After one of Madison’s longest, coldest winters ever, swimming season is almost here — along with toxic algal blooms, bacteria, invasive milfoil and other pestilences of the lakes. The Yahara lakes — Mendota, Monona, Wingra, Waubesa and Kegonsa — are no clearer than they were 30 years ago, despite i
Scott Murray did not want to leave the home in rural Juneau County, Wis., where he and his family had lived for more than 20 years. But with the house surrounded on three sides by manure irrigation systems, life had become a nightmare.
A four-day hearing on the challenges surrounding the expansion of a mega-dairy in Wisconsin showcased a community's deep divisions. A handful of speakers showed support for the dairy expansion. Many others expressed their concerns over the dairy's potential environmental impact, including a resident
Water-quality advocates say Wisconsin's Department of Natural Resources’ regulation of large farms, known as concentrated animal feeding operations or CAFOs, is too lax. DNR acknowledges low staffing levels have strained enforcement efforts, and described the program.
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.
TOWN OF LINCOLN, Kewaunee County — In one of the most intensively farmed parts of America’s Dairyland, where 29 percent of the county’s private wells test unsafe due to bacteria or nitrates, residents have a new concern: estrogenic well water.
The meat industry has once been concentrated in cities like Chicago and Kansas City. But it had left for small towns in rural areas, which were now struggling to provide the necessary social services to the immigrants who followed. How could we begin to show those demographic changes? And what could