Badger Institute

The global goat cheese market was valued at $6 billion in 2022 and is projected to reach more than $9 billion by 2032. Here at home, Wisconsin is profitably positioned as the nation’s top state for dairy goats.

“Everyone has been struggling, but we are turning a corner now. Our enrollment is up here in criminal justice, so interest in these careers is picking back up again,” said Patrick Solar, criminal justice professor at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville.

For Wisconsin consumers, total spending on food grew steadily from $12.17 billion in 1998 to over $34 billion in 2023. The increase was primarily driven by inflation. When inflation is taken into account, however, the real value of food purchased by Wisconsinites hasn’t increased very much. If the value of the dollar were fixed, the food Wisconsinites bought in 1998 would have cost just under $9 billion. By 2023, that amount would have grown to only $12.6 billion.

Though Madison and Milwaukee have dabbled with idea of guaranteed basic income, research shows that unconditional cash has done nothing to raise recipients out of poverty.

While Milwaukee continues to struggle putting sworn officers on the streets, the police departments in Wisconsin’s other largest cities are at or fast approaching full staffing.

The number of deer harvested in Wisconsin each season has steadily trended downward trend since hunters tagged a record number of 618,374 deer in 2000.

Things appear promising with Wisconsin’s recent court reforms. The wheels of justice are moving slightly more quickly. Yet it still takes nearly 9 months to resolve the average felony case and almost 18 months to resolve a first-degree murder case.

The emergence of Wisconsin as a dairy goat powerhouse is enough to make any cheesehead proud. “Wisconsin is number one because most goat milk is made into cheese,” says Randy Adamson, president of the Wisconsin Dairy Goat Association. “Very little is sold as fluid milk. Goat cheese is far more popular today than it was when we started 15 years ago.”

Two years after the Badger Institute rang alarm bells about delays in criminal justice because of staffing problems among prosecutors and public defenders — and one year after the Legislature acted on those alarms — the early signs point toward swifter justice.

Wisconsin long ago lost its dairy cow preeminence, but America’s Dairyland is once again living up to its billing as Greatest Of All Time — this time in a literal way. We lead the nation, by far, in dairy goats.