America's Dairyland, The Cheese Culture and How It Got Here

The phrase 'America's Dairyland' has been on Wisconsin license plates since nineteen forty. It is the kind of slogan that seems obvious in retrospect, but it arrived through a specific history.

Wisconsin was not always dairy country. In the eighteen fifties and sixties, it was wheat country. German and Scandinavian farmers planted winter wheat across the southern tier, and Wisconsin wheat fed Union armies during the Civil War. But wheat exhausted the soil quickly, and a pest called the chinch bug moved into Wisconsin from Illinois in the eighteen sixties, devastating crop after crop. Farmers needed an alternative.

The alternative arrived from two directions at once. Chester Hazen opened one of the earliest factory-system cheese operations in Wisconsin in eighteen sixty-four, in Ladoga, Fond du Lac County. The factory model, farmers delivering milk rather than making cheese at home, was borrowed from New York's Mohawk Valley, where a similar transition had already happened. At the same time, the University of Wisconsin was experimenting with what would later be called the Wisconsin Idea: the application of research to practical agricultural problems. In eighteen ninety, Stephen Babcock, a UW chemist, developed the Babcock test, a simple and inexpensive way to measure the butterfat content of milk. For the first time, farmers and creameries could be paid according to the actual quality of their milk rather than the volume. That single innovation, no more complicated than a centrifuge and a small glass tube, transformed the economics of Wisconsin dairy farming and made quality breeding a rational investment.

By nineteen ten, Wisconsin had overtaken New York as the leading cheese-producing state. It still is. More than six hundred varieties of cheese are made here. The state produces roughly three billion pounds of cheese per year, about a quarter of the American total. The license plate is not wrong.