[Music]
Hello everyone, welcome to our summer season of In
Wisconsin. I'm Patty Lo.
This week, meet a woman and her husband trying to breathe new
life into her family's farm.
Find out how a world view is translating into big business
for one Wisconsin cheese maker and travel deep into the
woods of soft county in search of an elusive prize.
All that plus a look at a way of life long past in Wisconsin.
Major funding for In Wisconsin is provided by the people of a
lion's energy who brings safe, reliable and environmentally
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and life in Wisconsin running smoothly, a lion's
energy, offering energy saving ideas on the web.
And by the University of Wisconsin Comprehensive
Cancer Center providing cancer research,
education and treatment, UW Comprehensive Cancer Center,
comprehensive as designated by the National Cancer Institute,
information available on the web.
Last week, we brought you the first part of our
series on students going through UW School for
Beginning Dairy Farmers.
You met a computer programmer who, along with
his wife, is trying to make a go of it on a dairy farm
in Shabuigan County.
This week, we learned that the couple has
decided to get out of the dairy business.
Gerald Berg, whose farm they
were helping to operate, said the couple decided to move
to Michigan and get out of the dairy business.
Because of the shortage of people wanting
to get into the dairy business, Berg said he
was unable to hire anyone else to help run the farm.
As a result, he had to sell most
of his dairy herd last week.
We've been unable to reach the fellers for comment.
Now, we meet a woman who is trying to restart her
family's dairy farm, one that hasn't seen milking
in 15 years.
The most important thing is the
land as far as I can see.
Patti Laskowski is no stranger to dairy.
She grew up in a farm, your
hillsboro. But like so many Wisconsin farm kids, she
didn't see any future in it.
It wasn't seem 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.
Yet 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-sized
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.
We don't want to go over 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 being 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 Waka Shaw County
to buy livestock.
Dairy cattle are in short supply,
even calves who won't be ready to milk for two years.
Patti and Bill locate some churbread jerseys for sale on
Bob Frieda's farm near Sussex.
And call me if you got any problems, see because
I don't care if I sold them to you or not to
kill my babies.
Patti and Bill deliver the calves
to the Laskowski family farm near Hillsboro,
arriving in a late spring snowstorm.
They have no barn, just a metal
machine shed.
They have no place to milk.
So somewhere in here along this wall, 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.
Freedom next June and then we'll have milking
cows in March and April of 2004.
We're pretty close right now.
Bill Moran and Patti and 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.
But it's a little bit different now because Bill
and I are actually the ones that if a 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 little life right into the
world, a little fuzzy life.
The milkhouse is exactly where Patti said it would be, but Bill
is still pounding away on it.
The milking parlor is a concrete pit with steps.
You come in, you go down here and then the cows stand
you know 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 Patti use a system of buckets powered
by a vacuum hose.
For the first few weeks until
the milk houses 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.
Daring is not cheap to get into.
I mean cows are expensive.
Milking equipment is expensive.
By June, the milk house 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 is planned.
A late season drought forced
Bill and Patti to start feeding silage 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 Patti head to the barn
pushing a daughter, violet, in a baby joker.
I thought, well, you know, what do we,
what do I do with you?
I felt like, you know, after after she's born,
you know, I'm in the house taking care of her.
Bill's, Bill comes up and he's,
but was 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 grandmouse.
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.
You're 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
it's that 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
milk earns 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 a 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 milk gig in this parlor with you.
Dairy farmers like the Laskowskies are in a demanding
line of work and at the other end of the industry,
Wisconsin cheese manufacturers are also in a tough
struggle. They're trying to hold on to a chunk
of the cheese market but are losing ground to states
like California.
But now some Wisconsin cheese
makers are finding that multiculturalism could be
the key to business survival.
The Shish Cafe in Madison, the recipes are from
Syria, but a key ingredient for chef Rabay Bin Yat
comes from Wisconsin cheese.
We do like bro cheese, we do it with salad and
pizza, we broil the cheese.
The surface of the cheese, I mean we use the cheese
a lot.
Exactly the way we cook a can of Syria.
That Syrian cheese called a kawa is made in one of Wisconsin's
oldest cheese factories.
For the factory owners Paul and Vicky Sharfman, it
started with a phone call.
We got a phone call from a man in New Jersey whose
name was Mahmoud Abul Rumi.
And Mahmoud was making his own cheese in his own dingy
store. He was a trailer.
In New Jersey and he wanted to find a factory
to make it for him so he could go do the marketing.
Abul Rumi came to Wisconsin to show the sharpened cheese
makers how to make a kawa.
But talk about an electric moment when this ethnic,
Jordanian, Palestinian cheese maker comes to Wisconsin
and works with older, long time Germanic Wisconsin
cheese makers and tries to explain the cheese maker to
cheese maker how to make this curd.
