(upbeat music)
- Hello and welcome to In Wisconsin.
I'm Patty Low.
Each week we bring you stories about the people
and issues in our state.
This week, catch a ride with the Dodgeville program
that keeps drunk drivers off the road.
Discover why some state farmers are opening
their barn doors to strangers and meet a couple of the dreams
of starting up a dairy farm even as many others
are going under.
You'll find out later in the program
if they achieve their dream.
Plus, we'll take you for a winter walk
near an undisturbed wilderness lake in Wisconsin.
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- Major funding for In Wisconsin is provided
by the people of Alliance Energy,
who bring safe, reliable, and environmentally friendly energy
to keep homes, neighborhoods, and life in Wisconsin
running smoothly.
Alliance Energy, offering energy-saving ideas on the web.
(upbeat music)
Governor Jim Doyle released his state budget proposal
earlier this week, promoting it as a blueprint
to freeze property taxes and at the same time,
increase funding for education.
It remains to be seen what the Republican-controlled
legislature will do with the Democratic Governor's budget.
But for now, some of the key elements include limits
on how much local government can raise property taxes.
Restoring two-thirds state funding of public schools,
largely by borrowing from the transportation
and medical malpractice funds.
Continued support of shared revenue,
the money local governments received from the state.
Raising the cost for hunting and fishing licenses,
a 16% increase in transportation funding,
but also increasing car and truck registration
and title transfer fees.
Specifics on these items can be found at our website
at www.org/inwisconsin.
You'll most likely hear in the coming weeks
quite a bit about these items, but those are just a few
of the thousands of points that make up the
2005-2007 biennial budget.
Most of these items fly under the radar.
We wanna make sure that we're looking into items
that you are concerned about.
So let us know if you have a specific budget item
you're interested in, no matter how big or small,
please contact us and we'll do our best to check it out.
You can call us at 1-800-253-1158 or email us
at inwisconsin@wpt.org.
We'll give you this contact information
again later in the program.
But first, as we just told you, the governor is
proposing a 16% increase in funding to the Department
of Transportation.
One of the main jobs of the DOT is to build and maintain roads.
The department also oversees a number of programs
meant to keep roads safe.
Two rural Wisconsin counties are taking part
in one of those programs launched by the DOT.
It's called Road Crew and it's meant to prevent drunk driving.
When people find out how Road Crew works, something,
it sounds a little wacky.
But Frederica Freiberg reports Road Crew works.
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Jamie Rodriguez has been drinking at a bar
in rural Iowa County tonight.
In fact, he's still working on a beer,
but he won't be driving.
He's got to ride.
It's a stretch limousine.
It's a very safe idea.
Even though I'm drinking.
But that's why I'm drinking.
And because I know I can get home safe.
That's music to Iowa County judge William Dyke's ears.
It's me, you're withdrawing your plea of not guilty
and you're about to be found guilty of operating
after revocation and operating while intoxicated
second offense.
Over the years, Judge Dyke's courtroom
has become a revolving door of drunk driving cases.
Did you read this before you signed it, sir?
We weren't really making a great deal of progress
getting the drunks off the road.
That is, until the judge learned of an outside
the box idea from a UW-Madison business prof,
the drink as much as you want and ride in style model.
It's capable of controversy.
It's capable of being misunderstood
because it is counterintuitive.
But when you get to the reality, and that is of the opportunity
it presents to reduce traffic, harm, exposure,
let's try it on.
Professor Michael Rothschild is a leading expert
in social marketing.
It's premise, give people something better
and they'll switch brands.
In this particular case, the competition for is the brand
called I Can Drive Myself Home No Matter How Drunk I Got.
Working with the DOT, Rothschild spent a year
sitting in bars talking to guys in the target group.
Men ages 21 to 34.
Because statistically, they cause the most drunk driving
crashes and the people trying to change their behavior
had to understand it first.
And what about the criticism of, isn't this enabling
people to drink?
We talked about that when we did the focus groups
and their comment was, no, not really.
We already drink as much as we can.
We can't really drink more.
You're not allowing us to drink more.
We already drink as much as we can.
We drink until we don't have any money in our billfold.
There are safe ride programs in Wisconsin.
A lot of safe ride programs.
And those programs give people a ride home
at the end of the night, but they don't give people
a ride to the bar.
The guys told us, if you want us to take a ride home with you,
you better give us a ride to the bar
because we're not going to leave our cars behind.
They told us that their vehicles are very precious to them.
And if we want them to ride with us,
we need to come up with a vehicle that's
as good as theirs.
So we asked them what they'd ride in.
They told us something nice.
And they said, by the way, we can smoke in our cars.
So you're going to have to let us smoke in your vehicle.
And by the way, we drink while we're driving.
And you're going to have to let us drink in
your vehicle as well.
After all the input, road crew was born.
