(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 witness a highly realistic fake terrorist attack
designed to train Wisconsin's first responders.
Travel back to a simpler time in the paintings
of Door County artist Charles Peterson
and find out how a Bayfield farm family put
a halt to development.
All that plus we'll meet a beauty who is a beast.
We'll also take you on a fall color tour
from the highest natural point in Wisconsin.
- Major funding for In Wisconsin is provided
by the people of a lion's energy who bring safe, reliable and
environmentally friendly energy to keep homes, neighborhoods,
and life in Wisconsin running smoothly.
A lion's 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.
Wisconsin's Technical Colleges, providing local education
for the crucial occupations essential to our communities.
Wisconsin's Technical Colleges, Communities First.
Four years ago, our sense of security changed forever.
It was four years ago that terrorists
brought down the World Trade Center, killing thousands.
Since then, creating Homeland Security has
become a top priority.
The federal government has poured tens of
millions of dollars into new equipment and
training for rescue workers in Wisconsin alone.
But it's not enough to train in a classroom.
First responders need to practice on the scene
and rescue workers around the state have been doing just that.
In Dane County, a shockingly realistic drill
took place a few months ago.
Reporter Frederica Freiberg has this report.
This is only a drill, but it is a full-out, terror disaster
exercise that has hijackers taking over
an airplane full of passengers and then releasing
an unknown chemical agent via an improvised explosive device.
Plains crashing into the Twin Towers in New York City
sounded far fetched too.
It all does sound far fetched, but it's crazy to think
what terrorism could do.
And that is part of the exercise is to prepare people.
Prepare people's plans, prepare people.
First responders to respond to a terrorist incident.
I'm at Farland just pulled up.
Since 9/11, Wisconsin has received more than $100 million
in Homeland Security first responder funds.
It's gone for state-of-the-art disaster response equipment
for things like up-armored police tactical units
that appear ready to wage war.
Exercise communication and hands-man operation.
For mobile radio communication centers,
where incident commanders direct large-scale emergency response.
The money also goes for training.
[BANG]
Training like detonating explosives
in a Homeland Security-funded containment vessel
tested out at a Sheriff's Law Enforcement Training Center.
[BANG]
Training also includes federally mandated full-out exercises
like one staged in the summer of 2005
at the Dane County Regional Airport.
[BANG]
More than 100 volunteers pose as airline passengers
taken hostage, poisoned by the chemical, and then released.
The scene would be terrifying, if not at drill.
[BANG]
This exercise was kept top secret from the first responders
so they couldn't plan ahead.
As it develops, they find themselves dealing with frantic,
injured, contaminated victims.
It's been going as well as it could.
Certainly anything like this is very difficult to handle.
But we do the best we can.
More than 50 agencies from the FBI to small
town fire departments, several of them all
volunteer, take part, more than 300
participants in all.
Decontamination of passengers proves difficult,
hosing them off, hurting them into one place,
putting them through decon showers,
tending to their injuries, and transporting them to hospitals.
Is it daunting to think of this in real life?
Yes. I don't want to say anything
about that more than it is.
We've been practicing.
We've been drilling.
Obviously, every drill we get better.
But we never want to see it.
A similar large-scale terrorist disaster drill
was staged here in 2002.
What I see different between the last time and this time
is that we do have more supplies, more things
to treat weapons of mass destruction,
and organizationally wise, it may not look like it,
but we are definitely a lot more organized than we have in.
You'll then move into the first of two showers.
Dane County is not alone in its preparedness drills.
Regional teams of first responders
staged similar exercises across the state.
One of the lessons learned from 9-1-1
is that you can't wait for the federal government
to send in whatever they're going to send in
to respond to something.
And that's the whole key point about first responders.
Are we ready for the real deal?
I would say we're getting there.
We still need some work.
But if I were to put it on a scale of 1 to
10, we're at a need.
Wisconsin Emergency Management points out
that all of the training and equipment
serves the state in natural disasters,
like tornadoes and flooding as well.
A new study, ordered by Governor Doyle
after Hurricane Katrina, shows Wisconsin
is not ready to handle mass evacuations
in the event of a large-scale catastrophe.
The governor wants all 72 counties to be ready
by the fall of 2006.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
We change gears now from preparing for the future
to looking back at the past.
Watercolorist Charles Peterson has seen a great deal of change
since visiting Door County almost 60 years ago.
