Here & Now

Here & Now for April 19, 2019

Frederica Freyberg:
I’m Frederica Freyberg. Tonight on “Here & Now,” Governor Tony Evers says the Foxconn contract needs some tweaks. We’ll hear what a tech industry specialist in Beijing has to say. Then a closer look at the most stubborn problem in Dairyland: milk prices. And a new bipartisan effort to improve the way sexual assault evidence is processed into the State Crime Lab. It’s “Here & Now” for April 19.

Announcer:
Funding for “Here & Now” is provided, in part, by Friends of Wisconsin Public Television.

Frederica Freyberg:
Foxconn’s recent acknowledgment that their Racine County operation will be scaled down from the original proposal convinced Governor Tony Evers that they will not come through with the 13,000 jobs the tech giant promised. The governor is so convinced he’s considering renegotiating the state’s multi-billion dollar contract with the Taiwanese company. The governor’s announcement this week sparked a sharp reaction from Republican leadership, including Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, who said, “This completes the original narrative that the governor has wanted to undermine the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation from day one. If the state is willing to renege on its commitment to Foxconn and open up a contract without agreement by both parties, then what guarantee can Wisconsin make to any other company that wants to expand here?
We checked in with Beijing-based Political and Economic Affairs Commentator Einar Tangen for this thoughts on the latest Foxconn saga. Tangen formerly lived in and worked on economic development issues in Wisconsin. When asked what he thought about Governor Evers’ plan to renegotiate with Foxconn, he said that plan would be, “Dead on arrival, gives Terry (Gou) cover to either sue or back out of the deal.” He went further. Tangen said, “In the event the state starts legal action against Foxconn for any reason, legitimate or illegitimate, Foxconn has the perfect excuse to withdraw from a project which was more political in nature than economic.” As for the political optics and all of this in Wisconsin, Tangen had this to say, “If Foxconn backs out, Trump and the Republican Party will use the issue to portray Democrats as inept bumblers who snatched failure from the jaws of victory.” Tangen added about the Wisconsin-Foxconn project, “As a pure bottom line play, it never penciled out.”
Now to another Wisconsin economic story, the shrinking number of dairy farms in our state. The dairy crisis in Wisconsin is perhaps best understood by hearing from the people living it. Tonight we share an excerpt from reporter Andy Soth’s documentary “Portraits from Rural Wisconsin.” In this segment, fourth-generation Pepin County dairy farmer Weston Patnode shares what it’s like to lose the herd.

Weston Patnode:
The financial part was the big problem. Milk prices are the same as they were in the ’70s or ’80s. Things got really tight. And we paid the bills when we could. And hoped we could continue to pay them. And then we kinda started to fall behind and it just got to where we weren’t gaining ground.

Boy:
Yeah, that’s how high it can go.

Andy Soth:
They talked to bankers about expanding and came close to signing for a $2 million loan, but didn’t want to risk losing their land or burdening their children with debt.

Weston Patnode:
They’re nine and five, so I don’t want to tie them down right now.

Jenni Patnode:
Yeah.

Weston Patnode:
That was part of it, too, when we were asked to expand, is that they’re nine and five. They can’t make that decision. If they were 20 and they said, “Yeah, we want to go all in.” We probably could have. But whatever they decide to do, they’re just responsible and kind, caring people at the end of the day. That’s what we’re hoping for.

Andy Soth:
It’s been only a few weeks since they made the decision to get out. The memories are still raw and it’s hard to talk about that last milking and saying goodbye.

Jenni Patnode:
I’ll talk. I’ll talk. It was hard. It was something that we knew would be hard, but we didn’t realize it would be as hard as it was. And we didn’t realize how hard it would still be.
So I wrote a blog, kind of to just tell everybody, for our family and friends to know. Tomorrow morning the alarm clock will go off early, 4:30 a.m. to board our dairy cows on trucks and trailers, for them to live on other farms. There isn’t a book for this. There probably should be, but no one wrote about what to do next when you sell your fourth-generation family farm. No one wrote a book about how to get through that last milking. Tears never seeming to end as you hold each other tight with no words to be spoken. No one wrote a book about where to go from here or how to get over the emotions of the loss you feel in the pit of your stomach, the heartbreak. No one wrote a book that tells you how to get over that feeling of failure even though you know you gave it your best to the end.

