Wisconsin Public Television

Transcript For: “In Wisconsin” #640

Original Air Date: Thursday, July 31, 2008

Patty Loew:

Hello, everyone. And welcome to “In Wisconsin.” I’m Patty Loew. This week meet the Spring Green actor who is immersed in drama on and off the stage. Discover why record high crop prices may come with an environmental cost, and hit the track at top speed, sorry, no brakes allowed. We’ll also investigate the mysterious disappearance of honeybees from our fields and gardens “In Wisconsin.”

Announcer:

Major funding for “In Wisconsin” is provided by the people of Alliant Energy, who bring safe, reliable and environmentally friendly energy to keep homes, neighborhoods and life in Wisconsin running smoothly. Alliant Energy, offering energy-saving ideas on the web. UW Health, providing specialty and primary care for all ages throughout Wisconsin. Information on UW Health physicians and clinics and on University of Wisconsin Hospital is available on the web. UW Health, healthcare for the greater good. And by the Animal Dental Center of Milwaukee and Oshkosh. A veterinary specialist working with pet owners and family veterinarians throughout Wisconsin, providing care for oral disease and dental problems of small companion animals.

Loew:

It may be difficult to believe if you personally are not living it, but there are still some areas in the state that are underwater as a result of June’s flood disaster. Spring Green is one of those areas. Andy Soth reports that for one actor from the American Players Theater, life as of late has been one big drama.

APT Actor:

I didn’t hear you pa, I was off in another world.

APT Actor:

That will wake him up.

Andy Soth:

It’s a Tuesday night performance of “Ah, Wilderness” by Eugene O’Neill and it’s sold out. That comes as a great relief to members of American Players Theater who worried that people would stay away because of reporting of floods in the area. In fact, only a few homes remain flooded. But one of them belongs to a cast member in tonight’s show, Sarah Day.

Sarah Day:

There was a huge storm and the water went up about 2 1/2 feet into my house.

Soth:

That high watermark remains on the walls, and the experience has left its own impression on Day.

Day:

It was startling, just startling. It was kind of hurtful when you realize that attachment that you have to a home.

Soth:

But Day has also realized the attachment she has to her fellow actors and crew members.

Day:

Ive learned that I have a lot of great friends. Oh, shoot. And that’s been a great lesson.

Day:

Maybe it is to me. Or it was once.

Brenda DeVita:

Sarah is one of the most graceful human beings. She’s always been very self-sufficient. I mean, to ask for help is not something that she excels at. And this was just beyond her and her willingness to surrender to the situation and take people’s help and for the first time in her life be the person everyone had to help, she just couldn’t have been more gracious about all that.

Soth:

So her colleagues, actors and set builders and costumers didn’t hesitate to play a supporting role rushing to fill sandbags not only for Day’s home but other Spring Green houses.

DeVita:

That night that the company, I mean everybody including our directors, 60- year-old directors, went to the shelter to fill sandbags and because everyone just wanted to try to help. The people that work here for the season are from Chicago or Milwaukee or from out of town. They love this place like it’s their home and they love Sarah.

Soth:

Eventually it became clear that sandbags were not enough.

Bill Duwell:

I’m not sure who made that call to get a truck over there to get stuff out of the house. That was like a whole new shift of people that went over there and did that. We were all in the middle of getting shows ready to go.

Soth:

The phrase the show must go on sounds like a hollow clich until you really mean it.

DeVita:

The show must go on is not a clich, it’s actually the truth. 1100 people will show up to see it and you have to have a play to put on stage.

Soth:

For Sarah Day that play was “The Desert Queen,” a world premier performance of a one woman show.

DeVita:

A lot of people would have said I need to stop, I need to quit my job, I need to move on and take care of my life and my family and I can’t do this. That wasn’t even a question for her. She didn’t even consider that, I don’t think.

