University Place

And welcome to both the festival and to the Wisconsin Historical Society, and to a program that I think you're going to enjoy a lot. My name is Ellsworth Brown. I'm the director, the Ruth and Hartley Barker Director of the Wisconsin Historical Society, and I'm pleased to welcome all of you here, a special guest in the front row especially, but we're glad that you all came, and I'm looking forward to the program as I'm sure you are, too. Thank you for coming. I wanted to just mention that although I'm not going to introduce Jerry Apps, someone else has that wonderful duty, I've done it before myself on a number of occasions, I do want to say that this man, Dr. Apps, is a treasured asset for those who care about rural history, agricultural history, and the sentiments that go along with those as well. He has worked with us on 11 of his 40 books, and the first time I saw Jerry, that 40-book number, I was astonished at it. So are you, right? -

Jerry

Yes. -

Ellsworth

(laughs) But, in fact, the last several include the "Wisconsin

Agriculture

A History" which we are here to learn about more today, "The

Quiet Season

Remembering Country Winters", "Whispers

and Shadows

A Naturalist Memoir", and "Old

Farm

A History", just to mention four. And some of these, and I'm sure some in the future, are coordinated as well with Wisconsin Public Television, and you may have seen some of those programs, too. I should tell you, though, as I contemplate the titles of his books and Dr. Apps' own academic background and then consider the resume of Secretary Brancel, who I'm going to introduce momentarily to you, I realize I'm absolutely in all ways the wrong person to be up here. Maybe only because of the prompts from knowing that I would be, I'm still struggling with the definition between Holstein and Hereford and heifer. (audience laughing) You really ought to do something about starting them all with an H. That would be the first thing you could do to reform this profession, I think, for people like me. And I have one thing to tell you, apart from introductions, and that is that afterward, after the program, take your entry ticket, maybe it's a little bookmark or something, I don't think they're going to be very fussy about the ticket in fact, to the lobby right outside after this event and trade it in for a free scoop of Babcock ice cream courtesy of the University of Wisconsin College of Agriculture and Ice Cream Sciences. (audience laughing) (audience applauding) Thank you for that. I think that's the right title, isn't it? Yeah. (laughs) I especially want to welcome to our podium today for first remarks the Secretary of Agriculture, Trade, and Consumer Protection. I'm assured that they have inspected the ice cream that's waiting for us, and it'll be just fine. His name is Ben Brancel. Secretary Brancel will share, in part, how the history of agriculture is important to the future of agriculture. He's a UW-Platteville graduate and has spent years serving the state and the state's agricultural industries. He was a Wisconsin State Assemblyman from 1987 to 1997, was assembly speaker, in fact, in 1997. He helped craft Wisconsin's Right to Farm Law, founded Wisconsin's Discovery Farms and Pioneer Farms projects, and led the effort to revitalize the Wisconsin Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory by housing it in the University of Wisconsin System. He served as state director of the United States Department of Farm Services Agency and also served as the state relations liaison for Wisconsin UW-Madison's College of Agriculture and, oh, I have it here, Life Sciences, where he helped support the Wisconsin Agricultural Research Stations. He was born and raised in Marquette County. Secretary Brancel managed a dairy operation for 22 years and now raises cattle on his family's 290-acre farm. His son and daughter-in-law actually run the farm, and this is interesting to me, sixth generation, consecutively, farming that particular land. I think that's a remarkable thing, and it's probably not so uncommon in Wisconsin as it might be in some other states. But it's still remarkable. And this gives him not only the professional experiences in making laws and policies and programs that are directing agricultural future, but also tying him and his family deeply to the roots of Wisconsin' agriculture from which that future rose. So, without further ado, Mr. Secretary, for you, the podium. (audience applauding) Thank you. Thank you. (audience applauding) Thank you. What a great day. Only 40, Jerry? Now, I was informed earlier today that there is a lot of material. I don't know how many of you personally know Jerry, but he is a voracious researcher, and he researches his topics extensively before he pens those to paper. And I'm told he has another five volumes to come with material he has not placed in this book yet. So, wait for the whole story. But we are here today to celebrate this particular book. And I was approached by a gentleman in my agency before I came over, and he said, "I hear you're going over to the university, "the Historical Society. Check 172." And I said, "172?" "Yes, page 172. That's my family." (audience laughing) So people are already identifying themselves within the material you have presented. What is important about that material? History is the fabric from which each one of us are here today. You have history of family. You have history of neighborhood. You have history of your actual involvement in whatever walk of life you are in. But as it deals with this book, it talks about the history of agriculture, which is actually the production of food, and we all know food is fairly important. There are a lot of different parts of life that impact us, but I can tell you after extensive research, we have determined at the Department of Ag that food is pretty instrumental because four out of four people eat. (audience laughing) And without understanding history, you don't really have a great grasp of where you're at and why you're in the place you're in and what made you who you are. And Jerry has a unique way of writing a story and presenting it that brings it to life, that gives it the "I know, I remember, I get it now." And a lot of people who write books do it for entertainment value. Jerry Apps has not missed that entertainment value. But in that, he has woven in an educational opportunity that all of you and me can benefit by. So I don't know if the oldest statistics are in your book, but I had to look up a couple because I'm talking about history. So this may have been in your lifetime, Jerry. 1920, the value of an acre of land at that point in time was $81.42. It's got to be accurate if it's cents. Today, not quite a hundred years later, $4,000. The value of a bushel of corn, and I will tell you today corn is king. Whether you like it or not, corn establishes the value of almost every commodity in the United States, which establishes the value of almost every commodity within the world. And other parts of agriculture have a huge, huge impact and a very significant involvement in food. But corn is the standard by which most everything else is measured. And so if you measure it in 1915, it was 74 cents. Today, in the year 2015, 100 years later, the established price in August was $3.67. So I want you to think about the value, the interest rate, the inflation rates, and what was happening in all of our activities of life, automobiles, homes, lands, roadways for building, everything you can think of, and then you go back to this commodity of corn and you have a value of 74 cents and it is now 367 cents. What that tells you is in our history in the state of Wisconsin we have made food cheaper and cheaper and cheaper for the public relative the amount of money available to spend on food. And Jerry catches the different commodities, the different histories, the fads that came and went, what is going on today that will be our future of tomorrow, and why we are what we are. Without speaking too long and stealing all of Jerry's remarks, all I can tell you is, Jerry, you have brought history to life, you have made history a relevant part in our thinking, our education, and our need to know, and if every author approached history and writing the way you do, the kids in grade school, middle school, and high school would clamor to get into the classroom to learn who they are, what they are, and what made them that way. Congratulations on this book. Jerry Apps. (audience applauding) Thank you very much, Mr. Secretary, and I appreciate you being here and sharing this with us. It's now my pleasure to introduce Dean Kathryn VandenBosch, the dean of the University of Wisconsin Madison, and you've already heard the title, College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, speak on ties of the University of Wisconsin Madison to Wisconsin's agricultural history. And she'll offer a few highlights about that. She is, as we think about the remarks that we've just heard, we can realize that Dr. Apps has detailed in the new book that we're here to celebrate, the University of Wisconsin students, the professors, and the alumni have all contributed volumes to the history, success, and innovations of agriculture in Wisconsin and beyond. In fact, I was in an old early 20th century dairy building, it hasn't been changed, that had a complete Babcock tester, the old fashioned one, still clamped to the board in their shop area, ready to start up if you needed it again. The other part of the area did not house holsteins let's say but cars instead. Nonetheless, it was interesting to see that that piece of history is still intact. I'd like to welcome the dean here. She is a person who is heading a college where speaker Jerry Apps studied and once taught and is now a professor emeritus. And prior to coming to the University of Wisconsin Madison in 2012, she was a professor of plant biology at the University of Minnesota where Dean VandenBosch also served as interim dean of the College of Food, Agricultural, and Natural Resource Sciences. As a professor, her research focused on the genetics of plant microbe interactions and nitrogen fixation of legumes, a family of plants that includes several agriculturally important species and makes Holstein, Hereford, and heifer easy to remember. She holds MS and PhD degrees in botany from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and spent time at both UW Madison and the John Innes Institute in Great Britain as a postdoctoral associate. So please join me in welcoming Dean VandenBosch. (audience applauding) Well, thank you, Dr. Brown. I'm so pleased to be able to be here today in this beautiful and historic building at an event that is part of both the Wisconsin Book Festival and the Wisconsin Science Festival. This is the second year they've been running concurrently, and, wonderfully, we have a lot of crossover events. They're a couple of my favorite events this year because they each foster our curiosity and provide an educational platform for all of us in the community to explore concepts and issues and our history. This afternoon's program provides a chance to explore

