Changes needed in approach to large-farm regulations

By John Holevoet 
Director of government affairs 

Wisconsinites are proud of our state’s dairy farming heritage. A suggestion a few years ago to remove “America’s Dairyland” from our license plates was met with strong opposition. This was good to see, but dairy farmers cannot survive off good feelings alone. We know that Wisconsin’s dairy community faces real challenges.  

The number of dairy farms in the state has been steadily declining since the 1950s, but the pace at which we are losing farms has quickened. We have also seen investments in dairy farms stagnate. At the same time, dairy farms and processors have been growing elsewhere. DBA has been very vocal about the threats Wisconsin must confront to keep its most progressive farms in the state and attract new ones as well.  

The regulatory burden and associated compliance costs that farms face are partially to blame for farmers choosing to invest elsewhere. We first saw this shift as more and more farmers opted to send their youngstock out of state. Even with transportation costs, it was still much cheaper to raise them elsewhere. This results in millions of dollars in economic losses for Wisconsin. Now, we see this trend broadening as farmers choose to build satellite facilities and new farms elsewhere.  

We need to improve the regulatory environment for farms in our state. This does not mean a lack of regulation. The states that are seeing significant growth in dairy farms and processing still have regulations. In fact, we are all bound by the same underlying federal rules, such as the Clean Water Act. That being the case, merely being more efficient in our administration of these shared rules would go a long way. That is why DBA has long advocated for improvements to the state’s CAFO permitting program to allow for new permits and renewals for larger farms to be issued more quickly.  

A recent decision by the Wisconsin Supreme Court has added new uncertainty to what might be expected of permitted farms here. The case centered on whether the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) could impose an animal unit cap on a CAFO and require a farm to dig groundwater monitoring wells at manure application locations. Ultimately, in a 4-2 decision, the court held that the DNR did have that kind of authority.  

In the wake of that decision, DBA organized a meeting between the DNR and ag stakeholders. Much is still unknown about the broad practical impact of this decision, but the uncertainty it has caused does not help those trying to encourage farmers to stay and grow in Wisconsin.  

There has never been a more important time for us to reexamine how farm permitting could be changed. DBA is hopeful that consensus can be reached between the farming community, DNR, environmental groups and others about a path forward. All three groups want a better and more functional CAFO program. This may seem like a lofty goal to achieve, but we have seen that merely trying to deflect or litigate our way out of regulatory challenges has not been successful either.  

There are no easy solutions to the problems Wisconsin’s dairy community faces; however, doing more of the same is unlikely to produce different results.