Soth:

Did it ever occur to you just to think I have way too much stuff to deal with? Can we put this on hold or–

Day:

Well — no, it never, no. It’s a funny thing. One of the great things about APT is that quitting is not really an option in an wonderful, wonderful way. And quite honestly the show was sold out and I had every intention of wanting to make sure that the people who wanted to buy a ticket back in March were going to be able to see the play.

DeVita:

You couldn’t come up with a harder thing to do than to be on stage alone for an hour and a half engaged for real, authentic, know your lines. She was in the middle of the hardest rehearsal process of her life and I really believe it’s the best work shes done I think in her life. So that really speaks to who she is.

Soth:

Her one woman show is over now, but Day has parts in other plays like Ah, Wilderness. She’s living in the guest room of the company’s stage manager with her belongings stored in a garage. Like all the people whos homes remain flooded in the Spring Green area, the future is unclear.

Day:

I’m not sure. I’m not sure what will actually happen. But there have been meetings with FEMA and with other agencies that are trying to help the people that are in the same position that I am.

Day:

Things like this come up and we think there is no hope.

Soth:

Despite the losses of the flood, Sarah Day and her colleagues have all gained a new perspective.

DeVita:

I love to repeat this line. She said it in a meeting. She said I realized I lost my house. I didn’t lose my home because this place is my home.

Day:

I’m very lucky though that I have a place to be and friends who are helping me through this time.

APT Actor:

How well you’ve stood it.

Loew:

Well, Sarah Day still isn’t sure what will happen with her home. FEMA has begun to perform inspections of the flooded houses around Spring Green. On a sadder note, throughout this time that Day has been dealing with her flooded home, she’s also been tending to her ailing father and we’re sad to report that Roland Day, a former Chief Justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court passed away earlier this week. Our condolences go out to the Day family.

Loew:

Flood-related damage has created hard times for many state businesses. In agriculture the Secretary of the USDA calls it a crisis situation that calls for drastic action. That action, allowing farmers to graze animals on land that had been set aside as part of the so-called Conservation Reserve Program. As Frederica Freyberg reports, this comes at a time when farmers across the country and here in Wisconsin were pulling out of the conservation program because government payments could not compete with the record high market for crops like corn and soybeans.

Frederica Freyberg:

This 200 acres in Dane County is planted this year in crops that are yielding all-time high prices.

Beuhla Uren:

He’s planting corn, I think. And soybeans.

Freyberg:

Beuhla Uren owns the land. Land that hasn’t bared its rich soil to seeding in 20 years.

Uren:

Yes, all this was in the CRP.

Freyberg:

Because when Uren and her husband retired from farming, they enrolled their acreage in the Conservation Reserve Program or CRP. Essentially the federal program pays farmers to idle land, originally it was designed to preserve crop prices but today serves to preserve soil, water and wildlife habitat.

Uren:

We didn’t have to do anything and still get paid so it was really — it was really wonderful.

Freyberg:

Over those 20 years in the program, the Uren’s farm became a prairie.

Freyberg:

How high was that grass when you would come out here?

Uren:

Oh, it was knee high or better. It was broam grass and archer grass and sweet clover, there were wildflowers and bluegrass.

Freyberg:

So why this year did you decide not to re-enroll?

Uren:

Because they didn’t pay us as much per acre. They kept cutting it — the amount we got every year and so my son said we can make more by cropping it.

Freyberg:

This year the family rented the land to their neighbor.

Garry Sutter:

We were lucky because it’s in our neighborhood. We’re very appreciative of being able to rent this.

Freyberg:

Is it hard to come by land?

Sutter:

Now with the price of commodities up everybody and their uncle is trying to rent some more.

Freyberg:

Trying to rent land to plant or planting their own because big demand in exports and for ethanol are pushing prices for crops like soybeans and corn ever higher. The incentive to idle the land just isn’t there. According to the US Ag Department about half of Wisconsin farmers who had their land in conservation reserve in prior years have decided not to re-enroll. That’s some 200,000 acres across the state pulled out of conservation acres. Iowa County farmer Laverne Hensen is among those who pulled some of his acreage out of CRP. And whats it in now?