a topic that's near and dear to my heart

the history of Wisconsin agriculture. Last year, in 2014, we spent all of the year celebrating 125 years of the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, and it's wonderful to see so much of that represented here. Chapter eight of Jerry's book, in fact, is called Educating Farmers, and it includes many ways Wisconsin farmers shared information amongst themselves in a cooperative education model built on local agricultural societies and fairs. And he also talks about the influence of the farm press, many of whom are still in circulation, still active today. And, of course, I was particularly struck by the quote that Jerry included from the university president John Bascom to the first dean of the college, my predecessor, William A Henry. Bascom told him that he was to, one, give instruction in botany, which I think is a good idea, being a botanist; two, to superintend farm experiments and improvements; three, to attend, in the winter months, local meetings of farmers; and, four, to build an agricultural department, which later became the college. I'm really grateful for the foundation that was laid by President Bascom and Dean Henry. The world has changed a lot since 1880 when Henry was hired, but these duties remain relevant today and remain part of what we do. My colleagues in the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences here at UW Madison take our partnership with the state and its farmers and its citizens very seriously. We heard a little bit about Babcock's buttermilk fat test too. More recently, we've had many breakthroughs in crop breeding and animal genetics and nutrient management and many more areas. We still rely on farmers to help us identify challenges for our research efforts and to support on farm research. I guess we frequently refer to what we do as an embodiment of the Wisconsin Idea, but it's also a really good way to do science, and it often generates some pretty good stories, as we'll hear. I'm appreciative for Jerry Apps as an emeritus professor from our college CALS in writing this book and giving us all a chance to celebrate Wisconsin agriculture. At this time, I'd like to introduce my colleague John Shutske, who holds a joint appointment as the Associate Dean for Extension and Outreach in the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences and also as the leader of the Agricultural and Natural Resource Program in UW's Cooperative Extension service. John. (audience applauding) Good afternoon, everybody. I can assure you that in about 90 seconds we will get Jerry up here to the podium. As Kate said, I'm John Shutske. I'm with the College of Ag and Life Sciences and also with Cooperative Extension. I was asked several months ago, I was thrilled to be able to introduce Jerry. More than a year ago, it was probably close to two years ago, I had a chance to review the manuscript, and Jerry's book,

