PBS Wisconsin Documentaries

The following program is a co-production of Wisconsin Public Television and University Communications at the University of Wisconsin- Madison.

cows moo, chickens cluck

I recall as a little kid people would say things like, "Well, if you can't do anything else, you can always farm." Not true.

laughs

Not anymore.

Tony

You have your doctor. You have your lawyer. You got to have your farmer.

Daphne

I think there's diversity in Wisconsin agriculture, which is critical. There's no way our industry is going to be successful long-term if we're all doing the same thing. Hard work alone isn't enough to make it in agriculture today. Wisconsin farmers need to have a vision. We're there to make sure these people get fresh, safe, affordable food. They're striving for something more.

Ruth

They're really good at exploring the potential in different niches and finding where they fit. And doing it their own way. They love to have people from the university out there doing stuff. When you're doing projects on the farm, then you can be the first one to know about it. I'm a full-time farmer and I love it. Follow three Wisconsin farming families, each with a unique take on agriculture. And discover how each of them turns their vision into a reality.

Lloyd

It keeps it exciting.

Kat

I can change somebody else's life.

Robert

It's quite easy. If I don't do it, who's going to do it?

Tony

I just turned 18. I was a senior in high school. I came back from football practice and my dad told me he was going to sell the cows. It was devastating because... Why? Why do we have to sell our cows? We're still getting up at five o'clock in the morning, working hard. Why are we selling our cows? During this time in the mid-1990s, selling cows was a familiar scenario for many small dairy farms across the state. Consolidation in the industry was leading to larger farms, and fewer dairy farmers. We're part of an agricultural system, so the decision, I say, was not necessarily made by my dad. It was directly made by him and my mom, but it was because of a changing agricultural system. And that... it made me angry, but it also made me realize why I love where I'm from.

drill whirs

hammer taps

Tony

His family's farm history motivated Tony Schultz and his wife, Kat Becker, to operate their own vegetable farm in north central Wisconsin. Working side by side, their vision for their farm is to keep it small and have their family provide the majority of the labor. Our main thing now is vegetables, but we like maple syrup because it fits in seasonally to the work regime.

Kat

You have to have a lot of stamina going into farming season, so I feel like really maple syrup season actually gets us in shape for that. But it is this energy coming into the season It's kind of, in some ways, the first hurrah.

pan sizzling

Kat

I am from New York City. It's not a Green Acres story. I don't wear a fur coat.

Tony

I met Kat eventually at UW-Madison. She was doing rural sociology and I became her case study. That's not really what was happening. That's Tony's favorite joke. But, Kat told me early on in our relationship... She told about how she had daydreamed about having a farm. I said, "Well, I have a farm." My dad hung onto the land and he was on the verge of selling it, but did not do that. Then in 2006, we came back here together and bought the farm. This is my farm table. This is where I grew up in. I sleep in my parents' bedroom.

both laugh

Tony

This is my family farm. This is where I'm from.

child chattering

Tony

Snuggly. You're snuggly. Keep the clumps here for the time being, Hava. I think we'll use them to hold down the plastic. That's what we'll do. Kat and Tony transformed the homestead into an organic vegetable farm that embraces the idea of variety. Variety not only in the different crops they raise, but also in the variety of ventures they undertake. Such as taking part in their local farmers' market. Even running their own CSA, or community supported agriculture, where the can sell their produce directly to their neighbors. They also make maple syrup and raise beef cows and pigs. The nice thing about the type of farming system that we have is that we don't bet the farm on a new crop. We don't put all of our eggs in one basket, right, as the old folk saying goes.

chickens cluck

Tony

It's my daily Easter egg hunt. Hello, ladies. Their passion for variety is what led them to working with different plant breeders and researchers from the University of Wisconsin. It's a way for them to try growing new varieties of vegetables, to see if they'll be a fit for their farm. I like having the farmers involved in this research right at the get go because then we see that it's relevant and they see that, too. My name is Ruth Genger and I'm an associate researcher in the Department of Plant Pathology here at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

Kat

Ruth is great to work with.

Tony

And we respect that her work is orientated towards our type of agriculture.

Ruth

We are trying to find potato varieties that are particularly well-suited to organic production. So, we trial them directly on the farms in the same environment where they will be grown. To start with, we send out to the farmers a list of all of the potatoes that we have available and the farmers look through and they pick out what they would like to grow.

Kat

First of all, I love that we're planting Nose Bag. Please... that's the best thing. So we have two Red Lasoda...

Ruth

So, what they give back to us is some information about how successful that potato was for them. Was it highly marketable? Did it yield really well? Was it resistant to pests and diseases? Overall, would they want to grow that potato again?

Maple

I pushed in all of the potatoes.

Kat

Push and cover.

