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Hello and welcome to In Wisconsin.
I'm Patty Low.
This week this was once a popular fishing spot on the
Monomony River watershed.
Find out what turned it into a gravel and
grass-filled field.
There's no place like a cranberry
bog for this farmer who invented a harvester called
the Ruby Slipper.
Learn how his machine may revolutionize
the cranberry industry and dig deep into this
garden where we discovered a sense of community
growing alongside the vegetables.
We'll also tell you about a success story
involving a species that was once endangered here
in Wisconsin.
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. 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.
Almost nothing is more precious to Wisconsin
than water.
Our lakes, rivers and streams.
That's why the building of a dam or
the removal of one has to be so carefully measured.
What are the pros and cons of changing what
is naturally part of our environment?
That was the question at the core of the
wilderness shores agreement.
The agreement was supposed to reduce the environmental
effects of hydroelectric dams on the Monomony River
watershed. It also called for the removal of some
smaller dams on the Monomony River's tributaries.
The wilderness shores agreement
was signed in 1999 and since then two small dams
have been removed.
Art Hackett returned to the
Wisconsin U.P.
border to see the results.
There's not much left of the woods creek dam but then
it wasn't much of a dam to begin with.
It was a small concrete dam with three
slotted spillway bays where you could drop in boards to raise
or lower the water level.
All that's left to see is a gap in the dike.
The dam's flowage may have served a
mill at one time.
It never generated any electricity.
The demise of the woods creek dam was a small part of
an agreement called the wilderness shores settlement.
The settlement involved an electric power company,
the federal government as well as environmental groups
and state officials from Michigan and Wisconsin.
The wilderness shores settlement
also involves hydroelectric dams on the Monomony River.
Damns owned by WeEnergies formerly known as Wisconsin
Electric. Wilderness shores was aimed at making
those dams more fish friendly.
The greatest environmental payoff comes over
the entire length of the Monomony River system.
That's because water flows aren't
going up and down as rapidly as they once did
when everything was done to maximize the amount of
electricity generated.
Prior to the wilderness shores
agreement, WeEnergies would let water build up
during times when electric demand was low and then use
it to generate power when demand was high.
From a fishery point of view, and
other aquatic organisms, that's very hard on the
community. Jim Fossum of Green Bay represented the US
Fish and Wildlife Service in the wilderness shores
negotiations. He's now a consultant to
the Wisconsin River Alliance.
During the high flow part of the cycle, you
have this high current that can wash things out of the
rocks and soil organisms can get washed on stream.
And then the low part of the cycle portions of the
stream margin are dewatered.
Under Wilderness shores, environmental groups and
state and federal agencies agreed not to challenge
WeEnergies license renewals for the high-dore electric dams.
WeEnergies agreed to keep the highs and lows of the
rivers flow within a narrower range.
The ability to peak full out with the projects
was reduced.
We still maintain peak capability
at five of our largest projects, but we lost about
three eighths of our total system capacity during
all of the licensing for all of our dams.
Jim Fossum says there should be an improvement in fish
populations, but it's still too early to tell.
If you change the flow to be more friendly to aquatic
organisms, they will respond to that rather rapidly.
While the agreement changed the way dams on the Monomony River
are operated, it also called for WeEnergies to remove some
dams on tributary streams.
If WeEnergies didn't already own a dam in the right place,
it bought one from someone else.
That's how the Woods Creek Dam disappeared.
Bill Rousher of WeEnergies says the
utility purchased it so there would be something to offer,
the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.
This property came for sale
and we decided we would talk to Wisconsin DNR, see
if they were interested in the removal since
it's a trout stream.
So we were able to buy the property and remove the
dam and that was a pretty big ticket item for the
Wisconsin DNR to get this dam off of a trout stream.
Woods Creek reverted to its natural state in 2003.
On the Michigan side of the Monomony River, weEnergies
already had a dam ready for immediate removal.
For nearly 100 years, the sturgeon dams stood
about 8 miles east of the Wisconsin border.
Its turbines didn't produce enough electricity to
be worthwhile, but it created a beautiful lake.
We got a fish here.
These fish grow well in here,
they live well in here, they reproduce well in here.
In 1999, Jeff Ball of Crystal Falls, Michigan,
took his fishing on the sturgeon dams flowage.
I believe you're out in the boat with Jeff Ball.
Fishing right in this area and you
caught a fish right over here or had one online anyhow.
Ted Testolin is the trustee of
Waseda Township in Michigan.
He was standing on the boat landing that day in 1999.
This is the boat landing today.
It's permanently closed.
The waters where Jeff Ball fished were
drained because the wilderness shores agreement called for the
removal of the sturgeon dam.
Over the course of three years, the lake and then the
dam slowly disappeared.
You can see from this area if you look upstream in between
the trees further upstream, you can see there's a lot
of vegetation coming in up there.
It's good and thick and it's holding
the soils together very well.
This was Jim Fossum's first look at the project
since the dam was removed.
I think for the short time since it's been removed,
I think it looks very well.