Andy Soth:
Through Facebook, Jenni’s post was shared thousands of times.

Weston Patnode:
Our phones were blowing up that night, for the next week, just text messages, phone calls. Like you said, messages online from all over the country and the world. It was quite amazing. I mean…

Jenni Patnode:
Yeah.

Weston Patnode:
…the outpouring of support.

Andy Soth:
Witnessing the widespread interest in their story, Jenni and Weston say that much more than their dairy herd was being lost.

Jenni Patnode:
I think a sense of the culture of America. I mean, really, they say like Wisconsin, America’s Dairyland.

Weston Patnode:
I think growing up, the family helping the next family down the road. The responsibilities we learned as kids, the work ethic. I don’t know if you see that as much.

Andy Soth:
While Weston weight his work options, they all enjoy the unexpected family time together.

Jenni Patnode:
Even if our kids aren’t going to grow up milking cows, it’s still important to us that they still get that same work ethic into them that you did.

Weston Patnode:
I still want to be able to raise my boys in the 400 acres here we have tucked back in this valley. Get down. There you go.

Frederica Freyberg:
Our partners at WisContext.org have been reporting on the dairy crisis and specifically low milk prices. We talked with reporter Will Cushman on location about the current state of prices for milk.
Hey, Will. Thanks very much for joining us.

Will Cushman:
Of course.

Frederica Freyberg:
So the Patnodes clearly are not alone. What are the numbers of dairy farmers going out of business in Wisconsin?

Will Cushman:
Sure. Wisconsin’s lost about 750 dairy herds in the last year. That equates to a little over 8% of the state’s dairy herds. Wisconsin’s been losing dairy herds for quite a number of years now, but the number is usually closer to 3% to 4% loss per year. So this is quite a bit higher than usual.

Frederica Freyberg:
We have a map of seven counties in Wisconsin which have lost more than 20% of their dairy herds over the last two years. Where is this most acute?

Will Cushman:
The most — it’s being most acutely felt in Eau Claire County, it looks like. Eau Claire has lost over 25% of their dairy herds in the last two years. So yeah. Particularly hard hit around that region.

Frederica Freyberg:
What are the special conditions that make Eau Claire the hardest hit in the state?

Will Cushman:
Sure. I talked to an Extension agent up there, and he told me that Eau Claire County has a lot of smaller dairy farms. A lot of those have less financial wiggle room when times get tough. And also there are a number of farmers who are approaching retirement age who are deciding to get out of the business rather than risk their retirement.

Frederica Freyberg:
And kind of the whole western part of the state seems to have those counties with that high percentage of dairy farmers going out of business or at least culling their herds. What is the current status of milk prices?

Will Cushman:
Sure. Yeah. The milk prices right now are at about $15.60 per hundredweight in Wisconsin. That’s slightly above the national average, which is $15.30. And it’s quite a bit below the all-time high that we hit in 2014, which was at about $24.

Frederica Freyberg:
Why did the bottom drop out of prices just from 2014 to today?

Will Cushman:
Right. Yeah. It really started falling in 2015 and it’s been hovering around $16 or so pretty much since then. I talked to some economists here in Wisconsin who say that a lot of that has been driven by dairy export markets. In 2005, American milk prices aligned with those of the world’s major dairy exporters, including the European Union and New Zealand. And in 2015, the E.U. eased a rule that had set milk quotas on member countries. So a lot of member countries really ramped up milk production, flooded export markets. At around the same time, New Zealand had a really great year for milk production that further flooded dairy export markets. And since then, ongoing trade wars with some of our major trading partners, including China and Mexico which are major dairy export markets for the U.S. have not been helping.

Frederica Freyberg:
What is the expectation about when prices might rebound? Does anybody know that?

Will Cushman:
Yeah. It’s really hard to forecast. Essentially because milk prices seem to be so closely linked with dairy export demand. Essentially export demand would have to kick back up. Get some of the surplus dairy products out, flush them out of the market and then hopefully we’d see a rebound in prices.

Frederica Freyberg:
In Wisconsin, which dairy operations are doing well in this climate?