Producer Liz Kurner found his paintings
play with this concept, capturing the ghosts of the past
who linger in the present day.
Our story is narrated by Jim Fleming.
A room full of admirers from across America
gathered recently to get a glimpse
of the elusive Door County artist, Charles Peterson.
I prefer the thought that my paintings are of great interest,
but I would rather remain anonymous.
Peterson's paintings are of great interest,
especially to collectors of limited edition prints.
Mark Quail is the owner of the White Door Publishing Company.
He is without a question when the most loved
and most respected artists in the limited edition print
industry not now but ever.
Quail first saw photos of Peterson's artwork
in the late 1980s.
And you could see immediately looking at them
that he's an extraordinary artist.
One piece in particular, Caut Quail's Eye.
There was one that was an old barn scene,
the title of it was Slayride.
And like usual, my discovery process
was it was an old barn at first, but then eventually you see,
well, look at there's somebody there.
And there's somebody else.
And I knew that there was a language there
that people could understand.
The language of Charles Peterson's art
speaks directly to the heart, telling stories
of the past with accuracy and affection.
I have a powerful inclination toward historical things.
So I take great pleasure in reconstructing
some of the history of our part of Wisconsin.
Peterson taught college art classes
before taking up a paintbrush full time, some 30 years ago.
My training, but also I think my natural interest in history
has turned me into what you would properly
call an illustrator.
My artwork tells stories about human experience.
And I've tended to concentrate on ordinary human experience.
The Miller Art Museum in Sturgeon Bay
recently hosted a retrospective of Charles Peterson's work.
Bonnie Harmon is the museum director.
There is such extraordinary love and detail even in the shadows.
In a sense, these paintings, there are
actually two paintings.
And he actually composes them that way.
There's a tremendous amount of work that goes into placing
all of the ghost images so that one almost happens upon them.
Those are also placed compositionally to work
with the rest of the painting.
They're very complex paintings, taking months to do.
Adding to the complexity of composition,
Peterson uses watercolors, one of the most difficult
mediums to master.
There's a perversity in me, I think.
I enjoy the immense difficulty of doing these things
in water color.
As a matter of fact, the way he paints,
he paints the entire back scene and having masked out
all the area ahead of time where those memory images
are going to be.
And they're painted in last.
And when you look at them in understanding
that when an art-- when a watercolor artist paints,
there's existing paint, he's got to get up to the edge.
If he doesn't get close enough, there's a white line.
There's paper that shows through.
If he goes too far, it turns a hard line
because it's overlap.
And you won't find hard lines.
Even though Peterson has great control of the medium,
the creative process can be frustrating.
The fact his wife Sue knows very well.
I was doing a field sketch of a little pond
across from our house several years ago.
And a man came by who had to see me about something.
And Sue said to him, just go down the path
and listen for the sound of cursing.
He'll have no trouble finding him.
And that was the case.
He did.
And apparently share the experience with others
in your family, your friends.
The recent gathering for Charles Peterson
was a retirement party.
He's retiring from the demands of the limited edition
print market.
Tonight, at this event, he unveiled
the last one in the series of 60 paintings.
The final release and the memories collection
of painters and memories.
Charles Peterson may be retiring from publication,
but he plans to continue painting for a long time.
There's no way I could quit painting at
this stage in my life because it has
become an obsession.
My soul, my inner being, supplies an endless hope
that a perfected painting will result.
According to the publisher, 2,500 prints
were made of Charles Peterson's final memory series painting.
The series sold out within 30 days of its release.
While Peterson preserves the past through his art,
others are looking for tangible ways to hold on to the world
as it currently is.
Landowners in particular are increasingly
trying to find ways to preserve their land
even after they're gone.
More and more, they're turning to what are called land trusts.
Producer Joanne Garrett visits a family who owns land
in Bayfield County.
This represents our life's work.
We've poured more than 30 years of our lives into this.
And it would be almost unbearable for me
to see it cut up, to see if all those are moving in
and cut it up into something other than what I've made it.
Rick Dale and his wife, Janet, came to Bayfield County
some 30 years ago and founded Highland Valley Farm.
This is a real business.
We take risk and we make investment.
It's a fruit farm with raspberries and
blueberries and bees.
Poke it in.
I'll put that in here, man.
A fruit farm that's situated on what has come to be
some of the most highly desirable real
estate in Wisconsin.
