Dismantling infrastructure

The region’s dairy infrastructure took yet another hit this week with the announcement by Baraboo-based Foremost Farms that they would be closing the Milan and Plover cheese plants.

Foremost Farms is a dairy cooperative, which means it is ultimately responsible to the producer/members that are part of the organization. As with any cooperative, it is also a business with a board of directors and staff making decisions for the good of the entire organization — even when those decisions aren’t so great for the producers, workers and communities directly impacted by those decisions.

A faceless company release announced the closure of the plants by the end of the year. There will be 60 jobs lost in Milan and 50 lost in Plover. There are the usual platitudes about how the company will help the displaced workers find new positions elsewhere in the company, that is if they want to uproot their families and move for them.

The company’s release says the age of the plants were making them unprofitable and that it would take a significant investment to bring them up to date. The company also cited the ongoing labor “challenges” in the area — something every human resources director is well aware of.

On one level, it is purely a business decision. A large business looking out for its bottom line and making the tough choices to align with where they see future growth and profitability can occur. It is those types of thoughts that let board members and bean counters sleep well at night.

On a different level, the closure of the Foremost Farms plants signal an ongoing dismantling of the dairy industry in Wisconsin.

The past several years have not been good ones for Wisconsin’s dairy farm families. While the pace of farm closures and consolidations has slowed from recent years, since 2014, the state has seen about one-third of all its dairy farms close. In 2021 alone, the state saw a 5% drop in the number of dairy farms. With the drop in farms and the tightening of local labor markets, there has been a steady dismantling of the infrastructure that both supports the dairy industry as well as cheese and processing plants which add value to the output of those farms.

Agriculture is a primary foundation of Wisconsin’s economy. Decisions to close processing plants weaken that foundation. It eliminates good paying jobs. It leaves communities with gaping holes in their tax base.

A direct result of the closure will be that the farmers who provide milk there will incur greater costs in having their milk hauled to plants that are further away — that is if they can find plants with the capacity to take their milk. Farmers, like any other business owners, live or die based on the margin between their revenue and expenses. Imagine it as walking on a plank bridge over a gorge. The wider the plank, the easier the traveling, and the narrower it is, the more precarious it becomes and the more at risk of being knocked off by the slight gust of wind.

Closing the Milan and Plover plants may be good business on the part of Foremost Farms and the majority of its member/owners, but for the people and communities impacted it is as lousy as month old milk.

Wisconsin needs to make a renewed investment in its rural infrastructure on both a public and private sector level. Once-thriving rural communities across the country have dried up and blown away the victim of business decisions that favored short-term thinking over long-term investment.

If rural Wisconsin is to remain economically viable and relevant into the future, action must be taken to roll back the dismantling of the agriculture infrastructure with renewed investment.

While there is a time in any business when you need to cut your losses and move on, rural Wisconsin is worth the continued investment.

Brian Wilson is News Editor at The Star News.