Will Cushman:
Sure. I talked to a professor at UW-Platteville, Kevin Bernhardt, who’s done some research related to this. And he’s actually found that dairy farms, herds of all sizes, there are some farms that are able to remain profitable even in these tough times. Even the really small herds, about 20% of all herds are able to maintain a cash flow right now.

Frederica Freyberg:
And —

Will Cushman:
But generally the larger farms are able to make it work a little bit more easily.

Frederica Freyberg:
And I know that in your reporting you talk about that. And yet this professor you spoke with, I believe you said at Platteville, said that there are farms of all sizes that are still able to maintain their profitability. But what kind of operations are mostly not able to hold on right now?

Will Cushman:
Yeah. It’s — the farms that have a high debt burden. Ones that are unable to maintain that cash flow. A lot of times that is the smaller farms. Oftentimes the larger operations just have more capital to work with.

Frederica Freyberg:
And then as you were suggesting earlier, too, many farmers are just aging out. I mean, they’re getting to retirement age. And so the demographics have something to do with it as well. Just briefly, with less than a minute left, what are people trying to do to try to remedy this crisis?

Will Cushman:
Yeah. In the state of Wisconsin, there’s a Dairy Task Force 2.0, is what it’s being called. Former Governor Scott Walker put that together last year, I believe. And a bunch of experts from around the state, including Extension agents and other people from the dairy industry, are working on solutions. This is also including people from the UW System are working on solutions to the dairy crisis locally. I also know that the USDA is thinking about going to hearings either this year or next to see about tweaks to how it does its milk pricing.

Frederica Freyberg:
Will Cushman, thanks very much and thank you for your reporting.

Will Cushman:
Of course. Thank you.

Frederica Freyberg:
Will Cushman’s series of reports on milk prices and the challenges in Dairyland can be found by clicking into our partner’s at WisContext.org.
And this related news, the Wisconsin Public Service Commission has approved one of the largest solar projects in the country. Landowners in Iowa County are leasing their land to renewable energy companies Invenergy to place solar panels on their fields. “Here & Now” production assistant Will Kenneally reports from near Dodgeville.

Will Kenneally:
Whoever said Wisconsin’s weather is predictable? No one ever. But it may be more steady than the farm markets which for a while now, have been mostly cloudy.

Ken Wunderlin:
In 1980 we got $13.80 a hundred for our milk. And this last January, February, and last December, farmers were getting $13.80 for class 3 for their milk. So the price was basically about the same.

Will Kenneally:
And so Ken Wunderlin, like a growing number of farmers, sold his dairy herd in Iowa County last summer even though it was his life.

Ken Wunderlin:
Oh, yeah. Yep. Yep. Started right out of high school on my own and been doing it for near 50 years now.

Will Kenneally:
UW-Extension Ag Agent Gene Schriefer describes the market forces facing farmers.

Gene Schriefer:
Often we’d see high milk prices at times of low crop prices so the dairy farmers were thriving. The crop guys were having a little bit of a harder time. Or crops would be really high priced and milk would be low priced. But now you’ve got a pretty broad swath of the rural economic economy out here, as far as agriculture goes, all being hit at the same time. It’s just the commodities right now have taken a beating just because we’re so good at producing. So we’ve got to deal with this glut.

Will Kenneally:
Now some, like Ken Wunderlin, are turning to the sun.

Ken Wunderlin:
It’s just another form of ag production or crop production. We’re going to produce energy instead of corn.

Will Kenneally:
Turning to a field of beams to make a go of it, Wunderlin is one of more than a dozen landowners renting their land to the Invenergy Company to place solar panels in southwestern Wisconsin. The 350,000 acre project will be the largest in the Midwest, one of the largest in the U.S. and about the size of the nearby city of Dodgeville.

Daniel Litchfield:
We settled in Iowa County because it’s a good spot for solar development.

Will Kenneally:
Daniel Litchfield is Director of Renewable Development for Invenergy.

Daniel Litchfield:
We need flat, open land. There’s an area here we’ve been able to lease for our site that is very constructible for solar, flat and open. And then the community and the landowners being interested and willing to host it.

Will Kenneally:
Renewable energy advocates say this puts Wisconsin on the map.