Maple

Push and cover. Working together has proved to be a two-way street for Stoney Acres and the university. Researchers are able to test their work right on the farm, and Kat and Tony now have a new variety of potato on their hands.

Tony

We've actually adopted a potato that we've taken out of the trials, Papa Cacho, which is like a fingerling style, a longer, leaner potato, but works well in our clay soils. We're like, "We're going to take this into our rotation."

Ruth

It's become a bit of a market niche for them. I think at the farmers' market they are "the people with the crazy potato." I guess it's a draw. It's one of the secrets to their success, actually, is to embrace variety. I think farmers are in general just natural innovators. They are always trying new things and definitely I see that when I go to Kat and Tony's. A new venture relying on a wide variety of vegetables grown at Stoney Acres has transformed Kat and Tony's home into a farm-to-table hot spot in the summer.

Tony

We're feeding a lot of our neighbors. Before, they may have thought of us as that "weird farm" or that "different farm". But now it's like, "the pizza night party is at Stoney Acres."

crowd chatters

Tony

We make pizzas using two brick ovens and we source all of the ingredients from the farm, other than the cheese. We raise the wheat. Grind it into flour. Make it into dough. We raise all of the tomatoes that we make the sauce out of. We raise all the vegetables that go on as the topping. We raise all of the pigs that go on as the pork, the ham, the bacon.

Kat

I man the hearth. Tony rolls the dough. Then we have our neighbors come over just for that night to help us, and we all kind of slam it together.

Tony

And people can just come, hang out on my lawn, eat a pizza.

Kat

My favorite part of Pizza on the Farm, is that we get to feed people good, from-scratch food.

Pizza night makes me believe in the phrase

"value added." We really see the value of the farming and the prep when we put it on a pizza and sell it as a final product. Embracing variety, along with trying new ventures and an openness to research,

has helped Kat and Tony bring their vision to life

being able to call Stoney Acres home.

Tony

Yeah, I feel like it would be a major loss in my life to not be doing it. I feel like I would be letting down the legacy of the farm. In south Madison, urban farmer Robert Pierce, is growing a legacy of his own. In the 50s, there were less than 500 black people here and we were all like family. We all knew each other. Back then, in those days, everyone had their own little gardens, so you never knew you were poor because you always had food. My grandmother made sure we were always in the gardens with her, too. So this thing with food stuck with me, you know? Robert eventually left Madison to serve in Vietnam. When he had returned home, he had developed food allergies and realized that his neighborhood had changed, too.

Robert

I was watching how my grandmother's peers were... Their health was really starting to decline. There was nobody taking care of these gardens for these people anymore, so they just let them go. They weren't cooking like they were cooking. They were eating cheap food and so their health was really starting to deteriorate. And so I decided that I was going to become an organic farmer...

laughs

Robert

1983.

laughs

Robert

Growing organic vegetables has helped Robert to control his food allergies, but he had even bigger plans- a vision of providing fresh, safe, affordable food for his neighbors. Pam, these are not hot.

Ana

No, they're very sweet. I told you I use them for my sauting. He now runs the South Madison Farmers' Market, making organic vegetables available to his community. His daughters even help out, making it a family affair. People think their coming just for the fresh produce, but they're coming for conversation too. You know?

laughs

Robert

Yeah, they have the gift of gab.

Ana

Ron has been in the movies here himself, okay?

Shellie

Cuba... Puerto Rico...

Ana

Spicy apples. Who would have thought? You all have a good day, okay?

Shellie

Thank you!

Ana

Oh, I love her.

Robert

I was a single parent. Five kids. I think the youngest daughter was like three or four and they would go up and down the streets and tell everybody what we had. "Yes, we have watermelons. "We have corn. We have... We have..." Yes, you could hear them all over,

laughs

Robert

bragging about all the food and stuff we were growing. They've all taken some type of responsibility and they know that it's hard work, but it's fair work. And we're about good food. Yes, Wolf River is the baby.

Shopper

Oh, maybe we'll try that then. Oh, yeah.

Robert

Okay? That'll help you? Yeah, that's what these are for.

Shopper

Okay, so I'm going to get this.

emergency vehicle sirens

Ana

That happens sometimes.

emergency siren speeds up

Robert

Man, already. People need to open their eyes and see what's going on, because there's a problem. You know, there's a problem here. I've always seen that there was this revolving door with felons getting put back in prison because there's no work. There's no jobs out there because you have that word "felon" on your record. People look at it...

Psst...

Robert

throw it right away. You don't even get a chance just because of that word. It's recycling. It's the same people and its mostly minorities that's being recycled through this prison system. Robert knew he couldn't just stand by and watch. His desire to help his community in the past has led him to collaborate with the Nelson Institute at the University of Wisconsin. Together, they worked to find ways to reach more people with his farmers' market, but now Robert had another idea.

