Bill Kaplan: Dairyland in trouble

Trump’s Agriculture Secretary, Sonny Perdue, speaking at the World Dairy Expo, Madison’s Alliant Energy Center 2019, infamously said: “Now what we see, obviously, is economies of scale … — big get bigger and small go out.” He was heartlessly saying that small dairy farms might not survive. Wisconsin Democratic Senator Tammy Baldwin correctly rang the alarm: “More than 2,000 dairy farms in Wisconsin have gone out of business since President Trump took office.”...

...That is the bleak future that Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce (WMC) wants for Wisconsin. The WMC is suing and threatening small rural towns that want to limit pollution from large industrial farms that degrades the quality and safety of groundwater and streams. The WMC is a big bully that can’t resist throwing its weight around against the common good. Corporations over small dairy farms and the public interest...