Laverne Hensen:

It’s in corn crop this year. And as you can see its on its way up.

Freyberg:

Obvriously, it’s a better economic choice to put this in corn particularly now than to leave it idle.

Hensen:

I believe that’s true and I think a lot of the farmers in the area have done that.

Freyberg:

For his part, Hensen believes he can still be a good steward of his farmland. He says he planted grassways along a stream bank on his property to prevent runoff from his fields. And he plants lots of trees, 250,000 of them so far. But the essence of the conservation program in this area is in creating grasslands trying to recreate native prairies that once covered these rolling hills.

Dave Sample:

I’m looking for an eastern meadowlark over here that’s calling. This is one of the birds that is a very abundant nester in CRP grasslands.

Freyberg:

Grassland Biologist Dave Sample calls the preserved prairies an important habitat for birds like meadowlarks, bobolinks, henslow sparrows and even raptors.

Sample:

A program like the conservation reserve which boosted our grassland acreage to 700,000 additional acres at its peak provided significant habitat for these declining grassland bird species. With the habitats now starting to come out, we don’t know what the implications will be for those breeding birds.

Freyberg:

And those breeding birds get a lot of attention from experts because of their fragile populations. In this field of conservation reserve land in Iowa County, DNR and university researchers have 22 cameras set up to monitor nesting birds and offspring, capturing their every move through a live lens and recorder. The idea is to find out in what conditions their populations grow. But even this research is getting crowded out by crops.

Kevin Ellison:

Basically we’ve had to kind of find more sites because some of the landowners that we were working on did switch to producing corn.

Ellison:

We were creating a surrogate habitat after removing their native habitat, theyre finally adapting to using this habitat, and then we’re kind of pulling the rug out from under them by removing the surrogate habitat we’ve created.

Scott Hull:

Any time you take hundreds of thousands of acres off the landscape in a year or two it is going to have an impact.

Freyberg:

DNR Wildlife Biologist Scott Hull is also the agency’s farm bill expert. The legislation that funds the Conservation Reserve Program. He says losing acreage in that program is also putting another habitat at risk. He fears the population of ringneck pheasant and bob white quail will decline.

Hull:

It’s a big deal for sportsman and for people who rely on the business that sportsmen bring to this state. It is possible if the decline is real and sharp enough that we could see a decline in the number of pheasant hunters in the state overall.

Pheasant Hunter:

Good boy, drop him. Drop, good boy.

Freyberg:

Hull says the latest farm bill does have a clause that says the USDA can boost payments it makes to farmers to idle their land for conservation reserve.

Hull:

We just need to find a happy medium I guess between conservation and price and commodities. Right now there is definitely no happy medium.

Freyberg:

The scales on that happy medium have tipped toward prices for commodities that are much higher than current conservation payments. For landowners and farmers like Beuhla Uren, that means the best economic choice for the land is to plow it and plant it.

Loew:

So far this year according to the USDA, farmers nationwide have pulled 2.2 million acres out of the conservation Reserve Program. Even as more crops are being planted in Wisconsin, there has been a strange disappearance of some of the most important field workers, honeybees. The pollinating insects are crucial to the productivity of food crops, but as Liz Koerner reports, many honeybees seem to be leaving the hive never to return leaving bee keepers searching for answers.

Mary Celley:

Can you smell it? It smells good, huh? Medicinal. Its full of magic.

Liz Koerner:

She’s known as the bee charmer. The products of Mary Celley’s magical ministrations are offered each week at the Dane County Farmer’s Market. Celley has been caring for honey bees for 26 years.

Celley:

You just have to go kind of slow in order not to kill any bees.

Koerner:

Keeping Honey Bees healthy isn’t easy. In the 1980s two different insects made their way into the United States and began attacking the bees.

