Waukesha County dairy farmer Tom Oberhaus explained why he’s choosing Trump once again in 2024 and how inflation has hurt those in the agriculture industry.
WAUKESHA, Wisconsin – At Cozy Nook Farm, they cover three areas: Cows, pumpkins, and Christmas trees.
“We’re diversified here,” laughed dairy farmer Tom Oberhaus in an interview with Fox News Digital.
He explained that he and his wife are conservative Republicans who have been sure of who they were supporting in the 2024 election for a long time.
“There’s no question in our mind that our four years under Trump management was much better than the three and a half years under Biden management – or whoever is, you know, that’s the great mystery is, who is actually running the government right now?” he asked.
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They previously voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020.
One issue he has with Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democrat presidential nominee, is that she vouched for President Biden’s cognitive ability.
“It bothers the heck out of me that we’re thinking about electing a person that just six weeks ago… told us ‘Oh, Biden’s on top of it. He’s really aggressive and really knows what he’s doing,'” Oberhaus said.
“We all seen that in the debate, you know, he’s past his time,” he said of Biden’s June debate with former President Trump that preceded his campaign suspension.
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Critics have claimed Trump is bad for farmers, pointing to his fondness for tariffs and his past trade conflict with China. But Oberhaus said the tariffs, which ramped up in 2018, “certainly didn’t hurt us.”
“We’re much better off with tariffs than having that government printing press printing out money,” he added.
At Cozy Nook Farm, Oberhaus said their biggest struggle has been inflation. “We’ve been [eaten] alive by inflation,” he claimed.
He explained that they do not set their own prices, and they tend to “run a couple of years behind everybody else.”
They’re now paying “twice as much for tires and fuel and feed and everything else.” However, “our milk price stays the same, until just now in the last month that it finally came up.”
He also stressed illegal immigration as a top issue for him, even hundreds of miles from the southern border. But the problem is surfacing even as far north as Wisconsin, he explained.
“Little town of Whitewater 35 minutes away,” he said. “It’s a town of, what, 15,000 people? And then they got a thousand new immigrants.”
Local Wisconsin outlets reported that last year Whitewater Police Chief Daniel Meyer and City Manager John Weidl penned a letter to Biden, asking for help after the “rapid increase” of about 800 to 1,000 immigrants since 2022.
“As a municipal government, our focus is not on legal status, but rather ensuring we are providing the resources expected of a municipality to all residents of the City. Unfortunately, we are increasingly finding it difficult to do that,” the letter reportedly read.
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“How do you handle that?” asked Oberhaus.
As for those who argue that with strict immigration enforcement there would result in fewer people to work on farms, he called it “baloney.”
“We got plenty of people to do the farm work,” he said.
On Trump, who recently ventured into Wisconsin’s biggest Democratic enclaves in Dane and Milwaukee counties, the farmer said, “I think that’s the sign of a leader – that you’re not afraid to go into the other camp and tell them what your ideas are.”