On-call rides in super nice vehicles.
It's very nice ride.
The limousine is a lot nicer than my truck.
God, Joe, ride!
In Iowa County, two concerned citizens got it off the ground.
Denny Markline owns an auto body shop and the fleet of limos.
Joanne Munson helped write the grant proposal
for Startup Funding.
They're joined by a rotating group of some
120 volunteer drivers.
Remember, writer Jamie Rodriguez?
He didn't have to dig very deep to pay for his road crew ride.
Because making it cheap was built into the program.
In social marketing, it's known as reducing
barriers to the new brand.
We will pick them up at home if they would like us to.
And we'll take them to the bar or wherever they'd like to go.
And take them back home again for $5.
If a patron drives themselves to the bar and then can't drive,
a call to the road crew gets them a limo ride home and gets
their own car safely home.
Again, $5.
For $10, road crew picks up, takes a person bar hopping all
over the county and home at the end of the night.
But we have used this so many times.
Despite the low fares, the program pays for itself.
That's thanks to volunteer drivers and lots of rides.
Because in Iowa County, road crew has given 9,000 rides since
hitting the streets two and a half years ago.
We found ourselves in the back of the limo a few times too and
so we had to give back, I think.
This has been nice and we have driven probably 200 and plus
some miles and one night, which could be a long night.
But I'd rather be busy than having no calls all when
there's people at driving than they shouldn't be.
You get to meet a lot of different people and
see some of your friends and keep people safe.
D.O.T. officials say follow-up studies show the road crew has
reduced drunk driving crashes and the program has risen
above any initial concerns.
People that are against drinking still see the value of keeping
impaired drivers off the road.
It's kind of nice coming home in class.
State statistics show that since road crews inception,
O.W.I. crashes have been reduced by 17% in the
communities it serves.
A similar program operates in Polk County and the D.O.T.
says it has seed money to give other
communities for starting up road crew programs.
Now again, if you'd like to contact us with state budget
related story ideas, here's our contact information.
Last week we brought you the story of a former
computer programmer who along with his wife
is trying to make it running a dairy farm in Shabuigan County.
Tonight we have part two of our packet series following
up on the progress of students from the 2002 class
of the UW School for Beginning Dairy Farmers.
This week meet a woman trying to restart her family's dairy
farm, one that hasn't seen milking for 15 years.
Patti Laskowski is no stranger to dairy.
She grew up in a farm near Hillsboro, but like
so many Wisconsin farm kids, she didn't see
any future in it.
It wasn't, seemed like it was a way of life that you could
even have and make a living at it.
So I thought, I'm going to go to school and do something else.
But early in 2002, here she was on a farm in Lafayette County
along with several dozen other students who hope to begin
or in Patti Laskowski's case get back into dairying.
The secret to running a profitable family size
dairy in the 21st century to hear the farmers
the class visits tell it is a technique called
rotational grazing.
It's farming the old fashioned way, letting cows graze on grass
instead of feeding production crops such as corn and alfalfa.
It allows farmers to cut operating costs and reduce
the amount of labor involved.
With this, we'd like to support a family and actually
make a living doing it.
After four months of weekly lectures, Laskowski
lays out her business plan for her instructors
and fellow students.
The base year is actually 2004, so that's the year that we're
actually going to be milking cows.
But they have no cows.
Laskowski and her husband, Bill Moran, live in a suburb
of Madison several hours away from her family's farm.
A few weeks after completing the class, they are
in route to Wakashaw County to buy livestock.
Jerry cattle are in short supply, even calves who won't
be ready to milk for two years.
Yes, people want to play don't they?
Patty and Bill locate some purebred jerseys for sale on
Bob Frida's farm near Sussex.
And call me if you got any problem, see because
I don't care if I sold them to you or not to
kill my babies.
Patty and Bill deliver the calves to the Laskowski
family farm near Hillsboro, arriving in a late
spring snow storm.
Well, you're going to be starting a dairy again here, so
it should be, it's kind of like everything comes full
circular, you know.
They have no barn, just a metal machine shut.
They have no place to milk.
So somewhere in here along this wall, we're going to, that's
where we're going to build a little parlor.
So we've got a lot to do yet.
But they have time.
It will be a while before these calves are ready.
We'll meet them next June and then we'll have milk and cows
in March and April of 2004.
We're pretty close right now.
Bill Moron and Patty Laskowski now have 20 cows ready to milk.
And more heifers and bull calves like this
one are arriving daily.
Growing up, you know, the calves were, that was always exciting.
It's a little bit different now because Bill and I are actually
the ones that if the calf needs help, we're there and
we make sure it breathes.
I mean, it's, it's amazing, you know, to have a little life
right into the world, a little fuzzy life.
The milkhouse is exactly where Patty said it would be, but
Bill is still pounding away on it.