Phil Pellitteri:

We’ve probably lost about half of the honey bees in the United States within the last 30 years if you look at number of colonies.

Koerner:

In the spring of 2007 Wisconsin bee keepers began losing their colonies in a different, very mysterious way.

Liz Meils:

Apparently theyre flying away from their hives and nobody knows what is happening to them after that.

Celley:

See this is a hive that, this is what happens when you go to them. There is nothing here. It could have been it was Queen-less, and I didnt notice it and they just dwindled but a lot of — there was a brood. They are left without these hatching out, see? This is a hive that has absconded, which means they all leave, not just part of them, all of them.

Koerner:

It’s called colony collapse disorder and even though most bees don’t return to the hive, Celley says she’s noticed disturbing behavior near her boxes.

Celley:

This is a behavior I don’t like. That bee is not well. It’s stumbling around. Its disoriented.

Koerner:

Colony collapse disorder was also seen in some southern states back in the fall of 2006.

Celley:

These bees are just worn out, tattered and torn.

Koerner:

Resulting in losses of up to 90% of the hives.

Pellitteri:

There is indications that this has been going on for 20 years or more. In fact, there are some people that suggest that they have seen similar things even in the 1890s.

Koerner:

As with any good mystery there are many theories floating around.

Pellitteri:

One of the theories it’s almost as if the bees become weakened, their immune system becomes weakened and then they become susceptible to other usually not serious infections.

Woman:

It could be a fungal disease, it could be a new insect, bacterial or maybe just stress related.

Koerner:

Another theory points to a newer class of pesticides called neonicotinoids that work systemically.

Pellitteri:

In some experiments sub-lethal dosages of those have caused behavioral changes in the bees. It’s interesting that France has banned the use of this in many areas in uses because of bee losses in France and the bee keepers petitioned to take these chemicals away. The chemicals are gone and they’re experiencing the same problems.

Koerner:

Some feel the bees are suffering the effects of traveling to work. They pollinate more than 130 crops in the United States including cranberries in Wisconsin. The bees are sent from crop to crop across the country on semis, which may stress their immune systems. Chris Werner runs a business that provides respite for bees in their off season. The bees in his care spent the first six months of the year working in one state after another starting in California.

Chris Werner:

Moving bees is definitely a factor in colony collapse. Whether or not you could say that it was moving bees that caused all these colonies to collapse, no, I don’t think you can do that. I think that there are a number of factors, some of which are environmental that the bee keeper has no control over and some of which we have a great deal of control over. How we move the bees and when we move the bees. We leave them enough space that they have adequate food stores.

Koerner:

To date no one has been able to definitively prove any of these theories but researchers across the country have been working hard to solve the mystery of Colony Collapse Disorder. Now a new study seems to provide an important clue. Results published in September 2007 on the Journal of Science’s website said one organism Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus of Bees was strongly correlated with Colony Collapse Disorder. The study points to bees that were imported from Australia as a possible source of the virus. The researchers are continuing their work trying to find out whether the virus might cause colony collapse by itself or in combination with other pathogens and stresses. Meanwhile bee keepers like Werner and Celley are doing everything they can to keep their bees healthy.

Celley:

I don’t think they’re leaving today. The bees sound happy.

Loew:

According to the USDA there were enough honeybees nationally to provide all the pollination needed in 2007. Also reports of Colony Collapse Disorder did not increase from 2006 to 2007.

Loew:

Our final report this week takes us to a spot in Kenosha that was once the site of regular fist pumping, heart thumping action. Our former student intern Emily Roloff found that while the crowds are a little thinner, people still travel to Kenosha for a chance to spin their wheels.

Tim Kemen:

Ready? Set, go.

Loew:

There is a little-known secret tucked away between Milwaukee and Chicago. A relic of the past that still gets hearts racing.