Wisconsin Agriculture

A History, I truly must say, Jerry, it turned out beautifully. And it's just an amazing piece of work. I also want to recognize in that process the Wisconsin Historical Society Press because it is really a piece of fine art. When I joined the college and Extension back in 2008, two different people sent me the book, I have a copy of it up here,

The People Came First

A History of Wisconsin Cooperative Extension, which Jerry published in 2002. And this work, more than any other work that I read as I prepared to come here, really helped prepare me to come to Wisconsin from my work in Minnesota. So I truly do appreciate that. I was asked as part of my remarks to just talk a little bit about Cooperative Extension. Through jointly funded positions at places like UW Madison, Platteville, River Falls, and Stevens Point, we leveraged the resources that come from faculty and other campus-based experts to provide education, applied research, and an array of support through our agents working in our 72 county offices. This partnership provides all Wisconsin communities access to our great university system, and we also help to support our $88 billion agricultural industry. Back to Jerry. I did give him a call, or we emailed a couple of days ago. And there's lots of stuff about Jerry on the web. It's pretty amazing. He's got quite a biography. As an author and historian, Jerry understands the role of managing and facilitating change is really what Extension and the college works to do better than any person who I know. Jerry was born and raised near Wild Rose, Wisconsin, which is in Waushara County, in 1934. When I talked with Jerry to get a little bit more insider information,

he told me

"We had no electricity in my house "until I was in eighth grade. "We milked 14 cows by hand. "We had no indoor plumbing, "and we heated our house with two wood stoves."

