THENEWYORKER,AUGUST17, 2020 17
evitable. “In America, the big get big-
ger, and the small will go out,” Perdue
said. “I don’t think in America for any
small business we have a guaranteed in-
come or guaranteed profitability.” Vole-
nec wasn’t surprised by Perdue’s answer.
“I walked in there knowing that’s how
they felt,” Volenec told me, referring to
the Trump Administration. “The part
that was unnerving to me was that he
said it to our faces. They’re not trying
to hide it anymore. They’re telling us
flat out: You’re not important.”
In 2016, after voting for Barack Obama
twice, Volenec voted for Trump. Volenec
had grown disenchanted with Obama
after his Administration banned whole
milk from schools and did little to slow
the loss of family farms. “I wasn’t fol-
lowing politics closely,” he said. “I never
listened to Trump give a speech, just
commentary over the radio. I had the
general impression that what’s wrong
with the agricultural economy was that
too many politicians were involved, and
that having a businessman in the White
House would benefit me.”
As rural Wisconsin’s fortunes have
declined, its political importance has
grown. Trump won the state by less
than twenty-three thousand votes. If the
2020 election is close, Trump could lose
Michigan and Pennsylvania—the other
Rust Belt states he flipped in 2016—and
still win a second term by holding Wis-
consin. Trump underperformed in the
suburban counties of Milwaukee, the
Republican Party’s stronghold, while
overperforming in the state’s rural areas,
where he won nearly two-thirds of the
vote. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
found that the largest shift in voting be-
tween Obama’s seven-point victory in
Wisconsin, in 2012, and Trump’s one-
point win came in communities that
cast fewer than a thousand votes. (Na-
tionally, Trump won sixty-two per cent
of the rural vote.)
Four years ago, Trump promised to
reverse the economic decline of family
farmers. “Hillary Clinton wants to shut
down family farms just like she wants to
shut down the mines and the steelwork-
ers,” he said, during a campaign stop at
the Iowa State Fairgrounds. “We are going
to end this war on the American farmer.”
In early 2018, he launched a series of trade
wars, which provoked China, Mexico,
Canada, and the European Union into
imposing penalties on American dairy
products. Mexico, the largest importer of
Wisconsin cheese, levied a twenty-five-
per-cent tariff on American cheeses. Last
summer, Trump allotted fifteen billion
dollars in compensation to farmers, but
the vast majority of it has gone to the
largest farms. In a tweet, he called farm-
ers “great patriots” and promised that they
would eventually be better off.
In June, as Trump’s poll numbers
dropped nationwide, the Washington
Post reported that his campaign advis-
ers were losing hope for Michigan and
Pennsylvania, and would focus on hold-
ing Wisconsin. “It’s baked into the cake
that Trump will lose the state’s large
metro areas in a landslide, while the
suburbs have been fleeing him,” Ben
Wikler, the head of the Wisconsin Dem-
ocratic Party, told me. “Trump can’t win
a second term unless he racks up enor-
mous margins in rural Wisconsin.”F
or Volenec, Trump’s appeal vanished
almost immediately. “If I had known
the things I know about him now, I
wouldn’t have voted for him,” he said,
when I visited him at his farm in Feb-
ruary. As Trump’s trade wars escalated,
Volenec’s problems worsened. In March,
2018, Canada effectively cut off all dairy
imports from the United States, and milk
from Michigan that had previously been
exported began flooding into Wiscon-
sin’s processing plants. The co-op where
Volenec sent his milk for processing was
now competing with cheap out-of-state
milk, and put a cap on the amount that
it would take from him. That week, Vo-
lenec heard about a meeting of the Wis-
consin Farmers Union, a family-farm
advocacy group, in nearby Dodgeville, to
promote a version of supply manage-
ment, a system used in Canada that sets
a quota on the production of dairy, eggs,
and poultry. Designed, like the New Deal
policies, to prevent overproduction and
to guarantee farmers a stable income,
the system relies on higher prices for
Canadian consumers. Trump’s trade
war with Canada is aimed at disman-
tling supply management, which has long
been deplored by Republican politicians.
John Boehner, the former Speaker of the
House, called it “Soviet-style” agricul-
ture. For Volenec, it was a revelation.
“This was my first glimpse into a world
where the dairy farmer is not subservi-ent to The Market,” he wrote in an essay
called “Groomed for Apocalypse.”
Volenec lives on the farm with his
wife, Jennifer, and their four daughters.
His parents still live and work there, too,
and the family employs four farmhands,
Mexican immigrants who milk the cows
three times a day, in five-hour shifts. Vo-
lenec spends most of his time feeding
cattle and doing maintenance. His work-
day begins at five in the morning and,
in the spring and summer, ends at nine
or ten at night. It was bitterly cold the
day I visited, so Volenec led me into a
small office adjacent to the milking par-
lor. On the wall was a whiteboard with
numbers detailing the farm’s milk pro-
duction, which averages roughly thirty
thousand pounds a day. A truck picks
up the milk every day and takes it to the
co-op, where it is turned into cheese.
(Ninety per cent of Wisconsin’s milk is
used to make cheese; if the state were a
country, it would be the fourth-largest
cheese-producing nation in the world.)
Dairy farmers have felt the effects
of the coronavirus pandemic acutely.
As schools and restaurants closed, they
abruptly cancelled their contracts with
milk bottlers and cheese factories. The
price of milk dropped by more than thirty
per cent, and some processors began
asking their farmers to dump milk. By
late April, as hungry people lined up
at food banks, one farm had already
dumped more than five million pounds
of milk, according to “The Mid-West
Farm Report.” Mitch Breunig, a dairy
farmer in Sauk City, had to dump all of
his morning milking for ten days. “We
took a hundred-and-fifty-foot hose and
ran it from the milking parlor right into
the manure-storage unit in the barn,” he
told me. Breunig wound up dumping
eighty thousand pounds of milk, for
which he received no money. “I would
just look at it and think, Wow, every-
thing we did was for nothing.”
State agencies issued protocols for
dumping milk, which can pollute ground-
water and decimate fish populations.
Though Volenec has not had to dump
any of his milk, he’s been worrying about
the environmental costs of large-scale
dairy farming, from water contamina-
tion to climate change. Manure runoff
from industrial dairy farming has con-
tributed to a dramatic increase in bacteria
and nitrates in the state’s groundwater,