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U.S. Ag Secretary makes stop in Casco

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Vilsack
On Thursday, May 23, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack visited Casco, where he and Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade, and Consumer Protection Secretary Randy Romanski held a roundtable with local producers and community members. Staff photo

By Star-News staff

CASCO – On Thursday, May 23, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack visited Casco, where he and Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade, and Consumer Protection Secretary Randy Romanski held a roundtable with local producers and community members at Dairy Dreams Farm, in Forestville.

During the roundtable, he announced major investment made by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) in agricultural input production that would lower costs, create new income opportunities and increase competition for producers and rural small businesses.

“So, it starts with farmers’ commitment to being sustainable, and so we suggested and decided to utilize resources from the Commodity Credit Corporation to establish a fund of $3 billion. And we asked farmers what they would do with that resource to embrace sustainable practices and this farm family is one of the families that stepped up. They said make it voluntary, make it incentive-driven, help pay for the practices that you want to encourage and create a market opportunity where we might receive a premium for whatever it is we’re producing through sustainable practice,” Vilsack recalled.

“So that’s exactly what we’ve done. We have currently today 136 out of 141 contracts that we’ve signed that were implementing thousands of farmers, millions of acres now engaged in this. In the state of Wisconsin we have 27 projects available to farmers, covering 44 commodities that are grown in the state, and encouraging and paying farmers to do 118 separate climate-smart practices — everything from cover crops to rotational grazing, things of that nature, nutrient management.

“So, we’re paying farmers to conduct climate-smart agricultural practices, and then, we are working with markets to create a value-added proposition for whatever it is, climate-smart crop or commodity produces.”

Vilsack said that he was excited to see the Pagel family’s operations and how it is supporting multiple families.

“When I ask you what you do, and you tell me you’re a farmer, that tells me not just what you do, it tells me who you are,” Vilsack said. “I know that there is no other occupation that is true. You ask me what I do, I tell you I am a lawyer, I tell you where I do business, I tell you who I am.

“I know that farmers are rooted in the land and the last thing they want to do is to have that conversation. They would prefer to have a conversation in which they say, ‘You know, with a little bit of entrepreneurship and a little bit of health, maybe we can create multiple streams of revenue that will support multiple families.’ And it seems to me that this country is smart enough, wealthy enough and innovative enough and creative enough to be able to create a system like this so that farmers and farm families have options.

“It’s not just get bigger or get out; it’s actually, we can make it.”

Vilsack said that the country has lost over 544,000 farms and 151 million acres of farmland in the last four decades.

Kewaunee County, news

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