IN FOCUS — The trend of small farms disappearing does not happen in a vacuum, there are wider reaching impacts that affect how the industry as a whole functions.

“There’s been a lot of consolidation happening on dairy farms, and the largest loss of dairy farms that we’ve had, at least over a recent period of time, happened in 2019,” said Dr. Mark Stephenson, UW-Madison director of dairy policy analysis, “When we lose dairy farms, we’re also losing some of the businesses in those communities, or near those communities.”

Dr. Stephenson said the dairy industry itself did a lot of reshuffling behind the scenes during the onset of the pandemic in 2020. One of the biggest and hardest to make adjustments was getting products from where it was normally sent to, such as school cafeterias, and into new areas like retail stores in order to maintain a consumer base.