Tyler Nuebner:
Wisconsin has lagged in renewable energy from some another states including neighboring states like Iowa and Minnesota. So this is a real opportunity to get us back in the race.

Will Kenneally:
Ken Wunderlin says it’ll be a relief to have a secure source of income.

Ken Wunderlin:
Agreed-upon rate. It is a much better price. More than two times as good as cropland would sell for. With cost of living increase into that rent every year. And so it just made sense to take the gamble out of farming.

Will Kenneally:
But not everyone’s onboard. Some local farmers are critics of the plan. They worry solar panel fields will change the landscape. That southwestern Wisconsin will stray from its traditional farming roots. Supporters say it will be long-term, but not forever.

Tyler Nuebner:
The great thing about that is when it’s time, when this project has reached its end of life, and it’s no longer economic or producing enough energy, you can pull that out and you’re back to farmland. It’s not a permanent structure. You’re not changing to a big commercial building. It is really temporary. It’s long-term. It’s 30 to 40 years. But it ultimately is temporary.

Will Kenneally:
Wunderlin says whether the land in the future is planted for crops or laid with panels, he just wants it to work for him and others like him.

Ken Wunderlin:
The way I see it, that the farmers can’t stay farming if they can’t make a production — or profit, I mean. And so it’s one way for — maybe we can, in the future make it so farming is profitable.

Will Kenneally:
Reporting from Iowa County, this is Will Kenneally.

Frederica Freyberg:
The Iowa County solar project is expected to be operational as early as next year.
Now for an update on the ongoing court battle regarding the lame duck laws. You may remember a Dane County court originally ruled the lame duck laws passed in the final days of the Walker Administration were unconstitutional. This week the State Supreme Court issued an order to bypass the appeals court in order to consider the Dane County decision on the high court. Lame duck laws included taking authority away from the governor and attorney general, including some power over appointing certain agency heads. This week, Supreme Court also denied several Republican-suggested options to restore appointments that Governor Evers rescinded after the Dane County ruling. At least one other Republican option to restore appointments is still being considered. The court also set oral arguments to begin May 15.
In tonight’s inside look, a new Legislative proposal that has bipartisan support aims to prevent a backlog of sexual assault kits. Four years ago, Wisconsin had a backlog of 6,000 untested rape kits. That has since been cleared. Under the proposed bill, a health care professional must notify law enforcement within 24 hours of collecting the kit if the victim chooses to report the sexual assault to police. Law enforcement then must submit the kit and it must be tested by the State Crime Lab within two weeks. If the victim does not want to report the crime, the kit must still be sent to the State Crime Lab within three days for storage, where it will be held for ten years. We’re joined by Ian Henderson with the Wisconsin Coalition Against Sexual Assault for his take on the measure. Thanks for being here.

Ian Henderson:
Thank you for having me.

Frederica Freyberg:
How is this different from how it had been done in Wisconsin?

Ian Henderson:
Well, I think in some ways, it’s not that different. What this legislation does is really codify the work that a multidisciplinary group of professionals convened by the attorney general a few years ago devised to give sexual assault survivors standard or uniform options regarding their care and the collection of forensic evidence when they present at a hospital. So basically a survivor who presents at a hospital has three options. One is they could just get their health care needs taken care of. The second is they could have a forensic sexual assault kit collected and then sent to the Crime Lab for testing if they wanted to report to law enforcement. And third, for a survivor who was unsure about reporting to law enforcement, they could have a kit collected that would be sent from the hospital to the Crime Lab for storage. Those protocols or best practices were already in place. This legislation, I think, does something really important which is codifies that into statute and puts those clear time frames, as you mentioned, into place for law enforcement and hospitals to send those kits to the Crime Lab for testing.

Frederica Freyberg:
Because what happens to victims and their cases when there is the kind of backlog that we had been working?

Ian Henderson:
I think for survivors what we heard was many survivors didn’t even know that the kits had never been tested, right? They had had the kit collected and what we don’t — because of the lack of uniformity in the past, we don’t really know what survivors were told when they had the kit collected. Some may have been told your kit won’t be tested unless you want to report. Or we won’t test the kit unless you give that affirmative consent. Or it will be tested right away. So we don’t really know what survivors were told at the time. And this legislation provides that certainty around what will happen as opposed to that lack of certainty and then survivors not knowing what happened.

