Swansenreport

A Wisconsin congressman is drawing a line in the dairy aisle.

Rep. Tony Wied, who represents the state’s 8th Congressional District, introduced legislation this week requiring lab-created butter to be clearly labeled as such on grocery shelves. He calls it the REAL Butter Act — short for Recognizing Engineered Alternatives as Lab-Created.

Wied unveiled the bill at Brickstead Dairy in Greenleaf during National Dairy Month. His target: a Silicon Valley startup called Savor, operating out of Batavia, Illinois, that makes butter from carbon and hydrogen. No cows. No plants. No farmland.

The money behind it? Bill Gates.

Gates’ climate investment fund, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, is among Savor’s backers. The company has raised $33 million, opened a 25,000-square-foot pilot production facility outside Chicago, and is eyeing retail shelves by 2027. Gates wrote on his blog that the process produces no greenhouse gases, uses a fraction of the water traditional dairy requires, and tastes like the real thing.

Wied isn’t buying it. Literally or figuratively.

Dan Brick, who owns Brickstead Dairy — a fifth-generation farm working toward its sixth — stood alongside Wied at the announcement and didn’t mince words. “It’s mind-blowing that we have to protect the name butter,” Brick said. “Butter should be a dairy product and not something that’s made in a lab.”

Brick said dairy farms already face enough headwinds — urban sprawl, market pressure, the relentless economics of modern agriculture. He’s not intimidated by the lab, though. “I know we’ll survive because we’ve got a much healthier product than anything that can be grown in a lab,” he said. “And more environmentally friendly, too.”

Wied’s office framed Savor’s product as an assault on American farmers — and, pointedly, on the Trump administration’s own dietary priorities. The Department of Health and Human Services is pushing whole milk and full-fat dairy in its new dietary guidelines. Lab butter, Wied’s team argues, cuts against all of it.

His bill is simple: if it’s made in a lab, the label has to say so. No fine print. No vague ingredient language. Consumers deserve to know what they’re buying before it hits their toast.

Savor says it isn’t trying to put dairy farmers out of business. The company describes its product as an additional option for food manufacturers and chefs — a way to reduce agriculture’s environmental footprint, not replace the cow. Whether that framing lands in Wisconsin dairy country is another question entirely.

The labeling fight, notably, has bipartisan roots. Sen. Tammy Baldwin helped introduce the DAIRY PRIDE Act last year, targeting the broader practice of slapping dairy names — milk, cheese, yogurt — on products that contain none. Wied’s bill sharpens that focus specifically to butter.

He says he’ll push the REAL Butter Act through the House Agriculture Committee and onto the floor. Dairy groups are already working to bring other lawmakers along.

Wisconsin produces roughly 14 percent of the nation’s butter supply. For the Brick family — and thousands of farm families like them — this isn’t a policy abstraction.

It’s the next generation.