Dadit

Robert knows about growing. Robert knows about the challenge of being an African American grower for, I don't know, 30 years? It really gives us an excellent collaborator. Not only that he is knowledgeable, but that he's experienced, himself, firsthand, about the complexity of limited food access in his community. My name is Dadit Hidayat. I'm a PhD student with the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at UW-Madison.

Robert

One day, I have this knock on my door and it's Dadit and he wants to know, "What can we do? Let's do something." And I said, "Well, let's talk about reentry."

laughs

Robert

A seed was planted that day, and Robert's vision of providing his neighbors with fresh, safe, affordable food was about to evolve. We're growing farmers. Okay? That's basically what's going on... we're growing farmers. Right now we're working with ex-felons. We're teaching them how to grow food organically and how to do that in an urban setting, like we do. And give them a spot at the South Madison Farmers' Market to sell their stuff. When we want to address food justice, we have to empower this community. They have to have their own control. That's when we started to talk about how we can work with formerly incarcerated individuals. My name is Anthony Cooper. I'm the Director of Reentry Services for Nehemiah Center for Urban Leadership. Most of the time, I'm working with people who have been incarcerated. Robert contacted me first and he already had the connection with Dadit and so they wanted to see if anyone was even interested in becoming a farmer. Together, they selected a participant for this year's program. For privacy reasons, the participant declined to be filmed. However, Robert quickly got to work training him in making compost, building growing beds, and selecting seeds. Before he knew it, he's vegetables were starting to pop out of the ground. Yeah, he's really excited about this whole process and really wants to make this sustainable for him and his family.

Dadit

Once you learn, then there is another process of implementing the knowledge into real action.

Anthony

Robert and Dadit have really been strategic, as far as making sure they are able to work with him and also try to teach him at the same time.

Dadit

By providing this opportunity to be a farmer for this formerly incarcerated individual, they will also address their employment issue. Secondly, because they are from the south Madison community themselves, and providing this food, it means that they're providing this food for their own community, for their own neighbors, friends... How you doing? Getting his friends and neighbors fresh, safe, affordable food has been Robert's vision for a long time. And now, by collaborating with the university to train more urban farmers, that vision can carry on and continue to put his community first.

Robert

I give them the best that I can give them. Just what my grandmother did to me you know. I mean, food is an important thing and especially growing it. So, that's what I'm about.

Lloyd

Deep down everybody likes to be on their home farm. In the 80s, my mother and father decided to sell their operation, and so Daphne and I bought it and we moved back here. Early on in our careers, we made some crazy decisions that really hurt us. Lloyd and Daphne Holterman took over during one of the more challenging eras for farmers, the farm crisis of the 1980s. Shortly after they bought new land, its value plummeted 60%. Even the prices of products produced on farms were down, but Lloyd and Daphne held onto the belief that healthy and productive cows could pull them through it. That's what drives me. The animal is the most fascinating part. Those cows are everything to us. Everything we've worked for and everything we have is wrapped up in those cows.

Daphne

Hi, you little cutie.

Lloyd

The better we treat our cows, the better they do for us. Hi. If you don't do that first, no matter what, you're not going to survive. During the farm crisis, new ideas coming out of UW were helping to solve real problems on the farm. Such as using their research to treat milk fever, a potentially fatal disease for cows. But, it was their insight into cattle genetics that was about to have Lloyd and Daphne looking at cows in a different way. There's a lot of things that we thought, over the years, were true... "Bigger cows give more milk." It's not true. "The way the cow is built would make them last longer." It's really not true. Through genomics, they're identifying the genes that trigger immune response, and so we can breed the cows healthier. We can breed the cows to calf easier. We can breed for moderate size, for fertility.

Kent

My name is Kent Weigel. I'm chair of the Dairy Science Department and I'm a dairy cow geneticist here at UW-Madison. I've known Lloyd and Daphne for 20 years I would say. They were early adopters of breeding for health, fertility, and longevity. They jumped right on and said, "This is what we really think is important." Lloyd and Daphne's vision for their farm was to have the healthiest and most productive cows possible. Years of collaborating with the university, and building on their own knowledge of cow genetics, has Rosy Lane right on track today. The ideal cow for me would be a cow that grows very healthy and has a good immune system. They want to get in front of the problem and prevent it, rather than try to fix it. So, with the genomic testing, what you're doing is getting a peek at the genetic predisposition of the animal. Being able to sort of peek into the DNA, and we really don't know with complete certainty, by any stretch, but you can make better decisions and more accurate decisions.

