In the Town of Troy, a licensed Grade A dairy farm is being told to stop operating or start paying. Walworth County dairy farmer Chaz Self says he is being unfairly penalized for selling raw milk, under a rule he says never changed and that he was already following.
Gov. Tony Evers’ state agency Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection (DATCP) wants a $10,000 forfeiture, $50 per day, and a license that stays suspended until a hearing that is not scheduled until May 2027.
Self and his wife, Megan, run Grassway Organics, a first-generation grass-based dairy on roughly 640 acres near East Troy, milking about 50 cows on a seasonal system. He left an non-farm job in 2016 to work on the farm full-time.
The farm’s business is built around raw milk distributed to people the Selfs describe as bona fide owners of the operation, not retail customers. An online GoFundMe to cover the fines has already cleared $50,000.
Wisconsin lets a real part-owner of a dairy farm consume the farm’s raw milk, but it bans selling raw milk to the public. DATCP says buying a share of the farm only so someone can pick up raw milk is a sham, not real ownership, and considers that milk as an illegal sale. Grassway says its members are genuine owners under that exception. The state has never defined the term, and that is the argument made by Grassway.
On March 18, 2026, DATCP issued a special order demanding changes in Grassway’s business practices. The farm requested a hearing before an administrative law judge. On April 21, DATCP suspended the milk license. Grassway again asked for a hearing. That merits hearing is now scheduled for May 24–26, 2027 in Waukesha County, according to a Sept. 29 account from the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund (FTCLDF) , of which Grassway is a member.
Self says DATCP served a civil forfeiture of $10,000 plus $50 per day the farm keeps operating. Fifty dollars a day is more than $18,000 a year on top of the $10k penalty, enough money to throw a dairy farmer out of business in the modern era of burdensome regulations, high operating costs, and other financial hurdles dairy famers deal with on a daily basis.
On Sept. 28 the farm sued and moved for a temporary restraining order, arguing that DATCP is enforcing its own findings before any judge has heard the case. FTCLDF says the department had spent at least six years working with Grassway on a cooperative model in which bona fide members could receive raw milk because of their ownership stake, then reversed course and tried to shut the business down without a hearing.
Wisconsin law ATCP 65.52 says no person may sell or distribute unpasteurized milk to consumers. DATCP’s own raw-milk page it does not prohibit any of the following: the licensed producer, a person with a bona fide ownership interest in the farm if the producer is a legal entity, family and nonpaying guests, employees, and an incidental sale to a consumer at the dairy farm where the milk is produced.
The Selfs say they designed Grassway around the law and presented their business model to the department, and went above and beyond what the rule required including a RAWMI food-safety certification, and acquiring the first raw milk liability insurance policy in the state on a Wisconsin dairy farm (according to the Selfs). Megan Self’s fundraiser says the phrase the state is now using to close them, “bona fide ownership interest,” has never been defined by DATCP in rule.
A declining herd count is not only impacting cattle ranchers. As of Aug. 1, Wisconsin had 4,991 licensed dairy herds, the first time the state has fallen under 5,000, down from 5,222 a year earlier and from 19,232 in 2000. Milk production has held up because the remaining herds are much larger. Self said “They’re going to continue to eat the small. The big are just going to get bigger.”
Public-health officials are using the same counter argument they have used for decades — pasteurization was built to stop milk-borne disease, and Walworth County has already lived through a raw-milk outbreak. In 2009, state investigators tied a Campylobacter-type illness cluster to Zinniker Farm; 35 people in Walworth, Waukesha, and Racine counties were sick, 30 of them linked to that milk, 21 of them children. The Zinnikers settled citations and lost the ability to sell raw milk. DATCP still considers retail raw-milk sales as illegal. None of that answers the due-process complaint at Grassway: a properly licensed Grade A farm, no published outbreak tied to it in the current case, and a merits hearing in 2027.
Author’s opinion: This is a violation of due process and needs to be settled much quicker. The government is attempting to push the the Grassway farm out of existence while failing to prove it was in violation of any legal statue or regulation on the books. Wisconsin — let’s support Grassway Organics.
Another fight that was settled in dairy farmers’ direction three weeks ago demonstrates what can happen when farmers fight back. Checkoff fees and a raw-milk forfeiture are different statutes, however both cases demonstrate the stranglehold the government has on our dairy farmers. There has been a precipitous drop in number of dairy farms in Wisconsin for years. The state faces an annual attrition rate of 3-5%, and although ~95% of Wisconsin’s dairy farms remain family owned, burdensome regulations and rising costs are the primary reasons for the drop in youth taking over family farms. When will Wisconsin leaders start to truly support our Farmers beyond a political photo-op in June for Diary Month? Related Story:
