The UW-Madison Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems has been awarded a grant from the Ira and Ineva Reilly Baldwin Wisconsin Idea Endowment that will help feed Wisconsin’s growing appetite for locally grown food. The project will look at tackling distribution challenges that make it difficult to get more regionally grown food into mainstream grocery chains. [...] [...more]

Support local food, farms and communities. Take the Wisconsin Eat Local Challenge from September 14-23. During these ten days, spend at least 10% of your food budget on locally grown and locally made foods. If local food is new to you, then 10% of your food budget is an easy starting point. If you spend [...] [...more]

Seventh graders at Sherman Middle School are learning healthy cooking from the pros. Two Mondays each month, L’Etoile chefs Tory Miller and Eva Ringstrom teach the students how to cook with fresh produce. Their class not only extolls healthy eating, but also gives the students experience preparing fresh produce. This class is part of Wisconsin [...] [...more]

The UW-Madison’’s School for Beginning Dairy and Livestock Farmers has received its biggest contribution ever—a gift of $50,000 pledged by FCS Financial Services, a farmer-owned financial services cooperative based in Wausau. The gift will support increased programming and initiatives, such as distance education classrooms, internships and mentoring, for this one-of-a-kind program for beginning and transitioning farmers. Program [...] [...more]

Beginning dairy farmers as well as seasoned producers have a new resource available from the Minnesota Department of Agriculture (MDA) and partner organizations including CIAS. Dairy Your Way is a free, 100-page book that profiles a variety of dairy housing and production systems suitable for the Upper Midwest. Producers, university researchers, extension educators and industry experts [...] [...more]

Greetings. Thank you, Chancellor [John D.] Wiley. That was a lovely introduction that you said about me, but when I started out, my path was not so clear. I know that all of you have great dreams. I am here today to tell you what I have learned about getting to make those dreams real, [...] [...more]

Odessa Piper, former chef-proprietor of Madison’s L’Etoile Restaurant, is one of five activists who will receive honorary degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison on Friday, May 12. Piper has distinguished herself as a tireless champion of sustainability in American agriculture and cooking. Using food to address fundamental questions of what our responsibilities are to each other [...] [...more]

When it comes to household income, farming background, age, and technology use, dairy farmers who use managed grazing aren”t all that different from farmers who operate more traditional dairy enterprises. A new report from the UW-Madison Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems (CIAS) and Program on Agricultural Technology Studies (PATS) compares production systems, technology, labor, performance, and [...] [...more]

Are you considering a new value-added business for your farm? Budgeting tools from the Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems at the University of Wisconsin-Madison can help you make informed decisions about a variety of livestock and specialty food enterprises. CIAS has created a set of budgets to help farmers plan for new or existing poultry, dairy [...] [...more]

Wisconsin continues to be a national leader in organic food production, despite the fact that certified organic farms, acreage and production represent only a small fraction of agriculture in the state. This report provides a snapshot of the current status of organic agriculture in Wisconsin, and summarizes some of the opportunities and challenges in the [...] [...more]