Daphne

One of Lloyd's goals early on was to impact the world dairy cattle genetic pool, and he's done that because he loves it so much, and breeding for a better animal, and thinking about it differently, and working with university professors, and sharing ideas. It's a win-win. The kind of cow I really strived to have when I started, and the kind of cows I strive to have now, are nearly totally different. What isn't different is the hard work that goes into taking care of the farm. Lloyd and Daphne brought on two young partners to help them continue to put their cows first.

Tim

There it goes. I think I'll take her out to the field where we've got a little more room.

Daphne

We have Tim Strobel here and he has been with us over 15 years as a partner and owner.

Lloyd

He's excellent at cropping and very driven, and so I think that's really added a big plus.

Daphne

And a few years ago, Jordan Matthews joined us.

Jordan

Up on top, we have computer systems that'll read their Fitbit.

Lloyd

Jordan took a lot of my responsibilities with the dairy and performance went up there again. So I guess I was doing kind of a crummy job because every time I hand off something to somebody else, they do better at it. Tim and Jordan are the beginning of a new era at Rosy Lane, but the vision remains the same.

Kent

So one of the things that's in their vision is we don't necessarily want to just get the maximum amount of milk you can get from a cow... We just don't want cows that are pretty to look at. We want cows that are healthy and functional. Then, everything else will sort of follow, and that's where they have found their niche.

Daphne

The cows have no idea all the work that goes into taking care of them. So, no, the cows don't have any idea of all the work. But that's okay. We don't do it for their recognition. We do it because taking care of cows is the right thing to do. The hard work in taking care of their herd and a commitment to breeding the healthiest and most productive cows possible, recently paid off in a big way for Lloyd and Daphne.

Lloyd

There's about seven, eight million dairy cattle in the U.S., so if they're in the top five thousand out of eight million, that's pretty good. Here's our heifer, Rosy Lane Delta 10-90. She shows up on top.

Daphne

The result of Lloyd's breeding was very good. We have a calf that's really high, number one in the world for net merit dollars. Net merit is a formula used by the Council on Dairy Cattle Breeding. It tests a cow's genes to predict its future economic traits, and Rosy Lane Delta 10-90 was recognized as the best earning Holstein on the planet. It's a melding of everything that she has, so she's a good all-around animal. She happens to be number one on the all-around measures. She doesn't need antibiotics because she's healthy. She's got longevity, the fertility, efficient reproduction. This animal is stellar.

Kent

It's not something that happens every day, and it's something that never happens to most people. There's still a little bit of luck of the draw involved to hit the top of the list, so he was super excited.

Lloyd

The 80,000 genes have to combine in a way that the other ones didn't combine, so that is total luck. It's not luck to have good ones, it's luck to have the best one.

Daphne

Oh, that was a good day for Lloyd. He was excited. He called his parents, and said, "This is the breeding that we've done and it started with you. Now, it's developed into number one in the world."

Lloyd

I just marvel because I get up every morning, first thing I do is I walk into her little barn... and make sure that she's still there.

Daphne

She's got a little special place, I suppose, in everybody's heart. Lloyd and Daphne are embracing the moment because they know their cow will only be number one for a little while. Typically, a new one is crowned every few months. But their vision for their farm is here to stay. Years of breeding for healthier and more productive cows, while gaining insight into genomics and dairy science from the university, has helped them to ensure a bright future for Rosy Lane.

Lloyd

You have to pinch yourself sometimes because it's about as perfect as you can get. The changing landscape of Wisconsin farming challenges each family to chart their own course, to create a livelihood from the land.

Tony

You get to make decisions about what you're going to do every single day. You have to work your butt off. You have to work some intense hours, but you get to make a decision about that.

Kent

They've done a great job of tying this altogether and they kind of got it early on. A commitment to their families, to their communities, and even their animals has helped each of these farmers to build on something bigger than the job at hand... its helped them to build their vision for their farm into a reality.

Lloyd

First of all, you have to have the drive for whatever you do. For Kat and Tony, it's finding different ways to embrace variety to reinvigorate their family farm.

Tony

Put it on a pizza. If you put it on a pizza, everyone is coming to eat it. Robert's vision is focused on his community.

Robert

For me, the market has been an avenue for them to be able to get fresh, safe, affordable food. And for Lloyd and Daphne, it's always been about putting their cows first.

Daphne

That's just what we do everyday. A day on the farm is no easy chore, but these farmers put it all into perspective.

Ruth

I think the only way that you can work that hard is if you are passionately committed and truly believe that what you're doing is the best thing that you can do.

Robert

You have to really want to do this.

Lloyd

It keeps it exciting.

Tony

Enjoy what you're doing because that is going to make your life worthwhile.

Ruth

It's absolutely their life. This is who they are. The preceeding program has been a co-production of Wisconsin Public Television and University Communications of the University of Wisconsin- Madison.