We're all you have two fat fingers.
We want girls with thin fingers
and you have to go like this and the German cheese makers.
This kind of cultural exchange has become commonplace at
the Sharfman's business, the specialty cheese company
of Loa, Wisconsin.
Talk to most cheese makers
about culture and they'll assume you mean bacteria.
But the specialty cheese company understanding
culture has an entirely different meaning.
In 1991 the Sharfman's bought a struggling
cheese factory with the idea of making cheese for the
growing number of Hispanic consumers.
And you look for what the needs are,
of course, and we're looking at food and the Hispanic population
ate eats a lot of cheese.
The Sharfman's developed La Bacarica brand through
extensive testing with Hispanic consumers.
And slowly we refined the products until they
looked like what people expected them to look like.
And we were looking to replicate cheese from
home. In just the last few years, America's Hispanic
population has grown 13 percent and the big cheese companies
have added Hispanic varieties, increasing competition.
So the specialty cheese company added more
specialties, like the Syrian Akawa, kosher Munster and
an Indian cheese called paneer.
We also are a national powerhouse in the
paneer market at this point, which I think is
very funny myself.
But you know there it is and we
sell to quite a few Indian distribution companies.
I used to eat the frozen Indian TV dinners because
you at least years ago you couldn't get good Indian food
in this town and now you can.
Now Vicki Sharfman's business makes the paneer used
in those frozen dinners.
And the specialty cheese company has connected Lowell Wisconsin
with America's grown diversity.
We both love it.
Yeah. What has been, I don't know that it's
changed our outlook so much, but it has been great to
see how it has affected the rural community, which
was rural so it didn't have the opportunity to have
people of all stripe come visit.
I think everybody at the firm has grown
as a result of that.
I think that's really one
of the things that we're most proud of as well.
It's cool.
It's definitely cool.
Cool, but also good business and a growing one in Wisconsin.
10 years ago specialty and artist in Jesus accounted
for only 4 percent of state cheese production.
Today it's 13 percent.
State Secretary Ron Nilsis-Duen says Wisconsin
is well suited to specialty cheese making.
It's such a good fit for Wisconsin
because we've got the right size farm.
Small farms, we've got a lot of existing
small cheese plants and probably as important
as anything else.
We've got a long, long tradition
in cheese making.
But it's actually a non-traditional
cheese that today is the specialty cheese
companies fastest growing product.
In the 90s Paul Sharfman patented a
process to bake cheese into a hard crunchy chip.
They sold it as cheese and crackers without the
crackers or just the cheese.
It was expensive and crunchy and salty and
weird, but it was cheese and crackers without the
crackers. And by early 1997 it was a dismal failure.
I had a lot of pretty boxes and no sales.
Until just the cheese caught the
attention of Dr.
Robert Atkins.
This is now the summer of 1997.
Atkins has just started his catalog and
he's searching for a crunchy munchy that can be in his
catalog. What's crunchy munchy that's on the Atkins
diet? Answer nothing.
Well there was pork rinds which made famous by the first George
Bush president.
Which he didn't do.
It wasn't crazy.
No one was crazy for pork
rinds. But low carbohydrate dieters have gone crazy
for just the cheese.
To keep up with great demand the
specialty cheese company has bought an old school
in the neighboring town of Riesville.
They've converted it to a factory
and hired dozens of local people.
Like Ruthie Snow who now works in the building where
she once went to high school.
Lots of good memories.
That's a good memories.
I was prom queen in the gym.
That gym now holds boxes and boxes of just the
cheese ready to be shipped.
Some of it ordered over the internet and processed by
Ruthie Snow.
Another change from her high school days.
I'm aging myself now.
We got electric typewriters
and that was very cool.
Internet was so far away.
So far away.
I find it exciting to ship all to all these
different international places.
And a little town like this.
It's pretty cool.
Whether it's over the World Wide Web,
a Syrian immigrants kitchen, or a favorite Indian meal,
Wisconsin's cheese makers are finding new homes
for the state's most famous product.
[Music]
We move now to a forest in Sock County.
That's where a videographer from
Wisconsin Public Television spent the day with one
of our state's talented poets.
Together they captured that experience in
what we call a video poem.
This chapter from our poems about Places series
features poet Judith Strasser and videographer
Frank Bowel as they search for Pine Hollow.
We seek a wild place.
A narrow, wooded gorge, sheer
cliffs, rock outcroppings.
We discover remnant farm, silo of gray concrete,
mossy foundation stone, something that might
have been water tank, civilization attempted.
No sign of the faint trail that the guide to natural
areas says takes off from the northeast corner
of an abandoned field.
Above the cicada's rasp, wind in dry weeds mimics
the brush of a stream.
