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Beaver Dam Agribusiness

Agriculture continues to have a substantial impact on the local economy, as it has for generations in Dodge County. Many of the early European immigrants to the area came as farmers, not laborers, looking for land to establish family farms.

The Poles, Irish and Germans who came found landscapes familiar to those they left behind in Europe – low, rolling hills of meadows and forest. Although the Wisconsin climate was not as mild as their homelands, they found the earth in the Beaver Dam area fertile and productive. Both cash crops and the dairying industry continue to be mainstays of local agribusiness.

Dodge County continues to be one of the top counties in Wisconsin in the production of vegetable and specialty crops, with green beans, peas and sweet corn leading the way. Many vegetable crops are processed in the area for wholesale shipment to distribution facilities, and then to retail grocery stores.

Many local dairy farms have been passed down, generation to generation, with some now reaching the sesquicentennial (150 years) mark as family farms. Dodge County can lay claim to nearly 50,000 dairy cows, each producing about 18,000 pounds of milk a year. Total dairy production is about 1 billion pounds of milk, annually, from Dodge County dairy farms.

The dairy farm tradition has continued to feed the local dairy processing and cheese making businesses. The Kraft Foods, Inc. plant in Beaver Dam, established in 1928, is both the oldest continuously operating Kraft plant in the U.S., as well as its most technologically advanced as a cheese product producing plant.

The plant turns out about 150 million pounds of Kraft’s Philadelphia Brand Cream Cheese annually. In addition to major food processors such as Kraft, some local family run cheese factories survive throughout the county.

Dodge County’s strong agricultural past led to the Dodge County Fair being heralded as the “Greatest County Fair in America” for many years. The fair was once held on grounds within the city of Beaver Dam, just blocks from downtown. Huge crowds arrived by train from the turn of the last century through the 1930s from Milwaukee, Chicago and other Midwestern cities. While the Dodge County Fair Grounds have moved further east of the city, this annual August event is still a crowd pleaser and showcases the strong agricultural heritage of the Beaver Dam area.