Fields stretch out in shades of green like a patchwork quilt, vibrant and alive. Silos loom overhead like silver gods watching over the land. Warm sunlight covers the buildings framed by corn stalks as the gentle murmur of cows mooing echoes in the wind.

The Hinchley Dairy Farm appears just like any other at first glance, but a deeper look reveals a farm that is anything but ordinary.

What started as a small family farm with only 11 cows and a dream has grown into a proud, growing dairy legacy, just as the Hinchleys themselves have grown — now three generations of farmers working together as one.

Behind this curtain of Midwestern bliss are the trials and tribulations that every farmer faces. Climate change, inflation and soil erosion are all challenges that often make the demands of farming too much to handle. As new generations grow up and take over, the fear of the future and what it may hold grows with them.

With an uncertain road ahead, the Hinchleys made a decision to determine their own future.

“You aren’t going to make it if you don’t diversify, you are not going to make it by turning the light on and keeping the same thing that your parents did, because you’re just not sustainable,” says Tina Hinchley, one of the owners.

The Hinchley family is championing a model at their farm that prioritizes financial, social and environmental sustainability, ensuring that their land — and the legacy of farming in Wisconsin — will thrive for generations to come.

With the climate crisis posing significant threats to farming in Wisconsin, local agricultural practices are under pressure to adapt and survive.

The Hinchley Dairy Farm is at the forefront of this shift, embracing sustainable methods to secure its future. The Hinchley family is transforming their farm to ensure its viability for the next generation. Their approach serves as a model for farms across Wisconsin and beyond, influencing broader conversations about sustainable agriculture in the face of environmental change.

“We need to make sure that we are taking care of our land, our water and our community because everything is interconnected,” Tina Hinchley says. “Making sure that the air quality that’s coming off of our farm is good, water quality, making sure our soil lives up to the expectations so that we can continue farming for the future.”

Husband-and-wife duo, Duane and Tina, took over the family farm located in Cambridge, a suburb of Madison, from Duane’s parents to continue the farming legacy of Hinchley Dairy.

The road to sustainability started for the Hinchley family when one of their four children, Anna Hinchley-Skadahl, was in college at UW–Madison for a degree in dairy science. Anna saw her parents struggle trying to milk 140 cows with all of their children being away, so she pitched a possible solution: cow-milking robots.

The Hinchleys transitioned to a Lely robotic milking facility in 2018, making their milking process easier, more energy efficient and healthier overall for their cows.

“By having these robots, not only is it more sustainable for me and my body and my family, it’s more sustainable for those cows, too, because they can milk themselves as often as they want,” Tina Hinchley says.

The Lely system allows the cows to eat, drink, relax or be milked whenever and however often they want, creating peace of mind for the farmer, as well as a stress-free process for the animal.

But the Hinchleys didn’t stop there.

With Anna set to take over the farm someday, the family wanted to guarantee that she would farm for years to come. The Hinchleys added a water retention pond and a conservation strip, which are both used in agriculture to improve water quality, protect soil and reduce the need for irrigation.

They also started to use GPS technology when harvesting and planting cash crops, like hay and corn, to see where the high yields were and to increase precision.

“We are no longer wasting seeds, we are no longer over-fertilizing,” Tina Hinchley says. “Everything that we’re doing is trying to be the most sustainable but cost-efficient. So in the end, sustainability is cost efficient and it should not be something that we are afraid of.”

As the Hinchleys’ farm demonstrates the transformative power of sustainable farming practices, it’s clear that initiatives supporting environmental stewardship are more important than ever.

Two years ago, President Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act, the largest investment in climate action and clean energy in world history, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Across USDA programs, the inflation reduction legislation supports rural communities and increases access to lower-cost clean energy, climate-smart agriculture and conservation. Tina Hinchley says it also provides farmers with incentives to hop on board and work together.

“There’s a lot of practices that are available for us to use and we do get government funds for that,” she says. “So it’s important to check those out, and the government wants to help us. It’s not like they’re our enemy, they’re here to help us.”

