Agriculture

Too many times, one of the issues that affects Wisconsin, gets missed. Agriculture was Wisconsin's major economic work force. It makes up 9% of Wisconsin's income today. Furthermore, farming employment is down 10% from 18% in 2000. This is steadily decreasing. One of the reasons for this is low prices and high input costs. Take for example milk prices. The price of milk has been at an all time low. However, if we can get technological advances in milking cows to all farms, they will begin to build a bigger profit. Another reason why farming is down is because bigger farms are taking over grocery store shelves. The smaller hobby farms are not able to produce as much and sell their products to large grocery chains. To combat this, we should have communities hold more farmers markets and create more local grocery stores which sell locally produced items. Finally, a reason that agriculture isn't as big is because not as many students grow up to be farmers. They go into other fields of work. We need to create a program in high school, that will teach the value of farming and how to run farms. We also need to create more incentives to get students to take over their family farms or to start their own. These small solutions will enable us to bring more farms back into Wisconsin.