From Dairy Country To Green Bay, Trump Radically Changed Wisconsin Politics. Can He Do It Again?

EASTERN WISCONSIN — Rural Wisconsin is crossed with state highways, but you might not recognize them. Two-lane country roads dotted with red barns, granaries, and farmhouses, where passing is nearly always permitted if you feel the urge to tear around the loaded semis and tankers that rule these parts.

Shiloh Dairy is nowhere near the freeway, but Route 10 will take you within a stone’s throw. Nestled into the rolling countryside of  Wisconsin, 25 miles west of Lake Michigan and the same south of Green Bay, Gordon Speirs keeps more than 4,000 head of cattle here.

A third-generation dairy farmer, at 57 he falls just one year below the average age of an American dairyman. Speirs emigrated to the United States from Alberta, Canada in 2003 (“it’s hard to be successful in a socialist country”), settling here in the heart of Wisconsin dairy country with about 600 cows. Over 18 years, he’s grown his farm into a large industrial operation, producing 220,000 pounds of milk daily, and served a term as president of the Dairy Business Association.

Speirs walks us through the farm, explaining how they feed the animals, house and care for them according to age, manage the manure pond, and of course milk the cows on a strict schedule, three times a day. He also takes us past a construction crew building two huge silos for methane capture—part of a scheme to create renewable energy from the methane produced by his cows to sell to consumers in California and elsewhere.