Bayfield, a tourist hub, is just minutes away.
The lure of nearby lakes superior draws in buyers.
But those winds that blow across the big lake
also wash across these farms, making this area
unique in the state.
The thing that enables us to grow the crops that we grow here
is this unique microclimate affected by like superior.
Every wind carrying whether to us crosses water,
except a southwest wind.
And a southwest wind is always a warm wind.
And so that really moderates our climate.
These small fruit farms are part of the economy,
part of the experience of the Bayfield area.
There's an ambience about fruit growing.
That's very attractive to people.
It's the flavors.
It's the beauty of the farms.
They're gorgeous to look at.
But 30 years of building up this business has had a cost.
Here I am, pushing 60 years old.
In all truth be told, I'm probably earning what
a beginning teacher starts with.
For a farmer's money is in the land.
You know, common addages.
Farmers are rich when they die.
Or if they sell their land to developers,
a lucrative prospect, and an unbearable possibility
for the day-als.
Their solution, call the local land trust.
That's what the day-als did.
There are 55 land trusts in Wisconsin,
each with different missions and methods.
They're private organizations that sometimes pair up
with public entities.
And they've managed to protect over 135,000 acres
in the state.
Fickie Elkins, the head of gathering waters,
a consortium of all the land trusts in Wisconsin.
A land trust is a nonprofit private organization
that specializes in protecting land
for future generations.
They either buy land or accept donations of land,
or they work with private land owners
to create permanent land conservation agreements
on their properties so that these privately owned lands
will never be developed.
Which is what the day-als did.
They put a conservation easement on their property.
They worked with their local land trusts,
the Bayfield Regional Conservancy, and the
Bayfield Township, which voted to raise taxes to
help preserve these small fruit farms.
The day-als sold their right to develop their land,
to subdivide it.
Their land is not a public park.
They still own it and work it.
They've simply sold one of the rights
they have as property owners.
If you think about property ownership as a bundle of sticks,
and each stick represents a certain property rights,
you can pull out some of these sticks or straws
from the bundle and sell them on the market.
For instance, timber rights.
Paper company comes and buys your timber right.
You still own the land.
Paper company now owns the right to harvest that timber.
If you sold that right, one of those rights that has been
identified is the right to develop the land.
An entity like a land trust, or a municipality
like a township government, or a partnership of those two,
can approach a farmer and offer to buy his right to develop
his land, the purpose of which is to prevent
the development of the land.
Two appraisals were done of the day-als farm.
The first is divided in soil to a developer.
The second is kept intact as a farm.
The difference equals the development rights.
That's what the day-al-sold through the
conservation easement placed on their deed.
And that easement that specifies no development of the land
stays with the deed forever.
And the beauty of farmland preservation under a land trust,
everybody wins.
Everybody, they're no losers.
The community benefits for the open space.
The retiring farmer now has options.
We still had six more years of debt load
for the expansion and the improvements that we've made.
The buyout for the easement immediately paid down that debt.
There was still enough leftover to create
a substantial retirement account for my wife and I.
And when the land is finally sold?
When it's offered out there for sale,
the developers are no longer bidding on the land
because there's nothing they could do with the land.
It's protected from subdivision and development.
So the only people bidding for the sale when the farmer finally
retires are people who are interested in
living on that property as a whole and
hopefully farming it.
Can you ball the soil?
The day-al-sund Chris has recently returned to Bayfield
to work with his dad and to someday take over the farm.
This has enabled us now to take that income
that might have been used for debt retirement
and offer a salary to a son who's eager to
return to the land.
Chris has come back now at an earlier age than anticipated.
And he'll work with me for the next 10, 12 years
given that 40 interval, I think, will go ahead
and get some water here because the berries are forming
rapidly now.
And everything that's up here in my head and Janet's head
gets transferred into his head and his wife's head.
And they will be the next generation.
What'd you get for this field, Chris?
From pretty good shape here.
That's about ideal.
Yesterday was at 19.
So this field always does have more written inequalities.
It takes a lot of pressure off in the future.
I don't have to worry about anybody coming in
and trying to buy a property out from under me,
or being in a situation where I feel like it's my last option
to sell because it's not even an option anymore.
Do they do their eyes for a sister?
No, I didn't.
It's probably a prime candidate.
We'll check through it.
A future generation could decide not to farm.
Maybe they don't want to work this hard.
