16 THENEWYORKER,AUGUST17, 2020
In the past decade, about half of the state’s dairy farms have gone out of business.
LETTERFROM WISCONSIN
THE LAST STAND
How suffering farmers may determine Trump’s fate.
BY DAN KAUFMAN
PHOTOGRAPH BY PEYTON FULFORD
L
ast October, Jerry Volenec, a dairy
farmer from southwestern Wiscon-
sin, took the morning off to go to Mad-
ison for the World Dairy Expo, an an-
nual cattle-judging contest and trade
show. Volenec wanted to hear a town-
hall discussion led by Sonny Perdue, Don-
ald Trump’s Secretary of Agriculture, to
learn how the Administration planned
to address the economic crisis gripping
Wisconsin’s family dairy farmers.
Volenec’s farm sits atop Bohemian
Ridge, a jagged plateau named for the
Czech immigrants who settled there in
the late nineteenth century. Among them
was Joseph Volenec, Jerry’s great-great-
grandfather, who established the farm, in
- In the nineteen-fifties and sixties,
Volenec’s grandfather milked a herd of
sixteen cows; he could make a living be-
cause New Deal policies used price sup-
ports and other measures to boost farm-
ers’ earnings and limit overproduction.
Jerry Volenec always wanted to be-
come a farmer. “You couldn’t keep me
out of the barn,” he said. “I was milk-
ing cows by myself by the time I was
fourteen.” By the early nineties, when
Volenec began farming full time, the
New Deal policies had largely been dis-
mantled. The family increased its herd
to about seventy, and Volenec’s father
started paying him a salary, enough
money for his education at the Univer-
sity of Wisconsin-Platteville, and to
start an I.R.A. In 2000, Volenec installed
a milking parlor, and since then he has
increased the herd to three hundred and
thirty cows. “We’re the biggest of the
small guys,” Volenec, who is forty-five,
with a sturdy build and a thin goatee,
said. “But I was making more money,
doing less work, when I started, twenty-
five years ago. I’m basically paying my-
self living expenses now.”
Five years ago, the price of milk fell
precipitously, accelerating the long un-
ravelling of rural Wisconsin. Since 2010,
the population in two-thirds of the state’s
rural counties has decreased, leading to
a shrinking workforce, fewer jobs and
businesses, and slower income growth
rates than in metro counties. More than
seventy rural schools have closed, and
for the past three years the state has led
the country in family-farm bankrupt-
cies. “The level of desperation and lack
of hope in our phone calls has increased,”
Angie Sullivan, who supervises case-
workers at the Wisconsin Farm Cen-
ter, part of the state’s Department of
Agriculture, said. “Dairy farmers are
working on their fifth year of low milk
prices. Many banks have stopped loan-
ing them money.” Wisconsin has seven
thousand dairy farms, roughly half the
number that it had a decade ago. Yet
the number of cows has remained con-
stant, because of consolidation and the
proliferation of factory dairy farms, some
of which have herds of more than five
thousand cows.
“It’s like a never-ending cycle, almost
like a hamster on the wheel,” Travis
Tranel, a Republican state representative
from Cuba City, forty miles south of Vo-
lenec’s farm, told me. Tranel is an or-
ganic dairy farmer with a five-hundred-
cow herd. “You just keep running and
running. Your only option is to produce
more.” Tranel said that consolidation has
all but wiped out small dairy farms in
Wisconsin and now threatens medi-
um-sized farms such as his. “We can see
the future if we stay on the path we’re
on,” he said, noting that the consolida-
tion of hog farming had already trans-
formed Iowa. “I definitely do not want
to see rural Wisconsin become as empty
as rural Iowa.”
After the town hall, Perdue took ques-
tions from reporters, one of whom asked
if the state’s loss of small farms was in-
