Let the Van Langens stay
Back in 2009, The Record-Review visited the 120-acre Ron and Ester Van Langen dairy farm in the town of Wien. It was like nothing we had ever seen before.
The farm’s freestall barn was plopped in the middle of luscious, green pastures bordered by a woods. Inside the barn were two Lely-brand robots where 31 Holsteins were automatically milked. This was like a brand new world.
The Van Langens knew what they were doing. They married low-tech managed rotational grazing with high-tech robotics. They designed a dairy operation that would be self-sustaining, not reliant, as they had been the case in their native Netherlands, on outside income.
A dozen years later, the Van Langen farm is a success. The dairy is 440 acres. The couple has 140 cows. The farm makes money, which continues to be reinvested in the operation. “We have the farm exactly where we like it,” says Ester Van Langen proudly.
But the Van Langens’ future is in grave doubt. In August, the couple received a letter from Donna P. Campagnolo, service director for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), saying that the U.S. Government intended to deny their request to extend their E-2 visa. A final denial will mean the Van Langens, despite 12 years laboring to build a business in Marathon County, will have to sell their cows, leave the United States for at least a decade and return to the Netherlands.
Somehow this must be stopped. The Van Langens must stay in America.
We call on Wisconsin’s congressional delegation to intervene. Both Sens. Ron Johnson and Tammy Baldwin should plead the Van Langens’ case. Local congressman Rep. Tom Tiffany has written a letter of support, but he should pen a stronger, more robust second letter.
The Van Langens have received support from neighbors, dairy industry friends and others. Significantly, the Marathon County Extension, Education and Economic Development Committee last week authorized county board chairman Kurt Gibbs to send a letter to USCIS asking that the Van Langens be allowed to stay in this country. “Marathon County needs more highly skilled owner-operated farms like the Van Langens, not fewer,” wrote Gibbs. “Their presence is a key factor contributing to help sustain one of our county’s most valuable industries--agriculture.”
The Van Langens’ crisis comes, of course, in the midst of a general national crisis regarding immigration. The country’s laws are mired in obtuse regulations and enforced by an overwhelmed bureaucracy that takes years, not months or weeks, to resolve cases. The system allows some people into the country. Others fall between the legal cracks and, unlike the Van Langens, who own a business and can afford a lawyer, are simply deported, shipped back home.
We can’t solve this country’s gnarly problem with immigration this week. That’s too tall of a task.
Yet we can point out how wrong it would be to send the Van Langens packing back to Amsterdam. Last week, the University of Wisconsin set up a large, solar-powered water quality monitoring station at the edge of the Van Langens’ gently sloping pasture to test the environmental benefits of management intensive rotational grazing. Data from this research will tell dairy farmers across Wisconsin how to produce milk in a way that is both profitable and friendly to streams, rivers and lakes. The USDA spends billions of dollars annually to get farmers to help the environment. It would be utterly stupid for the same federal government to send the Van Langens, experts in producing milk sustainably, to a different country. Their hard-won farming insights are needed here.
The Van Langens came here because they thought they could be free to build a dairy in the way they, not the government, wanted. Now, the U.S. Government threatens their dream. We hate the idea that an independent, family-sized dairy must roam the globe to find a place not to become extinct. Let the Van Langens stay where they are, in their little corner of the town of Wien.