But two, three generations following that
there may come a young couple with a vision
to bring it all to life again.
And if the land hasn't been cut up
and the roads haven't been developed
and the septic systems and the basements poured,
it will be here for them.
The berries look great.
I don't think they're moving.
Just press the irrigation.
As you heard in that report, the money
to purchase the development rights to the Dale's Farm
came in part from their local land trust
and in part from a tax increase, which the Bayfield
Township voted for.
Other land trusts work in different ways.
We'll bring you more reports on land trusts
around the state throughout the upcoming months.
If you'd like more information, check out our website
at wpt.org/inwisconsin.
You'll also find information there
about the largest land trust conference in the nation,
which takes place in Madison, October 14th through the 17th.
(upbeat music)
Last week, 65,000 people from around the world
came to Madison for the World Dairy Expo.
They came to learn about the latest in dairy technology,
check out the best dairy livestock on the planet
and see Governor Jim Doyle select one animal
as Wisconsin's cow of the year.
Okay, so maybe people didn't come from around the world
to see the governor proclaim the cow of the year,
but in Wisconsin, producer Art Hackett did.
The world dairy expo is the place to see
the best cows in the business.
These cows happen to be gurnsies,
but if you look at the signs surrounding the arena,
it's hard not to conclude, well, it's a whole-steen world.
The whole-steen is in shrine, in toys, advertising, and art.
After all, the theme of this year's world dairy expo
is the art of dairying.
Wisconsin is certainly well known for a whole-steen breed.
That's something that we see a lot of them.
We're very proud of those great black and white cows.
We have all the breeds though in the state.
Everything from the whole-steen to air-shires,
milking short horns, and of course, gurnsies, jerseys,
brown swiss.
What else can you name?
So when it's time to pick Wisconsin's cow of the year,
letting one breed constantly steal the show,
would be unpolitec.
So did you know you had a cow of the year
when you bought the cow?
No. It would be a little like
the governor asking a mom if the baby he was about
to kiss was her favorite.
Thank you for joining us today, as we celebrate Wisconsin dairy
in our 2005 cow of the year.
In some places, things like this start civil wars.
In 1972, the legislature passed Wisconsin statute 167.1.10,
designating the dairy cow as the Wisconsin domestic animal.
Shortly thereafter, governor Patrick Lucy
had the good sense to issue executive order 32,
designating first the whole-steen as cow of the year,
and then rotating the designation
alternately among the remaining recognized pure breeds.
And so I said, keeping with leader of the
Wisconsin state statutes and long tradition and
the rules of this show that each year a different breed
is featured as cow of the year.
And this year we're joined by an exemplary example
of a wonderful brown swiss animal.
It is my pleasure to proclaim their dairy cow,
sun-made, jet-wade, joccy, the 2005 cow of the year.
Congratulations. The long name describes
shotsy's genetic heritage.
She belongs to Kent and Rena Thompson of Roqua.
Kent found out shotsy was the winner
after the annual meeting of the state brown
swiss breed association.
And they started describing the animal in one.
And they were familiar then.
And what was your reaction then?
I didn't know until they got back from the baby.
And he was still smiling near the area.
Kent Thompson said shotsy was picked because of the amount
and quality of the milk she produces.
And there are aspects of a beauty pageant.
Her other mammary system of feet and legs
between the eyes of people are on the way
so she can get around.
As you can see, she just keeps like 200 feet and run.
Ready to eat again.
That and this was the year of brown swiss.
God, it's turned to hog the spotlight.
You know, all the little signature cows
that you see about Wisconsin, they're always hall stains.
You think you could do something about that?
I like my color.
I like the colored ones, the brown ones.
The idea that we're going to highlight a cow
I think really shows the strength of the dairy industry
and it shows what great dairy farms we have in the state.
It's not important that it's a brown swiss.
It's important that she's a cow.
It's important that she's a dairy cow.
That's our program for this week.
We leave you with a trip to the top of the highest natural peak
in the state, Tim's Hill in Price County.
For In Wisconsin, I'm Patty Low.
See you next time.
(dramatic music)
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(dramatic music)
(speaking in foreign language)
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Major funding for InWisconsin 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.
Wisconsin's Technical Colleges, providing the people of
Wisconsin with the knowledge and skills they'll need for
the economy of tomorrow.
Wisconsin's Technical Colleges, communities first.
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