It's coming along very well.
Ted Testolin and another township trustee,
John King, also showed up.
Both had fought the dams removal.
It's a travesty.
I mean, just look at it.
Look back at the old footage of what we had before
and look at this now.
I mean, how can you compare
it? We had a backwater here that was comparable to
a fishing experience in Canada.
During the demolition of the dam, the town trustees
complained contractors were allowing sediment which
had built up behind the dam to wash down river.
The other natural sediment movement of about 400
yards a year, the way I calculated from what we've
taken out in the dam has been here 80 years.
The Michigan Department of
Environmental Quality didn't find any problems.
I guess I'd like to make the point that had
the dam never been here at the 30,000 yards that
were removed would be in the system and would be
down probably at the next dam.
Are there fish going to spawn up there?
Is that what you're saying?
Well, it's fine here.
They'll have a hard time moving upstream because of the gradient
because of the rapid water with a fish from downstream,
but they're a fish in the system upstream.
And this is returned now to a free-flowing system.
Stream as it was before, there was ever a dam here,
free-flowing. And I'm not to say that I believe
a riverine system is better than a lake system
that they had.
It depends on your personal preference.
You know, there was a beautiful
flowge up here I agree in terms of wetlands and all of that,
but we have that replaced now of the riverine system.
I love rivers too.
The Wilderness Shore settlement means the power
dams along the Manamani River will continue producing power,
though not as much as before.
Environmental groups are seeing their wishes
fulfilled. The prevailing wisdom is that nature got
it right the first time.
Damns are a temporary aberration.
Some lakes, no matter how beautiful,
aren't supposed to be there.
We turn now to a story about another group of people who are
passionate about a particular piece of land.
Troy Community Gardens covers
25 acres within Madison.
It's a section of the city that was kept from real estate
development when a group of citizens and local organizations
work together on a conservation easement.
The result is a gardening space for people of many
different backgrounds and cultures, including Madison
author Marge Pitts.
Pittson, Wisconsin Public Television,
videographer Wendy Woodard, spent a year capturing
the changing seasons and spirit of Troy Gardens.
Winter. Gardening is over in winter.
I'm not sad.
I'm tired.
I don't remember the lust for digging I
felt in the spring.
The thirst for the smell of
compost, the zest for the rake.
Gardening roots a person in time as well as
space. Winter is not the time for toil.
Winter is for roaming.
Troy Gardens is more than just vegetable
plots. The property is also acres of open space, a
prairie and a woodland with a fine path weeding through it.
Spring. Each plot in Troy Gardens is an expression
of one gardener's personality and experience.
The best thing about community gardens is the
boundaries around each plot.
Beyond each border is the realm of another
gardener. Each gardener is free to impose his or her
own order.
My Mungardan neighbors use the same
techniques they used in their homeland or world
away. I like to think that seeing their plots take
shape every year makes them feel at home here.
A feeling of wholeness and
connection inevitably comes to us when we open our hearts and
minds to a relationship with the natural world.
All we need is a place to experience it.
That brings us to Troy Gardens.
Summer. Emid summer of a perfect year, time stops.
Like a dog panting hard on a cool floor,
the world is both throbbing with life and completely
idle. At this point there's nothing to do but relax.
Sit back in your row with a few small weeds that
can't compete with your huge growing vegetables
and listen to the day sounds of Troy Gardens.
It's a blistering hot afternoon.
I'm working my garden up one row and
down the other.
On my knees, barefoot, straw
hat pulled down low.
Sweating so freely I feel nude as if my clothes
have melted off.
I can smell the living soil on
the uprooted weeds, the tang of tomato plants I'm
pruning, and the watery mineral smell of my sweat.
Two plots away a boom box is playing traditional Mung
music while the woman in a boy work.
The music is discordant.
It seems to have no beginning,
middle or end.
I can't understand it with my mind,
but I'm not using my mind in the garden today.
I'm using my body and my senses.
And with these, I know that the music, the
heat and the work are as perfect as Eden.
Like Eden, the afternoon passes away,
but the memory, like the archetype, remains
whole and perfect in my mind.
Which, alas, I have resumed using.
I have faith that if we can learn to grow beans,
we can learn to share this green earth in peace.
Fall. With those around comes around.
That's why they call it a revolution.
Gardening is just one dance, busy as a polka to an
orchestra of fresh air, bird song, and long horizons.
But I like to waltz too, slow, dreaming circles
that stitch me into the ubiquitous beauty of creation.
My partner in this dance is a wink, a big dog with short legs,
who thinks of himself as the kindest emperor the world
has ever known.
The delight of rambling across
the landscape together, the pleasant company of a
beautiful dog as I do my chores, the happiness of
having a simple agenda.
These are harmonies of one music, one joy.
All we need, animals and humans is
a place to experience it.
And that brings us back to Troy Gardens.
Our next story also features people working with the land,
but on a much larger scale.
Last fall, state cranberry growers produced a record
crop, bringing in 3.66 million barrels of the
tart red fruit.