He also told me

"I attended a one-room "country school for eight years, "graduated from Wild Rose High School in 1951." And he received a one semester paid scholarship to attend UW Madison where he enrolled in the College of Agriculture. He was very precise about this. He said, "The scholarship that covered "my tuition was for $63.50." (laughing) Jerry went on to have a long and highly productive career with the University of Wisconsin. He is a professor emeritus, as we mentioned earlier. He is an author of more than 40 books, many of which cover history and rural living. In 2010, Jerry received the Distinguished Services Award from the College of Ag and Life Sciences. He has also been named a fellow by the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters in 2012. And, to further demonstrate his commitment to Cooperative Extension and our state's culture and tradition, he was also named to the Wisconsin 4-H Hall of Fame back in 2014. I must say, in conclusion before I welcome Jerry up, Jerry up to the podium, Jerry understands more than any person in the world the forces that shaped Wisconsin agriculture over many millennia, and he's helped the industry that we all serve to become one today that enhances our economy, our families, our culture, and our communities. Jerry, you truly are a treasure to our great state, and we are thrilled to have you here to speak today. Please help me welcome to the podium Dr. and Professor Jerry Apps. (audience applauding) Thank you so very much for those kind words. It's beginning to sound like a funeral. (Jerry and audience laughing) But I'm more than pleased to see so many of you here and more than pleased to share a few thoughts from this book on the history of Wisconsin agriculture. As Ben Brancel suggested, I really, when I began working on this project, I really discovered that it would probably take 10 volumes to write the history of Wisconsin agriculture. And I also, though, was encouraged that in 1922 a one-volume history was written, and that person at that time indicated that there are more pages to be written, and I would say the same thing today. There are more pages to be written about Wisconsin's agricultural history. So, I'm going to share a few of the illustrations that are in the book and a few thoughts along the way. Now, don't run for the door when I tell you to understand Wisconsin agriculture, we've got to start with glacial history. And that sounds like a stretch perhaps, but it is vitally important because 20,000 years ago the last great glacier came roaring down into Wisconsin from Hudson's Bay up in Canada, and it created the soils that we have, the rivers that we know, the lakes that are here, and in central Wisconsin where I grew up, right on the terminal moraine, which is where the glacier stopped, this is my home country right there. And I didn't know it at the time, but one of the gifts that that glacier left for all of us in the glaciated areas of the state were stones. Big stones, little stones, round stones, all size of stones. Did any of you in this audience have that wonderful opportunity to pick stones? More people than I ever thought. And how many of you really enjoyed picking stones? (audience laughing) And how many of you left the farm because of the stones? (audience laughing) That's one of the reasons. I still have a farm a couple of miles just south, still on the terminal moraine, and I take people on tour there every so often. I have 60 acres of woods that was never ever cultivated. And in that 60 acres of woods I have stones, huge stones, some as large as Volkswagens, that have sat there for 10,000 years because that's when the last glacier receded. And when that glacier receded, it left, well, it left behind not only stones but the rivers and the lakes, and it also created, you'll notice Waushara County listed there, my home county, just to the west, that kind of a bluish area, that was Glacial Lake Wisconsin, a huge body of water that was there when the glacier melted. And that now is one of our major vegetable producing areas in the state. And when I was a kid growing up on a farm just a little bit east of that old Glacial Lake Wisconsin, people said that you could buy that land for about 10 bucks an acre, and if you bought 40 acres they made you take 40 more. And, interestingly today, that's some of the most valuable land that we have. This thing is jumping ahead on me. I must be pushing the wrong button. Electronics and technology are something I'm trying to get used to. Once the glacier began receding, we saw an influx of Native Americans. And so I have a whole history in here of Native American agriculture. Our first farmers really were the Native Americans. And we think of them as hunters and gatherers, and that's true, but they also grew crops and they settled in one place. And so for several thousand years, we kind find all kinds of evidence of the kinds of agriculture that the Native Americans carried out. It was in 1634 that Nicolet landed just north of Green Bay. The first white person, so to speak, to set foot in what became Wisconsin, and there we saw the beginning of the fur trading industry in the state. And that went on for, well, probably a couple hundred years, and there wasn't a whole lot of farming. These French traders, they weren't that much interested in farming. They were interested in the furs and selling them in Europe. And then we saw the development of Prairie du Chien and Green Bay, Green Bay the oldest city in the state and Prairie du Chien the second oldest, and a fascinating thing that one learns from these fur traders is that the Fox River and the Wisconsin River with the portage, where now the city of Portage is, that became the super highway of the day. And so that saw the development of these two cities. By the 1820s, the lead miners began coming into southwestern Wisconsin, Platteville and Dodgeville and Mineral Point and those places. And here we see a picture of some lead miners who'd come up the Mississippi River in the 1820s. Many of them, once the mines, the lead mines, died, they continued to farm, and we can find all kinds of relatives of the early lead miners in southwestern Wisconsin. I find this map absolutely fascinating because the Native Americans had a whole different idea of land use. Their idea was not to own it, but that it belonged to everyone. And, of course, when the US government began negotiating treaties with the Indians, immediately the land was surveyed so that it could be sold. A buck and a quarter an acre. And this is the map of the Wisconsin territory. We became a territory in 1836. In 1838, and notice still that the Fox-Wisconsin River still defines pretty much what was Wisconsin. That southeastern part was surveyed by 1838, and that's where the early settlements were. And one of the things that Wisconsin, because we're a little bit of the beaten track, we're a little bit north and we're not on the main drag, so to speak, from east to west, Wisconsin put together what's called the Immigrant's Handbook in 1851. And the idea of the Immigrant's Handbook was to bring into Wisconsin settlers, and it was very effective. But prior, and this is an important point in our history, prior to the immigrants coming in large numbers, we saw Yankees, folks from New England and primarily from upstate New York, coming into Wisconsin. And these people, most of them were farmers, had been dairy farmers in New York, and they came here not to raise cows but to grow wheat. And that's a very important point to keep in mind as I go along. So, we've got the New Yorkers here, and now the immigrants, Germans first, then Norwegians, and by 1900 the Irish, they were third, and after 1900 the Poles. I always check. How many of you in the audience are of German background? And how many of Norwegian background? And how many of Irish background? And how many don't want me to know what your background? (audience laughing) Well, by the 1890s, when Wisconsin, southern Wisconsin, from a line about from, oh, Green Bay somewhere between Eau Claire and La Crosse today south, was wheat, the north was