- Welcome to "In Wisconsin." I'm Patty Loew.
This week, a more eco-friendly approach at airports.
See what Mitchell International in Milwaukee
is doing to control the runoff of toxic deicers.
- They were somewhat in denial they even had a problem
with contaminated runoff.
- Also, a look at specialty cheese
made from goat's milk and made in Wisconsin.
- The one thing that we have that nobody else has
is the tremendous history and heritage of cheesemaking.
- Plus, a camp for kids to discover the science
of stem cell research.
- Empower them and give them the confidence
they need to think about a future career in science.
- We'll put this unique camp under the microscope,
next on "In Wisconsin."
- 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, we're on for you.
And Animal Dentistry and Oral Surgery Specialists
of Milwaukee, Oshkosh and Minneapolis,
a veterinary team working with pet owners
and family veterinarians providing care for oral disease
and dental problems of small companion animals.
- We begin this week with an environmental threat
at Wisconsin's airports.
After some catastrophic winter crashes
in the late 1980s and early '90s,
the Federal Aviation Administration created
de-icing rules that airports must follow.
But, are these deicers safe for the environment?
As part of our new reporting project called Quest,
"In Wisconsin" reporter Liz Koerner shows us
how researchers are looking for answers in Milwaukee.
- When the DNR discovered contaminated runoff during
the routine inspection of General Mitchell Airport
back in 1996, they ordered them to clean up their act.
- They were somewhat in denial they even had a problem
with contaminated runoff.
But shortly thereafter, it became obvious that there
were issues with glycol entering first, Wilson Park Creek,
and then the Kinnikinic River system.
- Glycol is the main ingredient in de-icing fluid.
Because General Mitchell's management wanted the make
cost effective changes, they asked the United States
Geological Survey to run studies on their runoff.
Steve Corsi is the lead researcher.
- The bottom line is that if you spray chemicals
around the environment, you're likely to have
some sort of environmental impact.
- General Mitchell Airport applies 200,000 to 400,000
gallons of de-icing fluid a year.
At the low end, 40 tanker trucks are needed for delivery.
They now make an effort to capture some of it
before it runs off their property.
- Our goal is to capture 34% of all the glycol that's applied.
And we've been very close on those numbers
for the last several years.
- They vacuum up some of it with trucks
that work like street sweepers.
They also have three de-icing pads
that collect fluid below ground.
- All the storm sewers go to a sump crock system,
similar to a basement in a house, where this product
can be collected and pumped to an above-ground tank.
- But there are areas where they
don't collect the de-icing fluid.
Areas like snow piles, where collection would be costly,
and areas where safety comes first.
- On our taxiways and runways areas, we cannot collect
because of safety concerns.
- Some of the deicers decompose where they land
but the majority either end up in the groundwater
or run into surrounding streams.
Corsi and his team have completed seven studies
since they began their research in 1996.
Some paid for by the airport.
They work in collaboration with scientists
at the State Laboratory of Hygiene.
One study determined how much deicer is needed to
deplete oxygen in water.
- If the fish and insects and such in the stream
don't have enough oxygen they can basically suffocate,
just like you and I in the air.
- They discovered that glycol in deicers
isn't the biggest concern.
Instead, the chemicals in the additives can be toxic.
Their challenge was to find out what those chemicals are.
- And try as we might to get the information
from the manufacturers, they are unwilling
to give us that information, because it's basically
their business to keep it secret so that they can
compete with the other manufacturers.
- The additives are used in deicer as thickeners,
corrosion inhibitors and surfactants.
- What that does to the product,
is help it spread over the airplane efficiently.
(Conversations in the lab)
- They came up with a significant finding
about these surfactants.
- We found the major cause of toxicity
were in the surfactants.
- Not only are they toxic, they discovered that some
contain a chemical that interferes with reproduction.
Corsi says manufacturers have responded to this research.
- They've actually taken some of those additives out
of the deicer formulations and they've replaced them
with more environmentally friendly additives.
- The buying power of airports across the country
has also pushed manufacturers to go greener.
- And that's why we've changed several manufacturers
through the years in an attempt to get the lowest
toxicity formula that we can use at this airport.
