The Senate Agriculture and Tourism Committee will likely begin this Legislative session with what it knows works – expanding ag exports, promoting dairy and investing in meat processing, for example. There’s also support for continued funding of the Dairy Innovation Hub in the state biennium budget.
This is the word from Sen. Joan Ballweg, R-Markesan, who chairs the committee.
“We had some big initiatives last year when it came to the meat processing grants, when it came to supporting some additional meat inspectors,” she says. “And I think that’s a program that really needs to continue and to be enhanced.”
She adds that the Wisconsin Initiative for Agricultural Exports was another win for Wisconsin’s ag industry, and folks are looking to see how it can be expanded to include more products and more producers.
As Ballweg has attended winter meetings, conferences and ag days at the Capitol, she says conversations around agricultural tourism have come to her attention.
“The other thing I’m hearing is: Can we make agricultural tourism even more inviting to get folks to come out to the farm either for the day or for overnight stays?” she says, adding that agritourism will not only get people involved in agriculture but better connect them to the industry.
Ballweg continues: “To make sure that people … know how valuable agriculture is not only to the state of Wisconsin, but having good modern ways of doing this while still protecting air and water quality is, I think, something that we can all work on together.”
It’s pretty early in the state Legislative session for discussion on any bills that we can expect to see regarding Wisconsin agriculture. Sen. Howard Marklein, R-Spring Green, will be focused on the next biennial budget in his role as co-chair of the Joint Finance Committee. As a farm kid and member of the Senate Agriculture and Tourism Committee, he does recognize he’s in a valuable position to fund agricultural initiatives.
Any bill that affects taxation, spending or acquiring land goes through the JFC. Marklein says this time of year, bills are just starting to get drafted. Then it has to go to a committee, the JFC, and then the Senate or Assembly floor.
He says the largest challenge this year for rural legislators is to educate colleagues about why an ag policy is important.
“If you know they represent Green Bay or they represent areas of the state that may not have a lot of agriculture, and it’s incumbent upon us as legislators, but also the groups — the Farm Bureau, cheese makers — all those groups that connect with them,” he says. “And because we need their votes on it, even though they they don’t represent farm areas like I do, I need their votes. So it’s important that they not only get me on board … but it’s important we get legislators from around the state interested in some of those farm topics.”
As JFC co-chair, Marklein says a lot of his attention will be on the state biennium budget. When asked if there was anything specific he’d support in the state budget for agriculture, he referred to a project of his: the Dairy Innovation Hub.
“I’m not going to make any commitments. I can’t on behalf of our caucus. But given my personal involvement with that in the past, I am pretty confident that the funding is going to continue for the Dairy Innovation Hub,” he says. “We’re happy to have had that and as well as some of the other the the export grant program in the state. So there’s a lot of those things that we passed in prior budgets. And again, it’s important that as legislators, we remind our colleagues how important these things were because sometimes we spend money on something and we forget to tell a story about the success that this funding created.”