The shutdown of Pure Prairie Poultry several months ago left a large number of producers hanging out to dry with no financial recompense. Kelly Wilfert, a farm management outreach specialist for the University of Wisconsin, said the University is looking into helping farmers prepare for future possibilities.
“As we looked at the Prairie Poultry situation and started looking at the potential farm economy coming here in 2026, we started to have the conversation about what that farm economy is going to look like, and how our farmers get ready for that? And you’ll hear from a lot of folks about diversification and risk mitigation, you know, whether that’s crop insurance or dairy revenue protection, but what happens when the hammer drops, and you’re in the situation where you’re not getting paid?”
One of the options may be collections.
“One of the topics we’ll be working on this spring is talking about collections, and that would be more of actually the creditor side, and we usually don’t think of our farmers as creditors, right? Usually, we think of the bank or Farm Credit, but in a lot of situations, farmers can also be creditors. They’re owed money, whether it’s from a processing company, whether it’s from a co-op, whether it’s from someone they’ve done custom harvest work for, and so when you run into this situation where suddenly the paycheck hasn’t come, what do you do?”
The University of Wisconsin is putting together resources to help farmers if that situation ever arises again.
“But we’re going to be working on developing resources so that you’re already starting to think about that before it ever happens. So that, in that moment, when you’re hit with that chalk, you actually know what steps I want to take so that I can try to, quite frankly, when we think about collections work, it’s often, get in line. How do you get in line and make sure that you’ve got the priority, or at least as good of a priority as you can get to get paid out?”
It’s important to have a road map in front of your farm to know what to do if another situation like that takes place.
“Yeah, and the Pure Prairie poultry situation was a tough one, because that particular commodity doesn’t have a producer security fund. So, if we talk about milk or we talk about grain, or even some of the processing vegetables through the Department of AG Trade and Consumer Protection and through state statute, we have something called a producer security fund. And essentially, a lot of those larger processors are paying in regularly, and when something like a bankruptcy does happen or even not a bankruptcy, but just, the payments aren’t coming, that producer security fund sometimes can kick in and help cover those payments or at least partials so that the farmer, at least, isn’t taking a complete loss.”