Visitors to the Marshfield Agricultural Research Station’s June 24 field day will open the day with an update on the station’s building project.

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.

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.

Hazel Lee Shands, emeritus professor of agronomy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, died Friday, Dec. 27, 2002. He was 94 years old.

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.

Farm managers can now visit an Internet site, select a group of farms and see a breakdown on production costs for farms similar to theirs. Such benchmark reports can help others in farming by providing a reference for comparisons. Researchers also will use the site to analyze the economic performance of farms.

Taxing and spending by Wisconsin counties and municipalities are not so high that they are putting the brakes on local economic growth, according to a University of Wisconsin-Madison study.

A short stroll along Linden Drive and down Henry Mall takes visitors past the sites of some of the biggest scientific achievements of the past century. Those locations are no longer anonymous, thanks to a series of 19 plaques that highlights accomplishments at the UW-Madison”s College of Agricultural and Life Sciences.

Nitrogen prices are skyrocketing and 2001 corn prices will probably be no better than last year’s — not a great situation for corn growers. One easy way to save money on nitrogen this year is to take full credit for the nitrogen that’s already in your fields, according to Larry Bundy, a soil scientist at the UW-Madison’s College of Agricultural and Life Sciences.

The year 2000 began with some of the lowest commodity prices we’ve seen in decades. These depressed prices are making for difficult times in Wisconsin agriculture, and many farmers are re-examining their goals for their operations.