By Jeff Alexander
Published: Jun. 6, 2024 at 6:30 PM CDT|Updated: Jun. 6, 2024 at 6:41 PM CDT
GREENLEAF, Wis. (WBAY) - To mark June Dairy Month, our weekly Small Towns series will be taking you to a local farm over the next four weeks.
We begin this week with a large dairy farm in Brown County with a big family behind it.
It’s the Wiese Brothers Farms in Greenleaf.
On sprawling acreage in southern Brown County, a family legacy continues to be written.
It all started with Wiflord and Mae Wiese, who raised 14 children here, and then in 1982 sold their land to six of their sons.
Originally the Wiese brothers cash-cropped hay and small grains, but in 1994 they took a leap of faith and built a dairy barn.
The following they started milking cows, and with a herd of 600 they didn’t necessarily start small.
“It’s just kind of how the story goes, it was just a lot of families kind of going in together, and instead of everybody milking 100 cows, everybody had 100 cows but just put them all together,” explains Dan Wiese, one of the farm’s five current partners.
After working on the farm for his uncles in high school, Dan went full-time in 1998.
He saw how the dairy was naturally growing every year.
“When you do a good job and you have good reproduction and things are working well, you end up with an abundance of calves, and in those years selling extra heifers wasn’t that profitable,” says Dan, “so you just decided you would milk them, and when you’d have additional heifers come fresh you would build facilities and be ready for them.”
Like Dan, his cousin Ross Wiese had no doubt as a young boy the farm was where he wanted to be.
“I believe I got my tractor safety license at 11, maybe 12, so I’ve been here ever since, and it’s been a family legacy, and once you see something like that you want to be a part of it. It’s a life. It’s not a career, it’s a life, a lifestyle. It almost chooses you,” says Ross, another partner in the farm.
The Wieses say they take great pride in the health of their herd and land, where sustainability practices like no-till and cover crops are now common to prevent erosion and run-off.
There’s a constant focus on making sustainability equal profitability in everything they do.
“Our cattle and our land, that’s our future. That’s what we need for our kids to be able to do this. It’s what we need to hand down. We can’t hand them junk, so we need to make sure everything is in tip-top shape,” says Dan.
That next generation is already on the near horizon and eager to join the operation.
“As much as I love advocacy and ag journalism, I very much believe in the fact that if my generation isn’t the one to come back to the farm I won’t have any farmers to journal about or advocate for, so I hope to attend college, receive a degree in dairy management and agri-business and then come back to the family farm and work as the herd manager in partnership with my dad and my uncles,” says Madison Wiese, Dan’s daughter.
Today, Wiese Brothers Farms milks on average 6,000 cows a day with the help of 100 employees.
The farm’s success is all tied to family.
“I believe at its core everyone that works here knows that we are a family, and we operate as such, when things go south or things get heard, we all fall back on each other,” says Ross.
And as the Wiese family keeps growing, the partnership will only become more impressive.
“Two percent of Americans work in agriculture and work to feed Americans, and we feed 100 percent of our nation, and I find that fact mind-blowing and I’m proud to be a part of that two percent in the coming years,” says Madison.
And then your dad can retire, and you can be in charge?” I asked Madison.
“He’ll never retire,” Madison answers with laughter.
That’s because Dan says the future of dairy farming is just too exciting.
“And I only know that because I look back 20 years and I see the advancements in technology and the things we’ve been able to do, we’re a few years away from tractors driving themselves without us in the seat, so I can’t even think beyond ten years as to the things we’ll be able to do, drones are flying around doing our spraying right now, it’s very hard to imagine what technology will be so that to me is exciting, it’s been exciting and the unknown, and the new every day is what keeps bringing me back,” says Dan with a smile.
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