Wisconsin net farm income has gone from bad to better and back to bad over the past three years. This year, things will likely improve a bit, predict University of Wisconsin-Madison agricultural economists.

A workshop to help beginning fresh market vegetable growers with start-up issues and marketing will be a highlight of the first day of the Wisconsin Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Conference in Oconomowoc, Wis. Held Jan. 5, 2002, the workshop will be led by two experienced grower-marketers and John Hendrickson, an outreach specialist with the Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

One of the biggest, broadest questions in the Discovery Farms Program is the following: If water quality needs to be improved, what are the best things we can do in land management to make it better?

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are approaching the halfway mark in a nationwide survey of dairy producers that’s part of an effort to prevent Johne’s disease. Cooperating dairy producers will get free confidential testing of their cows, and they’ll be helping to reduce the impact of a disease that costs the U.S. dairy industry hundreds of millions of dollars every year.

Health insurance is almost always expensive for the self-employed, because they do not have access to large-pool group insurance and its associated lower premiums. However, among the self-employed, farmers are especially hard-hit.

As anyone who has driven across rural Wisconsin can tell you, tower silos are one of the most prominent features on the landscape. Up to 100 feet high, these domed towers are the traditional method of storing forage to feed livestock during the winter. In recent years, however, huge plastic “sausages” have sprouted throughout farm country.

We may never know how chronic wasting disease got into Wisconsin’s wild deer herd, but we’re going to get a better idea of how the disease could move across the state’s farm and forest landscapes.

Since the discovery of Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) in Wisconsin deer this past spring, many individuals have expressed concern over the safety of venison. This fact sheet is designed to give you some background information on CWD, and to answer questions related to venison safety and handling this fall.

In 1999, jobs on dairy farms and in dairy processing plants produced about $1.9 billion in income for 80,500 jobholders in Wisconsin. Total industry sales came to $11.7 billion, or 1.3 percent of the state’s total industrial sales. That’s a pile of money, but it’s only a partial measure of the dairy industry’s contribution to Wisconsin’s economy, according to a researcher at the UW-Madison’s College of Agricultural and Life Sciences.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Friends of Troy Gardens have begun a project dedicated to research, education, and outreach at Troy Gardens on Madison’s north side.