Since it started in 2019, the UW Dairy Innovation Hub has been working on keeping Wisconsin’s dairy industry alive and well. It does this through research surrounding land and water stewardship, human health, animal welfare and growing farm communities.
UW-Madison Prof. Chuck Nicholson gives an update on what the Hub is looking forward to in the new year. His position is funded through the Hub. He started his role in January 2022. His focus is on the dairy economy.
Nicholson says he collaborates with different research projects happening across the Hub’s three campuses: UW-Platteville, UW-River Falls and UW-Madison. For example, he’s working with a project in Platteville that uses data to understand farm cost of production. He collaborates with River Falls exploring lactose-free ice cream and how it could generate sales for dairy products. He’s also looking at increasing agricultural exports.
“In recent years in particular, there have been a number of issues with logistics and supply chain constraints that have been important,” he says. “So I have a project funded by DATCP and also a complementary project funded by the Hub that’s involving a group of undergraduate students in assessing what are the real barriers to increasing our exports, especially the ones that focus on supply chain and logistics.”
As part of that, the project will conduct a survey that will launch soon of all the state’s dairy manufacturers to understand: How important are dairy export markets to you? What are you currently doing? What do you see as the important constraints? What do you see as some of the solutions?
“What we’re hoping is we can take the collective experience of the industry; we can leverage the power of these great undergraduate students we have here at UW-Madison; and we can actually provide some additional food for thought about how we might go about increasing exports for the state,” Nicholson says.
He notes that he is getting positive anecdotal responses from the dairy industry on the ripple effects that the Dairy Innovation Hub is having in Wisconsin.
“We’re actually going to do a little bit more formalized evaluation effort of what the Hub has accomplished to date and what they’re likely to accomplish in the future,” he says. “And I think that’s going to be an important part of selling what we really have accomplished to the state stakeholders and also it’s going to allow us to sort of better think about how we can continue to have future impact.”
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