logging. And by the 1890s, we had logging camps all across the north. And how would you like to worked in a camp like that? That's a great picture. It looks like and it was terrifically hard, dangerous work. And they cut everything. And the north became known as the great cutover. Later, much of it became important in agriculture. And some of the early settlers, oh, they lived a difficult life. And notice here we have the father with his team of oxen and the mother to do it a little bit up close here. People think oxen are just enormous beasts. These are the poorest looking specimens of motive power you could ever find. And notice there must have been a sale on one kind of dress material. Because the whole family has the same kind of a dress. But so people in those days, and it was true when I was a kid, you were proud of your horses and your cows. The horses always got into the picture. They were as important as the family. And notice the house. It's just a poor old house. Well, now, how are we handling all of this wheat that people were planting? It was sowed by hand. It was harvested by hand. That's what's going on here with cradles, a scythe-like device. And the men did the cutting and the women and the kids did the binding of the bundles, forming the bundles. And it was hard work. And some farmers had as much as 50 acres of wheat. It was sowed by hand, harvested by hand, and threshed. And now a little aside, I've written a book on the barns of Wisconsin, and one of our earliest barn types was a three bay threshing barn, which meant it had three sections. And it was a barn designed to house and provide a place for the threshing of wheat. Wheat was stored on either end of that barn, and in the middle was the threshing floor. And when I was still a kid, that's what we called that center part of our old barn, was the threshing floor. And one interesting little aside, the wheat was threshed by wailing on it with a flail or having an old oxen walk across it, and there were big doors on either side of that three bay threshing barn. And the doors, when they were opened, a breeze could blow through so that when the chaff was tossed up into the air it was blown way. And in front of each door, across the bottom was probably a two by six or a two by eight which was called the threshold. And when you go home tonight and open your front door and you cross the threshold, now you know where that word came from. It came from those early three bay threshing barns they were part of our wheat history. But then this character called Cyrus McCormick, a Virginia mechanic and blacksmith, invented a way of cutting wheat that did not require a scythe. This was one of the most ingenious inventions that could come along. And if you want to study the history, which I have, the history of inventions, those early blacksmiths were most creative people because now with horses you could cut the grain with a sickle bar, which was a whole new invention, and, of course, you still had to form the bundles because it was not a binder. It was just a cutter. Well, now we're going to move forward to about right after the Civil War. By the way, in 1860-1861, we were number two in the production of wheat in the United States. A lot of people don't know that. And you fly over southern Wisconsin. and you see all those little ponds, little mill ponds, and that's because of our wheat industry because we, farmers and businessmen, found it more profitable to grind the wheat into flour rather than ship to reap kernels. So there was a lot of flour made in Wisconsin. And each one of those little mill ponds provided water power for a mill. But then, by the 1870s, wheat growing began to fail, and Wisconsin farmers were looking all over the place. What are we going to do? This was a wonderful money making activity. Farmers enjoyed it. They knew how to do it. They now had the equipment for doing it. And then disease came in, insects came in, and, of course, if you plant the same crop on the same field year after year without fertilization, they didn't know about that, then you're going to have reduced yields. So the yields went way down. They started doing other things. Hops. We had, by the 1870s, a tremendous beer industry in this state. We still do. And beer requires, besides good water and we had a lot of that, hops and barley. And so we grew hops. Did we ever grow hops. We became the leading hop growing state in the nation, and then that failed as well by the time we got towards the, well, the late 1880s. And now we move along to tobacco, another alternative crop that was prominent in western and southwestern Wisconsin. And potatoes. My gosh, in central Wisconsin on the central sands where I grew up, potatoes became a wonderfully important alternative crop to wheat. And a quick personal story. When I was a kid back in the '30s and '40s, I'm an old guy, we still planted 20 acres of potatoes by hand with a hand potato planter. We hoed them by hand. If there was nothing else to do, Pa said you can hoe the potatoes. And we had 20 acres and we hoed and we hoed and we hoed. And when it was time to harvest the potatoes, the one-room country school that I attended had a two-week potato vacation. So all of the kids could pick potatoes. And can you imagine in that whole area around western Waushara County every little kid was picking potatoes. And my dad paid, paid me, most kids didn't get paid, I got paid a penny a bushel, if you hustle right along you could pick a hundred bushels which would mean a dollar, and I, after several years of that, earned enough money to buy my first.22 rifle. So, potatoes were very important. They still are to that part of the world. And I need to get back and show you something that I'll bet you didn't know. That we were, by 1915-1917, the second most important producer of industrial hemp in this country. Kentucky was first. Hemp was, hemp gets a bad rap. Everybody thinks it's marijuana. Well, it's a relative but you'd have to smoke a car load of it to get what you'd get out of a glass of beer. Industrial hemp is a wonderful crop. You can make rope from it. You can make clothing from it. It's just a really good fiber. So we had a lot of it all across southern Wisconsin. We grew a lot of hemp, especially two wars, the First and Second World Wars. The Navy demanded a lot of rope, and hemp made wonderful rope. Also, by this time, of course, we had grain binders, and the binders required binding twine, and hemp made good binding twine. We also now began to see diversified farming. Isn't this a wonderful looking farm? There's sheep and there's cattle and, well, I don't know that you'd like to work on that farm, but that's an example of diversified farming where there were several different enterprises going on. I love this picture because by the 1870s we are beginning to see the transition from wheat growing to dairy farming. And these wheat growing farmers, these macho men, had nothing whatever, wanted nothing whatever to do with cattle. Those stinking cows, that's women's work. They should milk them, they should feed them, they should make the cheese in the kitchen and the butter in the kitchen, and that's exactly what was going on. And here, this woman just does like her cow. They get along just fine, apparently. The New Yorkers, the New Yorkers now come back into the picture. And most of you know about William Dempster Hoard. William Dempster Hoard came from New York. He, along with Hiram Smith, there's a building on the campus named after Hiram Smith, Hoard came to his neighbors and said, "Look, I know a way for you to make a living in this state on the farm, and it's not wheat. "It's dairy cows." "Yeah, right. Dairy cows. "Stinking dairy cows." It took the better part of 30 years for Wisconsin farmers, men especially, to work their minds around the idea that it was appropriate for men to have something to do with cattle. It was a gender issue. I think I'm probably the first person, at least I haven't seen anybody else talk about it as a gender issue, but it was that, in my judgment. It just took a while for men to get their minds wrapped around it.

