By Bennet Goldstein, Wisconsin Watch
EMERALD, WI – Gregg Wolf vows “to put a new step forward” on “a new day” at a northwest Wisconsin dairy.
Appleton-based Breeze Dairy Group, where he serves as CEO, purchased Emerald Sky Dairy in March, shortly after the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources approved the St. Croix County farm’s expansion.
Along with 2,400 spotted cows, four odiferous freestall barns and a milking parlor, the company acquired an undesired aspect of the $11 million property: the dairy’s checkered reputation.
During its eight years under previous ownership, the farm — since rechristened Croix Breeze Dairy — racked up a litany of manure violations, including two major spills. One went unreported for months until an anonymous tipster notified authorities.
The incidents drew rebukes from county officials and residents, who complained that the state’s lax penalties would not deter future offenses.
Residents fear that the farm’s growth will only increase contamination of St. Croix County’s water, some of which already contains nutrients commonly found in crop fertilizer and manure that can make people sick.
Now, after growling excavators and dozers regraded parts of the property, Wolf has worked to improve the dairy’s image, with a farm face-lift and managerial improvements. Trash was removed. The lawn seeded and green. Even the cows, a special crossbreed with hides covered in patches of black, white and almond fur, will be replaced.
“We’re more of an open book. We don’t really have anything to hide,” he said in June over the hum of the milking parlor. “I think the former owners didn’t communicate the best, and I would say farmers, in general, we’re terrible at PR.”
Convincing locals that the recently expanded dairy can be a good neighbor will be a hard sell.
“One would like to hope that a change in management would bring better management than what we’ve had,” said Kim Dupre, a former Emerald resident, who moved to Minnesota after Emerald Sky’s first manure spill. “But I guess the proof will be in the pudding.”
Breeze has committed to safety and distanced itself from its predecessor, but residents — already skeptical of large farms and the state agencies that regulate them — also are scrutinizing the company’s record.
In April, Breeze had an inauspicious introduction when a broken roadside signpost pierced a contractor’s manure application hose, releasing 500 gallons into a ditch before workers contained the small spill.
And across roughly a decade, Breeze or its contractors spilled an estimated 147,000 to 202,000 gallons of manure in 11 other reported incidents, state records show.
“When you’re moving millions of gallons of manure, unfortunately, equipment breaks, people make bad decisions,” Wolf said. “We report ourselves as you’re supposed to legally do and work with the DNR and clean up anything that might have happened.”
Breeze errs on the side of “overkill” when it comes to reporting, Wolf said; reporting, cleaning up, learning from spills — it’s part of company culture.
Residents will be checking.
Croix Breeze Dairy sits on the corner of 250th Street and County Road G — a main drag for drivers, especially during the summer county fair season. It’s surrounded by dozens of households.
“He’s gonna have a lot of eyes on him,” Dupre said.
Wisconsin residents increasingly are informing state regulators of manure spills. Although researchers and authorities doubt their frequency truly is rising, communities like Emerald ask how many spills the state expects them to tolerate before authorities prevent problems from developing.
“That’s a word we don’t like to hear in relation to a CAFO,” said resident Barbara Nelson, who lives less than a mile from Croix Breeze. “Even if it isn’t a major spill, it’s still a spill.”
St. Croix County sees changes in farming and water quality
Five families formed Breeze Dairy Group in 2002, and the company has steadily grown. Before the Emerald Sky acquisition, it owned four large livestock farms — known as concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs.
Breeze has a pending request with the state to enlarge another of its operations, which, if approved, could expand the company’s authorized capacity to more than 20,000 cows across five farms.
Wolf, a La Crosse County native who grew up on a 50-cow dairy, joined Breeze four years ago. He said herd sizes depend on the milk market and demand, and the company lacks a definitive target. It lacks a financial incentive to fill a dairy to maximum capacity if milk processors don’t pay enough to make a return on investment.
Although Croix Breeze’s new permit grants the farm authority to grow to 3,300 cows, Wolf said the company has no plans to exceed the current count. But broadly speaking, he said, farms need to expand as operational costs rise faster than milk prices.
In fact, said the dairy’s former owner, Todd Tuls of Rising City, Nebraska, the inability to expand Emerald Sky to his intended size of 5,000 to 6,000 cows was one reason he sold the operation.
St. Croix County is experiencing a familiar story of farm consolidation and growth.
Its 93,000 residents see less pasture, which dropped by half in just five years, and more soybean and wheat fields.
Mid-sized dairies also are disappearing, while larger operations have expanded their herds. Cows produce more milk and manure in increasingly centralized locations. Applicators spread the dung on farmland.
Doing so improves soil, incorporating nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium — nutrients plants use to grow. But fertilizing the ground in excess or subpar weather can contaminate water with pathogenic bacteria and viruses and nitrates, the latter of which, when consumed above the national health standard, increases the risk of birth defects, thyroid disease and colon cancer.
Alongside farming changes in St. Croix County, water contamination worsened in recent decades. The county’s share of private wells with unsafe nitrate concentrations rose from 10% to 13% between 2010 and 2022.
County conservation staff attribute the elevated levels to row cropping, exacerbated by the region’s porous bedrock, whose cracks and fissures enable water to rapidly enter the aquifer.
Many in the community also view Emerald Sky’s expansion as the harbinger of additional manure spills at a farm that has seen many in its history.
Environmental group alarmed over spills
In the winter of 2016, up to 275,000 gallons of liquid manure flowed through a cracked pipe into wetlands on the Emerald Sky property. Certain locations amassed deposits three feet deep.
Tuls told local media, and still maintains, that heavy snow obscured the spill from dairy staff, delaying detection, although prosecutors disputed his claim.
“Four feet of snow on it and people are like, ‘How do you not know?’” he said in an interview. “You don’t know because you can’t see it.”
In a 2019 incident that attracted attention, the dairy’s liquid manure was applied to a sloped field before it rained, allowing some to flow into a nearby creek, killing fish.
Tuls said the day’s weather was unexpected and the Department of Natural Resources could not prove the fish kill resulted from runoff linked to his field.
“We didn’t go to war with the DNR on that one ’cause it’s just like in our mind we handled everything that needed to be done,” he said. “I don’t know of a single perfect person in the world. People want cheese on their pizza and they want ice cream at Dairy Queen and they want milk in the fridge when they go get their cereal and they want half-and-half with their coffee and they don’t understand how hard it is to actually produce that milk.”
See the Woodville Leader next week for the conclusion of “How many manure spills is too many? St. Croix County residents scrutinize big farm’s new owner” with Part II.
