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Dairy group continues community engagement meetings

A dairy organization continues to bring farmers, neighbors, and local government officials together to discuss rural issues.

Professional Dairy Producers President Paul Lippert tells Brownfield the Agricultural Community Engagement or ACE meetings are a partnership between their farmers, the Wisconsin Towns Association, and the Wisconsin Counties Association. “A lot of times, they’re very friendly like this one but if there is any consternation or anything like that, it’s best to get people in the room together and just talk to our issues and just figure out what do we actually need as farmers, why do we have such big equipment, why do we have to haul this manure down the road and all of this kind of stuff.”

Lippert says some of the neighbors and local government officials have an agricultural background, but many of them don’t, and the ACE meetings let them see farmers and learn why they do what they do. “You get people that come out for the pancake breakfast and they get the real high-end, like look, it’s a cow, we get to pet it, we get some pancakes, right? This one, you get the dairy farmer one-on-one. You get to ask them specific questions, and they’re not always softball questions. Sometimes they’re real like, why do you have to milk so many cows? Why do these tractors have to be so big?”

Lippert says many people may live right down the road, but they’re generations removed from farming and may not understand the “why” behind what they see, and he says these meetings help everyone understand each other’s perspectives.

The Professional Dairy Producers held their fall ACE meetings at farms in Buffalo, Monroe, Manitowoc, and Jefferson counties this past week.

AUDIO: Paul Lippert discusses the PDPW ACE meeting series with Brownfield’s Larry Lee.