Immigration
Now showing online: Our film on rising immigration tensions in America’s Dairyland
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‘Los Lecheros’ (Dairy Farmers) played at 25 film festivals, bringing immigrant labor on dairies out of the shadows.
Wisconsin Watch Media Partners Center (https://partners.wisconsinwatch.org/tag/dairy/)
‘Los Lecheros’ (Dairy Farmers) played at 25 film festivals, bringing immigrant labor on dairies out of the shadows.
This letter was written in response to the Center’s Oct. 16, 2018 collaborative report with HuffPost titled: As Trump disparages immigrants, Midwest dairy farmers build bridges to Mexico.
The Puentes/Bridges program is a small nonprofit that organizes annual trips to Mexico to bridge the cultural gap between farmers and immigrant dairy workers — and the families they left behind.
Farmers, experts say reliance on immigrant workers, many of them in the U.S. illegally, will continue unless dairies — and Congress — make significant changes.
In Milwaukee County, the debate over ‘sanctuary cities’ continues, while in rural Wisconsin, informal networks form to help immigrants avoid deportation
The Hernandez family and other dairy workers are heading back to Mexico amid hostile rhetoric and rising immigration arrests in the Midwest and nationwide.
Dairy farmers raise wages to attract and keep Mexican and Central American employees. Workers cite hostility and heightened enforcement.
Two weeks ago, Administrative Law Judge Jeffrey Boldt approved the state Department of Natural Resources’ issuance of permits for a large and controversial dairy farm in Central Wisconsin. But he also reduced the amount of water the farm could pump from proposed high-capacity wells and required the DNR to consider the impact of the withdrawals in conjunction with other, nearby wells — a concept known as cumulative impacts.
The greenhouse and its veggies are one example of a new cottage industry popping up across the country to capitalize on the waste energy, methane gas and the nutrient-rich solids that are emitted from a digester.
Since 2001, manure digesters have been popping up across the state. Wisconsin now has 34, the most in the nation, with two more scheduled to begin operating by 2015. In all these digesters, bacteria eat biomass like manure, food scraps or whey and emit energy in the form of methane gas.
A four-day hearing on challenges to the expansion of a Kewaunee County mega-dairy illustrated deep divisions, ranging from neighbors who shared fears of polluted wells and illness to fertilizer and feed dealers who showed up to express their support of big farms.
In a Green Bay hearing beginning Tuesday, a controversial attempt to expand a dairy farm set to become the fifth largest in Wisconsin will be challenged in a case that could have a far-reaching impact on how Wisconsin regulates industrial-size livestock farms.