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A Dairy Month for the Dairy State
June is National Dairy Month and where better to celebrate all things dairy than here in "America's Dairyland?" Wisconsin's nickname is more than just a snappy slogan, however. The state has been a major dairy producer and innovator for more than a century.
But before dairy, there was wheat. Wheat was the earliest and most important cash crop for Wisconsin's white settlers in the mid-19th century. It required a small initial investment and was fairly easy to grow, so for roughly 40 years, from the 1840s to the 1880s, Wisconsin was "America's Breadbasket," not "Dairyland." The seeds of the industry's decline were already emerging in the 1850s, though.
Wheat prices dropped. Chinch bugs devoured entire crops. And farmers in Iowa, Minnesota and the Dakotas increased market competition. To meet these challenges, farmers experimented with a variety of alternatives to wheat, one of which, thanks to the vigorous efforts of William Dempster Hoard, was dairy farming.
Hoard believed that Wisconsin was particularly well suited to the dairy industry and encouraged wheat farmers who were losing money to switch to dairy. He organized a dairying convention in Watertown, Wisconsin, in 1872, where he founded the State Dairyman's Association, the first of its kind in the nation. In 1885 Hoard also founded a national dairy farm magazine, Hoard's Dairyman, still published today.
The University of Wisconsin also actively promoted the dairy industry in the late 19th century through scientific research and agricultural "short courses" designed to educate farmers on the benefits of dairying. Professor Stephen Babcock's innovative butterfat tester, developed in 1890, allowed for the consistent manufacture of high-quality butter and cheese and proved a major impetus to improve the quality, not just the quantity, of milk used in making butter and cheese. Babcock's tester also led Wisconsin to implement the nation's first grading system for cheese.
Today Wisconsin cows produce 1.8 billion pounds of milk a month, most of which ends up as one of more than 500 varieties of cheese. Wisconsin leads the nation in the production of American, Muenster, Brick, and blue cheeses. The nation's only limburger cheese factory is also in Wisconsin.
Learn more about the Wisconsin dairy industry:
:: Posted June 1, 2007
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