We're hopeful heading into the beckoning crook of woods that
embraces mone clover and grass.
We press downhill through blackberry bramble and
golden rod gone to seed.
[Music]
But the forest we find is a sham, jackpines and orderly
corridors, barren understory.
Just beyond the plantation we stumble on weathered
chainsawed logs scattered like pickup sticks.
Hardly wild nature.
But we have a mission here, TV minutes
to fill a videopalm to write.
Perhaps we can prod this scene into some semblance
of art.
We take notes, run tape, record what we see
and imagine.
Hope gone awry, disaster, better luck someplace
else. And then we too move on.
muted color, yellows and reds make spectacle of the
trees, but it's threatening rain and every trail
we try shrinks to a path for deer.
We find a grapevine thick as an arm, a snag
poked with woodpecker holes.
An old barbed wire fence and whenever the wind
leaves falling like rain.
But no gorge.
This is not what we wanted at all.
Until someone spots the yellow sign nailed to a
distant tree and here's the way down.
Browned moss on the rocks, maiden hair fur
and salamon seal in the crease of a dry streambed.
Somewhere below us, pine hollow, but we're running out of
tape. The poet sits on a rock.
Imagine the spring was burble, a snow melt, a steep, moist
ravine, warblers and threshes.
Sacadus falls silent.
Rain patters the leaf carpet
floor. To give up, pack up the gear, climb toward the
car, pass an old birch forked and scarred the
clings to the lip of the hill.
Do you have what you need that producer asks?
Do we know what that might be?
Beyond the silo, the city.
Behind, bold hope for some other season, a
trunk, live heart of a maple, cased in a femoral gold.
[Music]
Our next story takes us back to a craft from an earlier time.
A time before cars were speeding up and down our state roads and
highways. Our Wisconsin Retro selection for this week first
aired in 1987 and features a shitek man who is
keeping the craft of carriage making rolling.
[Music]
Harsdrawn carriage has got real popular.
Good vehicles in the 1880s, 90s.
End of them was pretty much in the first world
war they started going downhill.
I think probably the Model T's were getting
popular. You could buy a Model T.
I read the other day where you could
ride a Model T for $490.
When Henry Ford got done, they were $290.
You couldn't compete because
these weren't mass produced.
They couldn't begin to compete price wise with them.
Throughout civilization, the wheel has made all
the difference.
Henry Ford's assembly line may
have changed wheels forever, but the sight and sound
of horse-drawn carriages still linger as part
of the American landscape, especially near the
lakes of shitek in Barron County, where Bob Anderson
brings modern technology and an old tradition together.
Well, you can't build them like they built them 80, 90 years ago
and that's why we used a welded assembly in order to cut
down the labor and make it stronger because these
are used on the streets.
Some of them are used 10, 12 hours a day, 16
hours a day.
Some of them do two shifts of them.
Seven days a week and they're used to hard so
the old ones didn't stand up 80 to 100 years ago.
[Music]
Today, Anderson and his employees assemble carriages
that are more likely to travel the streets of
New York than the rural backroads of Wisconsin,
but even these contemporary carriages still require
just the right materials.
All the best wheels and hickory
after using the first top notch quality hickory and it's
hard to find enough good hickory that isn't southern
drawn. It's got to be northern drawn hickory
because it's stronger.
Though we associate today's carriage rides with the
New York Central Park, the Anderson carriage
turns up in some surprising locales everywhere from the
California coast to Bermuda.
These carriages are used for commercial use.
By commercial we mean giving rides in a downtown
or a scenic area.
One person even using them selling
real estate from them.
Where they're used is I have a lot of them in
Chicago and the downtown New York Central Park.
I have someone Bermuda,
Milwaukee, Duluth, one Minneapolis, California,
anywhere you want to go.
Each year Anderson's small company produces
only about two dozen carriages.
He is as clearly not an assembly line
robot-assisted venture.
Instead, Anderson models each carriage after classic
designs from a hundred years ago.
But even a nostalgic enterprise must compete
in today's marketplace.
And Anderson's carriages must be adapted to the
commercial climate to attract riders who want
to slow down instead of speed up.
More color here, a decorative pinstripe
there, all done to make carriages a successful part of
today's landscape, not just a nostalgic reminder of the past.
Henry Ford may have changed everything, but
Bob Anderson believes there's still a place for
preserving the wheels of the past, wheels that
give a gentle rock and sway to contemporary life.
We checked in with Bob Anderson and he's still
hard at work, except now he's mostly designing old
fashion popcorn wagons.
His carriages are still being used to give rides
in cities like Duluth and Chicago.
That's our program this week.
We leave you with a rainy day look at Garner Lake in
Richland County.
For In Wisconsin, I'm Patty
Lo. See you next time.
[Music]