Wisconsin also leads the nation in
cranberry production.
All good news for cranberry
growers, Dan Brockman.
During last fall's harvest, Brockman showed reporter
Andy Soth and invention that may help Brockman reap
the benefits of Wisconsin's successful cranberry industry.
If you've never seen cranberries harvested before,
you might not know that's what Dan Brockman is doing.
But even veteran cranberry growers would wonder how exactly
he's harvesting the berries.
I always figured that there's a better way to do
just about any job, just you have to figure it out.
What Brockman has figured out may revolutionize
the cranberry industry.
I think that within three to five years, the vast
majority of the crops will be harvested with this machine.
Brockman's machine is called the Ruby Slipper, named
for the way it slips the Ruby red fruit off the vine.
Cranberry vine with the berries on is hit by this bar and the
berries get stripped off and the vine just slides through
underneath. The fruit that's picked off the
vine floats in a flooded bog.
It's routed up, cleaned, and sent for processing into
juice or into cranberry sauce, where the berries can
be dried and sweetened.
Long ago, cranberries were picked by hand.
Then growers developed hand rakes to strip
the fruit from the vine.
After World War II, growers like Carl Getzinger and Bob Case
developed the first mechanical pickers that still bear
their names.
It's been the cranberry tradition
that growers develop their own equipment.
In the whole scheme, I exercise, the
cranberries are pretty small business.
They're probably maybe less than a
thousand, about a thousand cranberry growers in
the whole United States.
So a company, John Deere, or something like that
probably isn't going to manufacture specific
dedicated cranberry equipment.
But Brockman's business partner, a small family business in
Wisconsin Rapids, called BDT, does specialize in cranberry
equipment. We're centrally located in Wisconsin,
so we get a lot of the growers that are just in this
regional area that are coming to us for different applications,
and throughout the years of working with these
people, we've developed different products for them.
Dick's says the ruby slipper can do the job about five
times faster than this machine, called the water wheel or
a beater.
The beater has been standard equipment
for about the last quarter century.
A nice thing with this machine too is its simplicity.
There's a lot less moving parts, a lot less things that
could potentially break, and it's also a lot easier
on the cranberry plants themselves and on the
fruit. Brockman says the individual spring-mounted
feet on the slipper mean it can better handle
uneven terrain, getting berries of beater misses,
and produce a higher yield.
And unlike the old beater, the ruby slipper is an
implement that attaches to a conventional farm
tractor. It didn't want a dedicated piece of
equipment that sat in the shed for 11 or 11 half
months out of the year, it's only to use that
harvest. While the ruby slipper is a new technology,
it is part of a long tradition of cranberry growers
inventing their own tools.
But unlike Getzenner and Case, Brockman won't
name it for himself.
I don't name things after me.
I want to name people remember.
Everyone remembers the ruby slipper.
Now for an update, Don, an environmental success
story in Wisconsin.
About a month ago, the U.S.
Fish and Wildlife Service reopened
the public comment period on its proposal to take
the bald eagle off the endangered species list.
The federal agency is gathering input for 90 days before
making a final decision.
Even if the eagle is removed from the list, it
will still be protected by two federal acts that
prohibit harming the bird.
Here in Wisconsin, bald eagles have
made a remarkable comeback.
Producer Joanne Garrett takes us to Casville for
an avian show in the sky.
Winter in Wisconsin.
It can be a tough time.
A testing time.
But every season has its sweet compensations.
And this is one of the upsides to winter.
[Music]
As the ice steals in, eagles gather in greater
numbers near open water.
They congregate, concentrate, and put on a show.
[Music]
You're looking at a success story.
30 years ago, Wisconsin's eagle population
was in serious decline.
Nesting pairs numbered just over 100.
The state recognized their peril and responded
with a recovery plan.
And the number of bald eagles soared.
At last count, the number of nesting pairs was
more than a thousand.
A very fine place to view eagles is in Casville just
below the power plant.
They like to fish the waters there.
You can see them, herched in the trees on the shore,
or watch them walking, so ungainly on the ground.
So graceful in the air.
These dancers are one of the delights of winter.
It's one of the joys of the season.
Eagle watching in Wisconsin.
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The U.S.
Fish and Wildlife Service is accepting
comments about taking bald eagles off the endangered
species list until May 17th.
You can find out more information about that and
all of our reports this week by going to our website.
The address is www.org/inwisconsin.
Join us next week for another episode of In Wisconsin.
We'll introduce you to a pair of sheep farmers who
have turned to a four-legged solution to keep their
herd safe from predators.
We're in the heart of predator territory.
Before we got the guard dogs, I used to hear the sheep
going all the time, wake up and we were little and nice.
It's just Jesus was going on out there whatever.
And now I sleep to the night because I know I
got protection out there.
We leave you now with a look at a bird not often found in
Wisconsin, the great gray owl.
Our camera crew captured a rare glimpse of the bird's
last winter and we thought we'd share the magnificent
sight with you again.
For In Wisconsin, I'm Patty Low.
See you next time.
[Music]
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 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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