A team of UW-Madison dairy cattle judges placed 6th at the 2002 North American International Livestock Exposition Intercollegiate Dairy Cattle Judging Contest, held Nov. 9 at Louisville, Ky.

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.

Interim Farm and Industry Short Courses will be offered the weeks of Jan. 6-10 and Jan. 13-17 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

A team of 4-H dairy cattle judges from Walworth County placed third at the 34th All American Dairy Show Invitational Youth Dairy Cattle Judging Contest, held Sept. 23 at Harrisburg, Pa.

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.

Soybean growers across southern Wisconsin are confronting an unexpected and costly surprise at harvest. Some of their beans are wrinkled, moldy and mottled with dark blotches on the typically creamy yellow seeds.

On Oct. 1, Wisconsin’s new non-point pollution rules took effect. Polluted runoff is a leading cause of surface and groundwater quality problems in the state. The rules, aimed in part at controlling phosphorus and soil erosion from farm fields, will affect thousands of Wisconsin farmers.

The stories appear all too often. E. coli-contaminated beef causes sickness across a multistate region. Cryptosporidium in water sickens thousands in Milwaukee.

Each year approximately 1,000 farmers with disabilities receive direct assistance from AgrAbility – a national program funded by the USDA and supported by staff at the University of Wisconsin-Madison – for help to continue farming. On a national level, agriculture has one of the highest disabling injury rates of any occupation. And in Wisconsin alone, more than 4,000 farm injuries occur each year, many of which result in permanent disability.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison team scored 2,570 points to win the 82nd National Collegiate Dairy Cattle Judging Contest, Oct. 1 at World Dairy Expo in Madison. The Badger team bested second-place Cornell University by 19 points; 27 national and international university teams competed.