Hoard said things like this

he traveled all over the state. He started Hoard's Dairyman, a magazine which is still in existence. He said something like this,

he said

"Queen cow is forever going "to take the place of king wheat." That was before king corn. (Jerry chuckles) And so now the men, they weren't going to deal with the kitchens. They began building cheese factories. And so we have an influx of cheese factories all around the state. Why cheese factories? Why not just sell the milk straightaway? Our road system was so awful and it was a considerable distance to Chicago and to Minneapolis and to the fluid milk markets, so we made a lot of cheese. We still do. The vast majority of our milk goes into cheese. But this is an early cheese factory. And the early cheese factories were social centers for the farmers. Each day they brought their milk to the cheese factory with the team and the buggy, and they stand around and talked with each other while they're waiting to unload their milk. And now we've got a magnificent building going up

on the University of Wisconsin campus

the UW Dairy Barn, which was built in 1898, and somewhere here I've got what it cost. It was one of those interesting, well, here. It cost, in 1898, $16,000, Dean. $16,000 to build that building. And they sent an Ag engineer to France, I don't know why to France, to find a magnificent example of what a dairy barn should be. And he came back with this. No farmer in this state has built a barn like this. You do not find this barn anywhere. (audience laughing) But as an undergraduate, I started school here in 1951, I had a lot of classes in that building, and it's a wonderful structure. And we saved it a few years ago. It was doomed to be torn down for Campus Drive, and a bunch of us stood up and said, "Hey, that's a part of this state's history "that we must save." And we did. I'm going to say some more about that silo in a little bit. And so the University of Wisconsin had a lot to do with the promotion and the support of agriculture. The university first opened in 1848. It began a land grant institution in 1866. 1862 was the passage of the land grant legislation. And this is a little aside, and, well, I'm going to say it anyway. The University of Wisconsin in 1848 and 1849 and 1850s, and in fact by even the Civil War time, farmers did not see the university as very important. They simply didn't. And the university had a tough time convincing the legislature that it should be granted the land grant. And can you believe that Ripon College was considered at one time to receive the land grant? Wouldn't that have been interesting if the College of Ag was at Ripon College? That'd be a little unusual. Well, it worked out in the right direction, in my biased mind. And so in 1866 we became, the University of Wisconsin had land grant status. First experimental farm that same year. First professor of agriculture was William Daniel, '68, and the farmers institute began in '79. And I need to say a word in underlying the notion of the Wisconsin Idea. From the very early days, the University of Wisconsin, including the College of Ag, saw one of its roles as taking its knowledge to the far corners of the state. And people get confused about the Wisconsin Idea, but it was, and still is, an extremely important part of this great university's mission. The Wisconsin Idea, meaning the knowledge, the new research, the teaching is available not only on the campus but all over the state, and today we would say all over the world because this institution has that kind of a reputation. And a little bit, just a little bit of the importance of ag research in the development of the agricultural history. Professor Russell, pasteurization of milk, TB was on a rage and milk could transmit TB along with a lot of other diseases. Brucellosis was another disease that was transmitted through milk. It's manifested, brucellosis is manifested in something called undulant fever when people get it. And one of our neighbors had it. I know it very well. Pasteurization took care of that. And now back to this silo. To me, the history of, as crazy as it sounds, the history of silos and the history of silage is a very important part of Wisconsin's agricultural history because silage, corn silage in the early days allowed us to have an alternative feed in the wintertime. And, as Hoard said to all of his neighbors and the Germans and all the rest of them, "If you're going to dairy cattle milk in the wintertime, "you're going to have to feed them." And F.H. King, an agricultural engineer, he came up with the idea of our cylindrical silo. The early silos were trench silos underground. And then somebody got the bright idea of standing it on end, they were square but there was a lot of spoilage in the corners. And so they made an eight-sided silo, and there was still a lot of spoilage. Fermentation is how silage develops. It's an anaerobic process. Means there can't be any air. Any air causes molds to form. And so here is one of the very earliest cylindrical silos that Professor King came up with in the 1890s. We had a tough time in this state for farmers to accept silage, corn silage. In fact, the Farm Journal magazine had an editorial that said do not feed silage to your cattle, their teeth will all fall out. (laughing) The cheese factories will not buy your milk, and on and on and how wrong they were. Silage, we're the predominant silage making state in the nation. And don't forget this gentleman, after whom the ice cream that you're going to eat a little bit later is named. Stephen Babcock came up with the milk tester. We see an example of it here. And some strange things happen. I have a book on the history of cheesemaking where I go into this in some depth. But prior to Babcock, all kinds of shenanigans were going on. People, farmers would water their milk. I mean, who's going to tell the difference if you add a few quarts of milk to the water? One example, and, of course, a cheesemaker knew the difference because it'd spoil the cheese, but in this particular incident the cheesemaker was dumping this farmer's milk with his team of horses, had forded a little stream and he'd always watered his horses there. Anyway, he arrived at the cheese factory, dumped the milk into a receiving tank, and a fish flopped out. (audience laughing) So, I'll tell ya, Babcock solved that problem because now with the Babcock milk tester you were able to separate the fat from the milk and measure it. I was an ag county agent for a number of years, as John said, and in our office, when I was in Green Lake County, we had an old Babcock tester. The county agents used to do a lot of the milk testing. But that milk tester, and Babcock also did something. He gave that technology to the world. That was kind of a really interesting aside. And then alfalfa, as goofy as that may sound, that was one of our major, major developments on this campus. New varieties of alfalfa. Alfalfa that would stand our harsh winters. And the first course I had at this university in 1951 was a course on forages with an emphasis on alfalfa. And the instructor happened to be LF Graber. And Professor Graber said to me, "I want all of you students, "if there's nothing else that you take away from this class, "I want you to remember the Latin name for alfalfa." How many of you know the Latin name for alfalfa? Ah-ha. What is it? -