Kemen:

Everything on Monday night is moms and dads. There are grandfathers down here, there are grandfathers that race, their sons race and their grandchildren race.

Bruce Bock:

On Monday nights we pack up the whole family and come down and watch.

Loew:

It’s a family affair at Washington Park. The site of the nation’s oldest operating Velodrome, a Velodrome in a banked track where cyclists race fixed gear bikes. Those are bikes with only one gear and no brakes. When the track was built in 1927, cyclists were the country’s highest paid athletes. The Kenosha Velodrome drew in crowds of up to 29,000 people. Once a bicycling mecca, this track is now a quieter place. While the pros race on Tuesday nights throughout the summer, anyone who is willing and able is allowed to race in the citizen stock races Monday nights.

Kemen:

We’ve been running this program for about 25 years now and it’s to get little kids starting — we’ve had kids as young as 18 months old come out on their fire truck and race around the warm-up circle over there.

Bock:

It’s part of our mission to not only allow older athletes who are — have full-time careers to continue to be competitive and race in cycling but to also get some of the future generations into the sport, so the younger kids.

Loew:

Tim Kemen and his wife spend their free time Monday nights from May through August setting up and running these races for all ages.

Kemen:

We view this as teaching kids about a life sport, not — I try not to be super competitive about things. This is a low key thing we do on Monday night. We don’t have a lot of rules and regulations and things like that for people to complain about. It’s for fun.

Loew:

While the younger generations develop a passion for the Velodrome, those who were around during the track’s golden days reflect on what a night at the Kenosha races used to look like.

Carl Wilkins:

They used to have over 100 riders and some of the halftime entertainment was boxing. They used to close off the road sometimes during national championships and put bleachers up on the road.

Loew:

Although attendance may have dropped, the most important element in Velodrome racing has remained. The simplicity of the fixed gear bicycle. In fact, at some times it’s the older bikes the riders seek out.

Bock:

My middle son is riding a bike that’s 33 years old. It’s an older French bicycle.

Loew:

The idea of a bike with no brakes may scare some people but to those who ride, the lack of brakes is an important element of Velodrome racing.

Michael Peterman:

It’s lighter and some riders feel that on a track this size it’s a disadvantage. Other riders feel that it’s sort of a mind game. Theres one gear and you and the track.

Loew:

Through the years from hometown heroes of the past like cyclists Bob Pfarr, Bobby Thomas and Corky Thomas to riders of today that have gone on to win Olympic Medals, the race has remained unchanged.

Kemen:

Riders ready, set, go.

Loew:

But for riders who come out to enjoy some laps on the track on a hot summer night it’s not all about winning the gold.

Emma Ives:

You meet friends when you start racing and then when you — then when you like go for your second week of racing you might go like up to your competition and say hey, that was a great week that you raced last week.

Loew:

There is still time to check out the bike races yourself. The racing season at Washington Park Velodrome continues through August. More details including the race schedule can be found on our website at wpt.org/InWisconsin. And that’s our show for this week. In fact, this is our final program of the season. We’re taking a break in August. But you can look for us again this fall. We’ll be back with all new reports and in high definition. Until then, we leave you with a trip to beautiful Meyers Beach in Bayfield County. For “In Wisconsin” I’m Patty Loew. See you in September.

Announcer:

Major funding for “In Wisconsin” is provided by the people of Alliant Energy, who bring safe, reliable and environmentally friendly energy to keep homes, neighborhoods and life in Wisconsin running smoothly. Alliant Energy, offering energy-saving ideas on the web. UW Health, providing specialty and primary care for all ages throughout Wisconsin. Information on UW Health physicians and clinics and on University of Wisconsin Hospital is available on the web. UW Health, healthcare for the greater good. And by the Animal Dental Center of Milwaukee and Oshkosh. A veterinary specialist working with pet owners and family veterinarians throughout Wisconsin, providing care for oral disease and dental problems of small companion animals.