Welcome to Wisconsin Watch’s Year in Review series. In this series, we’re looking back on Wisconsin Watch’s reporting and impact in 2023.
Throughout the week, you’ll be hearing directly from reporters and editors and get exclusive behind-the-scenes looks at our biggest investigations of the year, along with some sneak peeks at what we have planned for next year.
This year was a meaty one at Wisconsin Watch for environmental and agricultural coverage. Common threads among stories I wrote were self-determination and justice — or the lack thereof.
Whether it’s a community in the state’s northwest grappling with who gets to determine farming’s future, the Alabama residents who live near a hazardous waste landfill that received Wisconsin’s toxic firefighting foam, or indigenous tribes who work to maintain their treaty rights in the face of environmental degradation, Wisconsin Watch grappled with the nuances of these issues, which lack easy answers.
I spent the better part of the year investigating and producing a three-part series about a proposed concentrated animal feeding operation — think, big livestock farm — in the northern Wisconsin town of Trade Lake.
These farms have proliferated in recent decades, stoking high-stakes debates about their effects on quality of life, property values and public health. A proposed swine operation in Trade Lake — pitched to be the state’s biggest — has occupied the hearts and minds of area residents and property owners for four years.
I conducted more than 100 interviews with experts, public officials and residents and reviewed more than 5,000 pages of court documents, newspaper clippings, engineering and operations plans, emails and transcripts to examine the political, regulatory and economic forces shaping the project.
Contemporaneous with the debate in Trade Lake was a lawsuit that occurred in the not-to-be-confused community of Laketown, located in a neighboring county to the south. Even though that case folded before the litigation was resolved, the precursor to a possible second lawsuit was filed not too long ago, prolonging the debate over local control over farming in Wisconsin.
These stories have fueled a public hunger for CAFO coverage, and Wisconsin Watch regularly receives requests to investigate controversial new projects. Sometimes local media cannot or won’t report these stories due to political pressure or lack of resources.
Wisconsin Watch’s environmental and agriculture coverage has grown this year, in part, due to its membership on the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting collaborative from the Missouri School of Journalism, Report for America and the Society of Environmental Journalists.
As one of 10 reporters who works with other desk members and expert advisers, I try to focus on issues impacting people in the Mississippi River Basin, which like all desk stories are available for news outlets to publish and repurpose for free.
When the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency proposed this spring new rules for toxic “forever chemicals” known as PFAS, I had already prepared an article that included all the background information necessary for partner outlets to use as they met their impending publication deadlines. They customized the content for their specific audiences, but Wisconsin Watch saved them hours of work.
Later, as this summer’s severe drought droned on in the Midwest, we produced with contributed reporting a Basin-wide portrait of the issue. The story was widely republished in outlets across the nation.
Another collaboration that filled my year was a deep dive into the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources’ firefighting foam collection program — an effort to rid the state of a major PFAS contamination source. As of October, more than 28,000 gallons of foam had been transported to one of the country’s largest hazardous waste landfills in Emelle, Alabama.
Reporters from Al.com handled on-the-ground interviews with residents from nearby communities, while I dove into the records of the landfill’s safety practices and compliance history and the logistics of Wisconsin’s collection program. We sought to answer a resounding question: What does it mean ethically for one state to export its PFAS problem to another?
After I appeared on Wisconsin Public Radio to preview the story, a researcher contacted the newsroom with an offer to test Emelle’s water for PFAS contamination. Additionally, Fred Setterberg, author of “Toxic Nation,” a classic that inspired the article, praised our reporting, calling it “good and important work.”
A prominent Wisconsin advocate in one PFAS-contaminated community said the story “poignantly” drove the point that cleaning up Wisconsin’s “PFAS mess” doesn’t end at home, but must consider waste streams from cradle to grave.
Looking to 2024, we have loaded the publication pipeline with several stories, ranging from agriculture’s intersections with emerging technologies like artificial intelligence to the industry’s surprising foray into America’s culture wars.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