Woman

on the University of Wisconsin campus

Medicago sativa. Medicago sativa. I've remembered that to this day. And I know lots of things like that. That's about how I know German, too. So I run around saying, "How many of you know about Medicago sativa?" Like, who cares? But alfalfa was really, really important, and we developed a lot of it here on campus. Now, this is another story. You see that mouse? You see that mouse? (laughs) (audience laughing) Thanks to my son-in-law, he's good at developing these things. But Karl Paul Link, and I have that whole story in my book, he, along with his graduate students, developed Warfarin. And you know what Warfarin stands for? Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation. And Karl Paul Link came up with something that some place I read recently I think it's the second most important money maker for WARF today. It's used now not only in rat poison and mouse poison, but anybody with heart problems, Coumadin is a derivative of Warfarin. So it's a great story, and there are a lot of others. See that guy coming in right there? That was the first county agent in Wisconsin. And what county do you think the first county agent was in? Anybody have a guess? You should know this, John. (laughs) Oneida County. Way up north. That cutover area. And there he is. E.L. Luther with his Model T, and he also had a motorcycle that he tooled around. Well, the educational efforts of the UW were several. The farm short course actually began before the College of Ag in 1885, College of Ag in 1889, Extension service in 1908, first county ag agent in 1912. Here was one of the very best examples of the Wisconsin Idea when the Extension service was organized. And I spent five years as an Extension agent, so I know firsthand how it worked and the importance of it. But it's taking the research information from the university out to the people and not only sharing it with them but showing them and helping them and telling them stories about others who have used it and so on. So, the UW had a lot to do. Well, what was early dairy farming like? How would you have liked to live on this dairy farm? Now, those, Ellsworth, those are the cows that you ought to really study, that group right there. She's milking the cow out in the barnyard. I mean, that milk has got to have been really of high quality coming out of that farm. And then we have, oh my son-in-law had to have a barn raising that actually rose. But we began now seeing the development of these magnificent barns. Some 250,000 of these barns. I have a book just on barns of Wisconsin. And OSHA would have been so pleased to see this picture. Because this is the day of the barn raising. Any of you attend a barn raising? I did when I was a kid. And a barn raising was a wonderful social event for the community. Not only was it a way for the farmer to celebrate the putting together of all of the pieces of his barn, but it also got all the women came and they had lots to eat and it was one of many social events. Agriculture and rural communities had all kinds of these social events, and the barn raising was one of them. And we had a lot of round barns. Vernon County, Wisconsin, Viroqua, Westby, that part of the state for many years, and I think it's still true, was the leading county in the nation in the number of round barns. And I have a whole story about round barns in the book that you can read about. How many of you know, how many of you rake cranberries by hand? Let's check that. The first job I had when I graduated from the University of Wisconsin, it was the Korean War and I was supposed to go to the Army and so nobody would hire me and so I raked cranberries. And that's exactly how we did it. And the cranberry industry started in this state in the 1860s in my home county in Waushara, and then it moved over to Wood County, Wisconsin Rapids, and then it's over many, many counties in the state now. We're the premiere producer of cranberries in the nation. Raking cranberries was the most miserable job in the world. Let the truth be known. And the fellow at the lead set the pace. We all worked in a conga line, and we'd like to drown him. We're working in water up to our knees in October and early November raking cranberries by hand. That's how it's done today. A whole lot easier. And then we are a major producer of canning peas, and we have been for a very long time. And it's the canning industry started in a kitchen in a hotel in Manitowoc, and I have that story in the book as well. And we had truck farming. That doesn't look like much of a truck, but that's what it was in the early days when farmers in Racine County, Kenosha County loaded up their produce and took it to the grocery stores in that area. And these are tomatoes that they're hauling. Now we come back to the central sands, that area that I mentioned before which was old Glacial Lake Wisconsin. And with the Second World War and the development of aluminum, we also saw the development of irrigation because now the irrigation pipes could be lighter and the technology of using irrigation became more widely known. The experiment station up at Hancock did a lot of work with irrigation. It still does. And so this is a very, it's also very controversial, by the way, getting more so because water, I've just finished writing a book about water, come out in a year or so, is going to be one of our big issues. There's no question about it. And here we have what? Where are our ginseng lovers? This is ginseng, and we're a major producer of ginseng. And we also are a major producer of mink pelts, and fur farming is a part of Wisconsin agriculture that many people are not so much aware of. And cherry production up in Door County. I had a chance to interview and spend a half a day with a cherry grower right at harvest time. And I can remember when I was younger we used to pick cherries by hand. Now there's a big machine that comes along, grabs hold of the tree, shakes the bejeebers out of it, the cherries fall off, and they roll into a water tank, and they go on to the next tree. And they don't spend more than 10-15 seconds at a tree. And I don't know how the trees like that, but it sure gets the work done in a hurry. And would you believe that one of the emerging agricultural pursuits in this state happens to be grape growing and winemaking. In a lot of the areas that grew tobacco, especially over in Vernon County, they are transitioning from tobacco to grapes. And we have wineries everywhere as you travel around this state. And the university is doing a lot of experimentation with grape growing and especially grapes that can stand some of our winters. A lot of problems with grapes making it through the winter. And maple syrup is still a part of what we do and a very important part. And I had to throw this in, but this is my home farm. This is where I grew up. And I was born in that room right there. (audience laughing) And I spent many hours right in there milking these 14 cows. And that silo, I was scared to death to crawl up to the top of that silo. My brother was, he was the one who did that. And there's the old chicken house and there's the granary and there's the... the tractor shed and there was another shed back here and there was the brooder house. And, anyway, that's the whole farm. In the 1930s, I'm working on a book on the Civilian Conservation Corps and their contributions, especially to soil conservation and the development of parks and all that sort of thing. And they were instrumental in working with the Soil Conservation Service, which had just emerged as a separate entity in the 1930s, and we saw strip cropping and terracing and all of that sort of thing. Especially in the hill country over in the driftless area where farmers have been plowing up and down the hill and losing all kinds of soil to erosion. So that became an important part, and the university had a lot to do with that during the '30s. And then one of the dumbest things in the world is that we got in such a row over oleo margarine in this state. I mean, we were just beside ourselves with oleo margarine and how dreadful it was. And we had the oleo wars they were called, and people were sneaking, the whole thing was that you couldn't buy colored oleo. You could buy white oleo, and you had to mix it up with some coloring. Some of you will remember that. So what did people do? They snuck down into Illinois and over into Iowa and Minnesota, and they brought back illegal, illegal yellow oleo margarine. Colored oleo margarine. And that went on for a long time, I don't have this in the book because I can't really verify it, but it's a wonderful story. I'm going to share it anyway. One of our elite legislators claimed that he, in a blindfold test, could tell the difference between oleo margarine and butter. And so they blindfolded him and they set him down in front of oleo and butter and he tried each one. And he picked out oleo as the best, as butter. He screwed it up. Come to find out, as the story goes, he had heart problems and his wife, without telling him... (audience laughing) Had switched oleo for butter. So it was an embarrassing moment. (audience laughing) I have a couple of chapters that deal with agriculture today, and with a little bit of where we're headed. And organic farming is becoming very important in this state. We have Organic Valley, which is one of the largest cooperatives, organic cooperatives in the country, operating out of La Farge. We have drones. You've seen them in the news all the time. Drones are becoming more and more important to agriculture because they could inspect the fields without having to personally walk to inspect the crops. And we have GMOs, the genetically modified seeds, corn and soybeans in particular. And then the dairy industry, obviously, has not stood still. It has changed and changed dramatically. Remember that shot I shared of this guy milking his cows out in the barnyard? Well, here's a more modern day dairy barn from the outside, and that's how it looks on the inside. And we have quite a few of these in this state. One of our largest dairy herds is in Rosendale, and they have 8,000 cows. Compare that to 14 that we milked by hand when I was a kid. And we make now some 600 different kinds of cheese. The artisan cheese business has just blossomed, and the UW ag school has had a lot to do with that, developing new cheese varieties. We're doing very well with cheese in this state. And just a little bit of, you've got to watch these cows come into place now. (audience laughing) This is what we looked like last year. It's changed some, a little bit.

