Owners of the Crave Brothers dairy and cheese company in Waterloo are good at finding federal and state assistance to help maintain their operations, and they ask for advice from state agricultural agents.
They received a $300,000 federal Value-Added Producer Grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 2008 to modernize their ricotta cheese production, and they hosted Wisconsin's 2009 Farm Technology Days on their Waterloo farm last summer.
But none of their many dairy expansions was funded by loans or grants from current state programs designed to help dairies. In fact, few Wisconsin dairy farm expansions are.
Of the nearly $1 billion Wisconsin dairy farmers spent to expand or update their facilities between 2003 and 2007, only $22.4 million, or about 2 percent, came from the state Dairy 2020 Initiative, according to records provided in March by the Department of Commerce.
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