The milking parlor is a concrete pit with steps.
When you come in, you, you go down here and then the cows
stand in all about their bags or about yay high.
And that gives you easy access to them.
Ready or not, the cows need to be milked now until
the parlor is complete.
Bill and Patty use a system of buckets
powered by a vacuum hose.
For the first few weeks until the milkhouse is closed in,
they can't even sell the milk.
They can only feed it to the calves.
They have to rely on outside income.
But it's been tossed.
I mean, there's no doubting that.
And it's expensive and daring is not cheap to get into.
I mean, cows are expensive.
Milk in equipment is expensive.
By June, the milkhouse was completed and they could start
shipping the milk to a cheese plant.
And they also completed a house so they could live on the farm.
It's made of logs and looks like it could have
been built a century ago.
Not all goes as planned.
A late season drought forced Bill and Patty to start feeding
sialage earlier than expected.
We had so much feed in May and June.
They were stomping it down because there was so much.
And then all of a sudden, it cut off like a water faucet.
By winter, Bill and Patty head to the barn pushing a daughter,
Violet, in a baby joker.
I thought, well, you know, what do I do with her?
I felt like, you know, after she's born, you know, I'm in
the house taking care of her, Bill comes up and he's
doing all the milking.
And what do we do?
How do we kind of get out of, you know, the
routine that we're in?
Sometimes she goes to the milkhouse.
Sometimes she goes to grandma's.
The couple's plan calls for seasonal daring.
The temperature is well below freezing.
Milking will end in a few weeks and resume in the spring.
The cows will still have to be fed, but not as much.
The milking parlor designed to make milking easier on backs
and knees wasn't finished until the first season of
production was almost done.
The couple struggled through the summer with
the awkward bucket milkers.
There were a lot of times in there when you were milking with
those buckets that I thought I think I got us in
overhead, that's something that we can't get out of.
And it sent chills up my spine because we put all our money
into it and I thought maybe I thought maybe I got us
into something that we were way over our heads.
And even now, you know, it's like the amount of money you
get, I mean, just compared to like working a
regular job, you know?
It's like you could work, I mean, even like a starting job
somewhere and probably make as much, you know, as
you could milking cows.
But things are looking up.
The farms finally been certified, grade A
organic, meaning the milkers a premium price.
Thinking about all those struggles in the mornings
and the summer, we have cows, you know, I don't
know, maybe half a mile away in some of those backpastures.
And I would still rather have that warning commute
than driving 40 minutes to my job that I did
a few years ago.
Even though the equipment is freezing up, the higher price
of milk, the fact that the parlor is finally done and
the new baby have given patio feeling that the farm is going
to be a viable and growing proposition.
The first few weeks when I went back and I just showed up with
her one day and I said, you know, can we help?
You know?
And so we milk now.
Bill and I and we milk together a lot.
And, you know, I just marveled at, you know, Bill, I just
smiled at him and I said, this is so much fun, Bill.
You know, this is so much fun.
I love milking in this parlor with you.
You just met a couple trying to make a go of it with
a new dairy farm business.
But there are many farmers across the state who would say
that couple should be ready for some ongoing tough
financial times.
So tough that producer Laurie Gorman found many
Wisconsin farmers are trying non-traditional
ways to grow the income from their family farm.
Springtime planting, a common scene on the
Wisconsin landscape.
But this farmer is growing a crop of a different sort.
Meet Alan Trinon, fifth generation farmer
and agricultural entrepreneur of sorts.
Good luck in the corn maze.
Don't get too lost.
Have a good time.
There are a lot of ways to have a good time on the
Trinon family farm near Lodai.
You could launch a gourd into the pond.
Catch a hay ride to the pumpkin patch.
We can make a beautiful face right here, Jasmine
when we carve it.
Or there's the big attraction, the corn maze.
This season will be our fourth year for the corn maze.
The maze will be a pirate ship this year.
We add to the corn maze to our operation of our pumpkin patch.
With the corn maze, it's my wife and I.
Two people can run it.
On a slow to medium day, you take their money and get them
a nap telling them to get lost.
That's the number one question.
What if we get lost?
When I tell them we harvest middle of November,
we'll find you that.
The Trinons are part of an emerging trend in
agriculture, ag tourism.
Family farms across the state are opening their barn doors to
the public and plenty of folks are willing to pay for
the chance to walk through a field of corn.
In an area like this where we're not too far from Madison,
land values have been gone up 15-20% a year.
You can't grow corn and beans and make a living at that if
you're paying that kind of price for land.
So farmers are saying our land's valuable, we need to do
something that's more valuable and capture some
more money off of it.
In Sauc County, tourism generates about $700 million
worth of economic activity every year.
We're the number three tourism county in the state.
So we look at $700 million in tourism versus $120 million
from the agricultural economy.