The number of dairy farms last year

10,800. I think we're a little less than 10,000 now.

Number of dairy cows

1.27 million. Total milk production, second to California. This is an editorial comment. California is about its fourth year now of a severe drought, and my guess now is in about a year or two we're going to rest away from them the milk production because it takes a lot of water to have a large dairy herd, and they are lacking in water. The average number of cows per farm is 117. The seven kind of goes around the corner there. And total cheese production,

people don't believe this

2.8 billion pounds of cheese come out of this state. That is a lot of cheese. And a quiz for you all. What's the most popular kind of cheese that's made these days? Do I hear cheddar? If I hear cheddar, you're wrong. (audience laughing) It's mozzarella. The pizza industry has had a fantastic influence on the cheese industry. And when I was, again, when I was, well, right after the Second World War when I was listening to the soldiers coming back, especially those from Italy, and they were proclaiming the virtues of this wonderful new thing they were eating. It was called a pizza pie. And it had on it tomatoes and cheese, and my mother said, "That's no pie. Who would eat that for a pie?" Well, look what's happened with the cheese industry. And where are we now in our agriculture in 2015? Number one in cheese production, number one in corn for silage, number one in cranberries, mink pelts, snap beans, carrots for processing, and milk goats. We have a bunch of milk goats in this state. And we're number two in milk production, oats, milk cows, potatoes, second, I can't see this thing. Third, potatoes, sweetcorn, green peas, and then Christmas trees, cucumbers, and mint for oil is on the bottom. I want to end with this shot because it's, to me that is a picture of Wisconsin agriculture. It's maybe traditional. I don't see, well, I do some larger buildings. But it shows off the importance of various crops and it shows off the importance of strip cropping and it's just a wonderful thing to look at. A few years ago, a study was done with Chicago people coming into Wisconsin. And they asked them, why do you like to come into Wisconsin? And they had this little ranking of things. And people expected it would be Wisconsin Dells and the water parks, that would be the number one reason. Well, it wasn't. The number one reason was the opportunity to see farms, to see alfalfa growing, to see farm buildings, to see the beauty that's a part of our agriculture. I've never forgotten that. That's very important. We always think of the economics of agriculture, and that's important. But we should also think there's an aesthetic to agriculture. There's an inherent beauty in agriculture. And with that, I'm going to close, and thank you all so very much for coming and learning perhaps a little more about what Wisconsin's agricultural history is all about. And we've just scratched the surface. Thanks so much. (audience applauding)