and geography-wise to our central Valley in California,
and it's big. I don't think it's quite as big as a central Valley in California,
but another difference is it's more industrialized.
So even though it's a big expanse, there's small manufacturing, highways,
municipalities, inner ruins, it's been habitated for a long time.
So even though it's a big flat valley, there's pretty complicated as far as the features in it,
but that was really fun to see, and as a dairy farmer,
a lot of the dairy in the country is in that Poe region in the north.
When it comes to the purpose of this map, I mean, I can only imagine that if fun it is to be able to do something like this,
and the experience it is just for a person in general doing it, but the information, the act of it,
I imagine that it's also to collect information.
It's to just share information and find out what they're doing over here,
and can it help, can it apply over to us in the states?
For sure. And you get that all different ways.
So we went to Ford area farms, and this year it was nice.
Some years we go to quite a few more than that.
Italy is not a powerhouse of dairy, even in the EU.
That would be France and Germany, but they have enough dairy.
And what was nice about this is we went to probably the largest dairy in the country,
which is just 15 minutes from downtown Rome,
and right on the western coast of Italy, next to the international airport,
and they milked 1700 cows there.
And the style was a lot like our larger dairies in the US,
although they have some rules that some practices that we would do they wouldn't do.
And then we also visited a dairy in the north of Italy that was exclusively robotics,
and I think they had, oh, 10 robots, I think,
some in a brand, really new facility, and some in an older facility.
And robots have become a fairly common thing here as well.
And then we went to the first dairy was a very significant amount of their farm income
was having some of the very best genetics in the world.
And so we learned about their focus on that.
And then there was a dairy that was, I don't think
there was nothing incredible about this place.
It was just a nicely run one family operation, milking a couple hundred cows
in a city all around them and kind of in a steep valley.
And so that was nice to see probably a less extreme and more typical dairy as well.
So that's dairy cattle.
They milked water buffalo in Italy.
I did not know that.
Well, I did.
I don't know if I knew you could even do that tool water buffalo.
I'm learning a lot right now.
Well, you know, they're very protective of their region of origination of names.
So like we use parmesan and they have a parmesan or regiano.
And I can't even say the name of the other one.
But the product can only come from a certain region.
And then within that region they also have production protocols
of what it would take to make that type of cheese.
So, but we borrow their terms.
I mean, we have parmesan and we have mozzarella.
That's what we put on a lot of pizza.
Well, the original mozzarella, not even in Italy, it's not exclusively that anymore.
But the original mozzarella is a water buffalo cheese.
And that is my favorite cheese.
So that is wild to me to learn that.
That is really interesting, huh?
That's something.
You know, so we have goat products.
It would be the second most common dairy product here in the US.
And we have some sheep products as well.
Very, very, I mean, you have to go search that out to find it.
But goat products will definitely, if you're accustomed to a normal dairy product taste,
you will taste the essence of goat in a goat cheese.
And actually, I think you will find in water buffalo that's not really very noticeable.
But the milk is very different.
It's like twice as high in fat and protein than cow's milk.
So that's what the cheese would be made out of.
So the yield out of that would be much higher.
But I'd say as far as flavor profile, it would be harder to sit down and say,
oh, that's water buffalo.
It just didn't announce to me as loudly that I was eating something that I wasn't used to.
Did you see, you know, for everything as far as, oh, this is unique.
I want to try to do this here, or this is something that might be helpful.
Do you see a lot of relatability, too?
Like, hey, we are on the other side of the world.
And they're doing things almost the same or so similar the way we are here.
Well, the first dairy we went to, I actually was involved in finding the genetics herd.
I had read about them in a magazine.
And they don't normally take tours.
So because they don't want to deal with tourists.
Sure.
But these are farmers.
And farmers relate to each other wherever they are in the world.
And so they greeted us very much with open arms.
And yeah, I think, you know, farmers, you know, they have some pretty
restrictive rules in Europe and how they do things.
And we shake our heads.
And they have different economic situations.
The price of land is often higher.
Sometimes labor, you know, we talk about Mexican labor here in the US.
And Italy, they have a lot of people from India.
And I think less reliant on outside labor than we are here.
But definitely throughout the country, not just on farms, service kind of work in hotels and stuff.
You'll see some North Africans, Middle Eastern, but a lot of people from India.
I always look for opportunities to show a parallels or connections between us and others.
And this is a good one right here, this industry and what you're talking about here.
Was there anything else that stood out to you about the trip or anything else you wanted to touch on?
Well, you know, I was an extra side tour.
We toured the Vatican and all the stuff that's come down with the Pope happened right after we were there.
Oh, wow.
Wow.
Wow, that's wild.
So the tourist things were probably as nice for me as the agriculture.
I feel very confident saying this.
I have never been more jealous of a guest.
I have never easily, but it's a dream of mine to go to my family's from basil, mostly.
And so that's an area that I've always wanted to check out.
But there's just no, I don't know.
I don't know if there's a bad part of Italy to check out.
It was really interesting.
Thank you so much for taking us on that trip with you, Matt.
I appreciate that.
You know, one of the other things that I've told you endlessly on air off air, how much I appreciate is how you have allowed me and so many others to have a look behind the curtain of this world a little bit more.
And hopefully create some empathy, some understanding of our ag industry, our farmers, the people that are working out there.
And one of the cool things in early conversations we had was about the tech world in the ag industry.
How as a just knowing nothing coming into these conversations early on when we first started talking, I was blown away by how intertwined the worlds have become.
And then there's an article that I saw the other day, Matt, about this such a Wisconsin farmer becoming the first in the state to own a driverless tractor.
I was just on the morning show today, raging against driverless vehicles.
I will wholeheartedly own that.
I don't see it.
You were raging.
Yeah, I was personally me just me speaking for myself and everything.
I don't know that we've earned them as a society.
I feel like we've still got a lot of work to do in the driving department and that driving is a privilege.
It's not a birthright.
But then when this came up, I became a complete hypocrite.
And I owned that because this seemed like a really smart idea to me with this industry.
It might be safer than on a highway.
Yeah, you know, yeah.
But we know one of the things that I've learned in talking with you Matt and some others in the industry is the need of more hands on deck at times.
And how many, like your average farm, even a smaller or medium sized farm, and how much is put on one or two people.
And anything that could take maybe a little weight off the shoulders of our farmers seems like a positive to me.
And again, I'm coming into this obviously as a layman and not knowing that much.
So that's why I wanted to bring it up with you.
And I thought the topic was interest.
Well, so GPS guided tractors are...
So I'm not a gear head.
I'm not a tractor guy.
I'm in the barn with cows more.
And we have tractors in our farm and we don't have GPS guidance on our vehicles.
But we hire the majority of our field work.
And that's all GPS.
So you'd call it auto steer.
So you got a person in the tractor cab.
But the satellite knows where you're at.
And so you gain some efficiency making sure that you're row spacing.
Or you have an overlap to an area.
And you can driving down the highway.
You can look at sprouting crops coming up.
And you can go, well, that guy didn't have GPS.
So these auto steer systems are very, very close to being driverless.
So we're a little bit close to this already.
Oh yeah, it's very common that level.
Now to take the person out is the next logical step.
Yeah.
And this process is just in the beginning.
So there's only 20 of these tractors in the United States.
They're all in the Midwest.
And Mozeny has the only one in the state of Wisconsin.
And this is...
I was telling Matt about this before.
You can...
First off, you can find the complete article at MSN.com or go to the WSAW doing some great reporting over there on Channel 7.
Locally Challenge 7.
This is part of the De Jong farms.
This is over.
And you can find them on their Facebook page.
They're over an Edgar.
And they've been very...
They've been kind of sharing a lot about this too.
And this experience and everything.
So I just wanted to credit them being a part of this, but also sharing the information.
And just kind of seeing where this goes.
I find it to be a really interesting next frontier, if you will.
But then I talk to you, Matt.
And I find out, no, it's already a frontier we're at.
No, no, not at all.
Or close to it.
Or close to it.
But you know, we do know, like with a new administration, that there's a lot of tenseness in that people have...
Whatever you call them.
Non-native employees.
And let's say that that would drastically change.
And there would be fewer of them.
There would be this huge appetite for things like driverless tractors.
Yeah.
Even though most of the people in tractor cabs today are not non-native.
If you look at the segregation of roles, cow milkers are a lot of Hispanic people.
But people on the field less so.
But that's also one of the drivers for robotic milking of cows.
Is that there's just perceived labor shortage in agriculture.
So we're going to see in not just in agriculture, because there's people that want semi-tractors to be driven that way.
So we're, you know, my generation are getting close to retirement.
And the next generation's coming in are a lot smaller, smaller cohort than the boomers are.
So there's going to be a lot of pressure for replacing labor with technology.
It's honestly going to be very interesting, but something we also need to keep our eye on.
You know, going forward and seeing how this develops.
Not just out of curiosity, but certainly out of concern, too, I think.
Matt, I can tell you how much I appreciate you doing this.
I know that one day you might retire, but you are not allowed to retire from this job.
This interview, particularly with me, I love talking with you.
I appreciate you being here, man.
Thank you.
If people have follow up questions, if they'd like to know more, reach out to you.
Can they do that? How can they do that?
Yeah. So I'm in the county office of the extension, which is in the courthouse.
I'm also, I work in Marathon in Clark County.
So I office, also office at the courthouse in Clark County in Nielsville.
You can find us if you, if you look up UW Extension Clark or Wood County,
you can find our website and there's our phone numbers and so forth there.
Appreciate it, Matt.
Thank you again for the time.
And thank you, everybody, for listening.
Spread the word about the show and keep in mind you can get it at civicmedie.us or wfhr.com.
Share it with your friends on social media and everything and encourage you to keep on listening.
Thank you much for joining us here on the Rapids Report at WFHR, locally grown radio.