That's why we've really been trying to push for more of those
tourist dollars to be funneled into the farm economy.
It's a dollar for three tries.
For Alan and Angie Trinon capturing some of those
tourism dollars is vital to their ability
to stay on the farm.
On this farm it's a 200 acre farm with a little
more than 100 acres till it.
You cannot support a family on the 100 acres of traditional
crops, corn and soybeans.
If it wasn't for the corn days in the pumpkin patch I would
be working off the farm and Angie would likely
have to work more.
Because we live here on this farm, it's nice that it grows
but you know we don't want to turn it into Disneyland.
And also we promote this as a real farm.
So you know we're not going to pay everything and get scoop up
the manure every hour or two.
Finding a balance between opening their farm to the public
and retaining their privacy can be a challenge for
ag tourism operators.
A lot of farmers, they farm because they like
being their own boss and working by themselves
and they don't want people coming out and telling them
what to do and when you're doing ag tourism you're answering
to your customers.
So the horses names are Mike and Max, Mike and Max are
both Belgian work horses.
There are zoning issues, there are traffic issues, signs, a
lot of things are regulated when you start an operation like
this, bathroom facilities.
You name it.
It isn't just easy money.
You can't just cut some pads through your corn field and put
out a sign and expect everything is going to be great.
But there are some great opportunities too.
Great opportunities also exist in what could be considered
the quieter side of ag tourism.
John and Dorothy Prisky operate the fountain prairie
in infarm in Fall River.
We're in addition to welcoming guests to their restored
1899 Queen Anne home.
They raise a herd of Scottish Highland cattle.
We were attracted to them originally because
since they have all that hair they also don't
need any housing in the winter.
We also found out that their meat is just
excellent and besides being the cutest cows you've
ever seen that's another drawing point for the B&B.
A lot of people like to come and see them.
Raising cattle and running a bed and breakfast may
seem an odd combination.
But for the Prisky's it was the realization of a life goal.
I worked in downtown Madison for about 18 years and one of
our goals was to be home on the farm together.
It always sounded like John was having so much fun here.
I either had to put a stop to that or come home and join it.
I was actually going to be just outside in the farmer
part of the in infarm.
But since we've been open we've had so many interesting
people come that I'm it's like a magnet.
Everybody that comes has a story.
They may come to hear our story but in the meantime
we're hearing their story.
The Prisky's story centers around restoration.
Since buying the property in 1986 they restored not only the
three story 17 room house but also the land.
Taking land that was for many years used for row crops and
turning it back to wetlands and prairie.
You know we are restorers and we try to share what we do.
We don't just do it and then put up a fence and keep people out.
Everything we've done we share it and educate and
at the same time we learn.
A lot of the guests want to get out and see the animals
and have their pictures taken with the animals
and help do chores.
In fact we've had some guests that have beat me off.
Yeah that's what I would just skip and say we've got one
family from Northern Illinois.
The wife is an early riser and she and John did the
chores on a Saturday morning.
Next morning she got up early and showed the other
guests how to do the chores.
That was a lot of fun.
Doing chores, picking produce, tromping through corn fields.
Often the farmers themselves are surprised by the
appeal of ag tourism.
In my generation everyone had a cousin on a farm, a family
member who were cousin our uncle grandpa on a farm and
was exposed to it and today kids don't.
And so running through your corn field is a novel idea.
People are a little more removed from agriculture than they were
a few generations ago but some of them still remember going
to grandpa's farm or an uncle's farm and they either want
to relive that experience for themselves or share it with
their children and sometimes I think they bring their
children under the guise of saying well
we want to show this to the kids but actually they're
coming for themselves.
I still consider it agriculture.
It's agriculture and tourism.
I would consider it educational too.
It's a chance for the trinons to teach people from the city
what it's like to be out on a farm and how corn grows and
how pigs grow and it really takes a special personality and
a special type of person to do this type of work.
So where are y'all from?
It's from Chicago.
And that's our program for this week.
Remember the state's spring primary election
is this coming Tuesday.
Among the offices to be elected is the superintendent
of the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction.
You can find information and interviews with the four
candidates at WisconsinVote.org.
You can also see incumbent Elizabeth Burmester interviewed
on this week's edition of Here and Now.
That's broadcast Friday at 7 p.m.
on Wisconsin Public Television and Sunday
at 11 a.m.
on Milwaukee Public Television.
Here and now we'll also have analysis of Governor
Doyle's budget proposal.
And for now we leave you with a walk near Frog Lake State
Natural Area in Iron County.
For in Wisconsin, I'm Patty Low.
See you next week.
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Major funding for in Wisconsin is provided by the people of a
Lyon energy who bring safe, reliable and environmentally
friendly energy to keep homes, neighborhoods and life in
Wisconsin running smoothly.
Aliant Energy, offering energy saving ideas on the web.
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