Frederica Freyberg:
Now, you’re saying that this is kind of best practices and under this bill, under these best practices, victims do have the choice whether to report their sexual assault to police. Why is that important?

Ian Henderson:
Well, there’s a variety of reasons why a survivor may not want to report to law enforcement. One of those reasons would be a fear of not being believed. Could be concerns for their privacy. We also know that for survivors of color and those from other historically marginalized communities, they may mistrust system interventions including law enforcement. So this legislation preserves the right to engage with law enforcement with that survivor while at the same time allowing them to have forensic evidence collected and stored at the Crime Lab should they decide one week, two weeks or five years later.

Frederica Freyberg:
Speaking of storage, part of the proposal would require storing analyzed kits from victims who consent to analysis for 50 years at the Crime Lab. Why so long?

Ian Henderson:
As I understand that provision is about kits that have been tested already. And so I think some of the reasons why we want to have kits tested would be a length of time that someone might be serving a sentence. I think just also to have the kits not destroyed so that if there were questions about wanting to test additional evidence regarding perpetrators who may be identified later, then this just preserves that evidence for a lengthy period of time.

Frederica Freyberg:
Now, because this bill sets out statutory requirements as you’ve described for this collection and processing of sexual assault kits, won’t there be many more kits then sent for testing and what assurances do people have that the State Crime Lab has that capacity?

Ian Henderson:
Well, that’s a really good question. I think that would be something we definitely not want to speak for the Crime Lab or the Department of Justice. My understanding is the Department of Justice did, in their budget request, put in additional resources for the Crime Lab. But you’re right. I mean, I think this will ensure that we don’t have a backlog of kits sitting in law enforcement. We wanted to make sure that the Crime Lab has the resources they need then to test the kits once they are sent to their labs for testing.

Frederica Freyberg:
How is this proposed bill being met by victims and their advocates?

Ian Henderson:
Well, I think because these protocols had been developed with a real multidisciplinary group of people, including community advocates who had the opportunity to run these kind of ideas and concepts by survivors, I think this is in some ways, like I said, nothing really new. I think what’s really important, though, is that it’s giving survivors choices and it’s giving them concrete information. Anytime the criminal justice system can provide options, choices and information, I think that’s a really positive thing.

Frederica Freyberg:
It sounds like a difficult thing to achieve really, that you had something codified in law and yet victims again have this choice.

Ian Henderson:
Absolutely. I think what’s going to be critical is then those people, community advocates, the forensic nurse examiners who are doing the kits, will then have this information and can give that clear information to survivors when they’re presenting at the hospital for a forensic exam.

Frederica Freyberg:
Ian Henderson, thanks very much.

Ian Henderson:
Thank you.

Frederica Freyberg:
The bipartisan sexual assault testing bill is expected to be formally introduced in the Legislature in the coming days.
Now to a completely different topic and an excerpt from our weekly digital series “Noon Wednesday.” Every Wednesday, online at noon, our multimedia reporter Marisa Wojcik interviews newsmakers, scholars and other experts to provide a deeper understanding of current events. On any given week, Marisa’s guests talk about issues that range from the very local, like school funding to global matters, which was on tap this week. The subject on the table was how does United States law differs from Islamic sharia law. Here’s UW-Madison Law Professor Asifa Quraishi-Landes.

Asifa Quraishi-Landes:
In the west, we tend to think of law as something that the state does, the government does. And it’s not law in that sense. When Muslins talk about sharia, they’re talking about their guidelines for living their life: how to pray who to marry, how to get divorced, what to eat, what to wear, who to leave your money to when you die. Those are rules. As you can tell, some of them we would call law, in our sense, like divorce law. But other stuff is manners and ethics. So that’s really what sharia is to Muslims.

Frederica Freyberg:
That is a taste of our weekly online series “Noon Wednesday” with Marisa Wojcik. That is all for tonight’s program. I’m Frederica Freyberg. Have a great weekend.

Announcer:
Funding for “Here & Now” is provided, in part, by Friends of Wisconsin Public Television.