Reflecting on the impact these laws have had on the state of Wisconsin, Democratic Sen.-Elect Melissa Ratcliff, who will represent Wisconsin’s 16th District, which includes Cottage Grove, says the government has an important role supporting farmers and rural areas.

“The importance of these funds is that it’s giving farmers the opportunity to be able to invest in their farms, to continue to grow to have the most efficient equipment, which is important for our climate, for sustainability purposes, but also to make their farms more efficient, too,” Ratcliff says.

By empowering farmers to implement environmentally friendly practices, the inflation reduction measure is crucial as the climate crisis and extreme weather events threaten agricultural stability.

Tina Hinchley highlighted the effects the changing climate has not only had on her farm’s crops, but also their animals — it’s not a climate issue, she says, but a climate crisis.

Extreme rain events, wetter springs and falls, groundwater flooding, declining snow cover, winter “thaws,” changing seasons, more frequent extremely hot days and droughts are among the climate impacts stressing Wisconsin farms, according to an article from the Wisconsin Initiative on Climate Change Impacts.

“One of the impacts that we’re seeing from our changing climate are relevant and very visible to everybody, not just agriculture and farmers, but it’s really a lot of it is relative to extreme weather events,” says Sara Walling, co-chair of the initiative’s Agriculture Working Group.

The working group’s 2021 report says the anticipated response of Wisconsin agriculture to changing climate, atmospheric composition and land management contains a wide range of uncertainty and potential impacts.

Hotter weather and increasing rainfalls are causing pressure on plants and livestock, yield loss and overall productivity for farmers all over the state, putting them at the forefront of the effects of extreme weather changes.

“I always say they’re at ground zero for a lot of these things,” says Paul Mitchell, a professor of agriculture and applied economics at UW–Madison. “They see the soil erosion, they see the lost productivity, they pay for it directly.”

The report highlights the importance of finding solutions to these problems, such as initiating more sustainable practices like cover crops or no-till farming. Walling says education is just as important so farmers know what they are up against and how they can become more resilient for the future.

The Hinchleys focus on sustainability in three ways: financially, socially and environmentally.

Financial sustainability is simply just ensuring the farm is making enough income to keep the lights on, while social sustainability is making sure the community around the farm is supportive of what they are doing, as a trust needs to be established.

“Every farm should be concerned about what the impact of their farm is on their community and their environment,” Tina Hinchley says.

A big part of their role in the community is the farm tours they run for families and groups as a way to educate about farming, food production and everyday life in agriculture.

Environmental sustainability is the practice of farming in a way that protects the environment, conserves natural resources and improves soil fertility. Many sustainability practices have to do with keeping the environment safe, like their water retention pond or the conservation strip planted around the crops to protect the soil and water.

But Tina Hinchley stresses the importance of ensuring that the farm’s impact on the environment and its soil is positive.

“Making sure that whatever we’re doing to our soils — that is going into the plant, that is going into the cows, that is going into us — is something that is not going to be harsh, toxic or destructive for generations to come,” she says.

As the sun sets over Hinchley Dairy Farm, it casts a warm golden glow on the rolling fields. The fight for sustainability isn’t just a battle for profit or production.

It’s a heartfelt commitment to the generations that came before and the many to follow. The Hinchley family knows that their efforts today will shape the world Anna will inherit tomorrow.

The fight for a sustainable future is not just a struggle, it’s a promise — a promise to the land and to their family.

As they take each step forward, they hope to inspire others, ensuring that the legacy of farming lives on, for generations yet to come.

Tina says her motivation comes from her daughter’s equal passion to fight for the future of the farm she will one day take over.

“She doesn’t want to have to fight all this stuff later on, and if we can get her set and rolling ahead of time, it’ll be the best solution to make it so that this farm will forever continue farming,” she says.

Cover photo: The silos and barn at Hinchley Dairy farm. Photo by Sophie Walk.