“He kind of put the pox on small farming in the state,” Evers told reporters after sampling Pierce County cheese curds and meeting the owner of this year’s Wisconsin Cow of the Year at the World Dairy Expo in Madison.
U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue in a visit to the dairy expo Tuesday said small Wisconsin dairy farms — which have been decimated in recent years amid plummeting milk prices and falling export markets — may need to get bigger in order to survive the cost to operate and the whims of the market.
Evers suggested Perdue’s comments demeaned the industry advertised on state license plates.
“Are they struggling? Absolutely. But I think at the end of the day we need to get behind them rather than saying, ah maybe you should go larger,” Evers said. “I, frankly, resent that the Department of Agriculture secretary from the federal government came in and kind of lambasted them.”
Perdue said it’s difficult for farms to pay for capital costs and adhere to environmental regulations on a business based on 100 dairy cows or fewer.
“Now what we see, obviously, is economies of scale having happened in America — big get bigger and small go out,” Perdue said.
Nearly 3,000 U.S. dairy farms folded in 2018, about a 6.5% decline, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture figures. Wisconsin lost nearly 700 — almost two a day.
Though prices have improved some in recent months, Wisconsin has still been losing more than two dairy farms a day this year, wreaking havoc on the rural economy.
Many families exhausted their savings and credit to remain in business, and they eventually had to shut down their milking operation to cut their losses.
Perdue’s comments come as Wisconsin dairy farmers are still feeling the sting of Trump’s visit to Milwaukee in July, where the president downplayed the suffocation felt by farmers here because of Trump’s own tariffs.
“Some of the farmers are doing well. … We’re over the hump. We’re doing really well,” Trump said as part of a tour of Milwaukee to promote a new trade deal with Canada and Mexico, which he said would rebuild the country’s wounded manufacturing and agriculture industry.
The comments from Trump and his agriculture secretary surely will be used by the president’s Democratic opponent against him, but their long-term effect is unclear.
Overall, Wisconsin dairy farmers have largely backed Trump’s proposed trade deal and there is no evidence the president is facing broad defections among rural voters who supported him in 2016.