- Failey says capturing more deicer isn't cost effective,
so the best bet is pressuring the manufacturers to make changes.
The DNR's Paul Luebke agrees.
- Getting additives that aren't showing the toxicity
is really the key.
- And an answer to the question about how toxic
this airport's runoff is, Corsi says
they've discovered that it depends on how much
snow melt or rainwater is diluting the streams.
- Not a clear-cut answer.
It just depends on what's happening
during the runoff event.
- The EPA estimates 25 million gallons
of aircraft de-icing fluid are used each year
at airports nationwide.
New rules are in the works to regulate how much
deicer must be recaptured.
As far as Steve Corsi and his staff at the United States
Geological Survey, he's now doing exploratory
research in Milwaukee and Madison on the impact of
road salt in our waterways.
To find out more, check out the link on our webpage
at wpt.org and then click on "In Wisconsin."
Wisconsin's dairy industry is
promoting new ways to help farmers compete.
The focus is on the fast-growing specialty cheese sector.
One niche, cheese made from goat's milk
and made in Wisconsin.
Reporter Andy Soth takes you to one of the state's
largest goat farms to show you how they're selling the idea.
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- Oh, I feel really big.
- And Gene Zimmerman is big, at least in the small
but growing world of Wisconsin goat farming.
- The cart is over here; you can see the grain.
- That's why dozens of people interested in goats
came out on a gray windy day for a State Ag Department-sponsored
Dairy Goat Field Day.
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- I can tell you about goats.
- I thought you had a tremendous turnout for the event.
- Yeah, I think there was 78.
Of course, a couple of them were my mom and dad
and my brother just came for the meal; they're here every day.
- A meal that included plenty of cheese
made from goat's milk.
And it's that growing taste for goat cheese
that's feeding the growing interest in goat farming.
The number of dairy goat farms has been growing rapidly.
17 Wisconsin counties have one to three goat farms.
Ten counties have between four and ten.
And five southwestern counties are home
to more than ten dairy goat farms.
And the state has led the nation
in the number of milking goats.
- There was a lot of angst a few years ago
about what was happening with our dairy industry.
California is beating us, and they, you know--
And so, people took a look at it.
And people within the industry took a look at it
and said, we really need to do some things
if we're going to stop losing farms,
if we're going to stop closing cheese factories.
- That led to new thinking.
- I think they finally realized like, hey,
Wisconsin is the number one goat dairy state
and I believe the number one specialty cheese state.
I think they kind of said, "Well, we can't be
"the biggest with the cows, so we're going to be the best."
- You need only visit the grocer's dairy case to see
the booming consumer interest in specialty cheese,
much made from goat's milk, much of it made in Wisconsin.
- But, the one thing that we have that nobody else has
is the tremendous history and heritage of cheesemaking.
- That cheesemaking heritage dates back to
Wisconsin's early European settlers who turned their
extra milk into cheese in their front kitchens.
Diana Murphy started cheesemaking in the same way
once her family began to raise goats.
- I had this milk, and what do I do with it?
So, I started to read about it
and started making cheese in my house.
I had more cheese than our family could consume,
so I would bring the cheese to Vermont Valley
to share with the other workers for our lunches.
- Vermont Valley is a community supported
agriculture farm near Black Earth, where Murphy worked.
Before long they asked Murphy to add her goat cheese
to boxes of fresh produce, they provide members
each week during the growing season,
but to do that, she would have to be licensed.
- Diana Murphy is just one of those special instances
where she had a career off-farm
and decided that she was going to milk goats,
and that she was going to be a cheesemaker, which is not easy to do.
It takes a year or so to get through all those courses
and do the apprenticeship.
- And then, I took my cheesemaker's test
and I passed it, so then I was ready to--
I could legally make cheese and sell it.
- Murphy provides her fresh goat cheese
to Vermont Valley's members and she also sells it
at a Madison farmers market.
And she entered it in
the American Cheese Society Competition.
- Which is the creme de la creme of specialty cheeses
in the United States.
And she took first place for her goat feta cheese.
So, that's a real success story.
- A success that many would-be goat farmers
would like to emulate.
Especially, it seems, other women.
- I get lots of calls from women who are interested,
and often when we have field days,
a lot of women come.
- The reason I went into goats versus cows, I think
partly is because it's an easier animal to handle.
They're smaller, of course, they're different
than cows in many ways, but just the handling of them
is more conducive, I think, maybe to a woman
than a cow would be.
- Gene Zimmerman raised cows, but when he got married,
his wife came with goats, and before long
they made the switch.
- You have to love them.
And it's like, cow farming, you have to love it, too,
but these guys are more loveable.
- While they do share a love of goats,
Zimmerman and Murphy are very different goat farmers
representing the diversity in this growing industry.
Zimmerman has a herd of hundreds,
which requires a lot of management.
- If you're not a dairy person
and don't have husbandry skills,
it's not gonna work out real well.
- That means artificial lighting and other techniques
to keep the goats breeding, birthing
and producing milk year-round.
Murphy produces seasonally, like the CSA farm
she distributes her milk through.
The milk from Zimmerman's hundreds of goats
is shipped to a large cheese factory.
The milk, from the 20 or so Murphy goats,
gets made on-site into her award-winning cheese,
a value-added product that is worth more.
- There is a lot of diversity within the dairy goat industry
just as there is in the dairy cow industry.
- Together, cows, goats and sheep make for
a diverse state dairy industry.
A diversity that may help make the industry even stronger
for Wisconsin as it strives to evolve
from being the biggest to being the best.
- Agriculture is our greatest economic force
within this state.
- I think cheesemakers work together very complementary.
Cheesemakers helping cheesemakers.
We have that resource.
- It's exciting. It's very exciting.
- Diana Murphy tells us her goats will give birth
to kids in late February, and then she can begin
milking again and making specialty cheese in the spring.
She won't be alone.
Specialty cheese production has increased 20%
in Wisconsin since 2004.
Stem cell research gives Wisconsin another way
to compete in the global arena.
It provides hope in the fight against Parkinson's disease,
spinal cord injuries and Multiple Sclerosis.
Having an ample supply of young scientists could be key
to propelling Wisconsin forward in the future.
While some kids are at basketball or band camp,
reporter Art Hackett found students peering
into microscopes in Madison.
- The arrival looks like any other summer camp.
Suitcases, room keys, ID bracelets.
What's different for 20 students from rural
Wisconsin high schools and their teachers is what
they will be working with the next three days.
- Today, we'll be encapsulating stem cells in alginate.
- Stem cells, cells often, but not always, cultured
from human embryos which can be coaxed into becoming
like those in our heart, our pancreas
or the nerves in our spinal cord.
- That's your job today, is to isolate the neural cells
and purify these populations of cells.
- The camp is sponsored by WiCell, the University of
Wisconsin-Madison's institute for stem cell research.
- There was a very small percent of rural
Wisconsin high school students who were
comfortable coming to a big campus like UW-Madison.
So, we thought that this would be a great idea
to bring them to campus to help them see
what kind of science is being done, to help them
alleviate their fear of the unknown and of the campus,
and at the same time empower them and give them
the confidence they need to think about
a future career in science.
- So, if you have a bubble somewhere on your slide,
if you just sort of gently tap the PMS stamp.
- We did passaging of cells where we put them
in new plates to grow.
- You're ready to--.
So now, you sort of want to flip it upside down.
- The students made structures
to hold stem cells together, to form tissues.
- Tissue engineering is scaffold mixed with cells.
So, that's exactly what we're doing.
We're taking our hydro scaffold and embedding our cells.
- Right now, the tissues are things like
the cartilage in your ear.
The campers see an even greater promise in the future.
- I hope that they're able to finally transplant organs.
I think that's a major thing that should be done with them.
It's just, it would help so many people.
- Like last year and the year before, we hope
you'll say this is the best camp you've ever attended.
- The camp began in 2007.
That was the year after a national election in which
stem cells were a hot button issue.
- What you do in Missouri matters to
millions of Americans, Americans like me.
- Most stem cells come from human embryos
left over from in-vitro fertilization procedures.
- Senator Talent even wanted to criminalize the science
that gives us a chance for hope.
- Then and now, the camp begins with a presentation
by a medical ethicist.
- Whether you're going to be working with patients
or you're going to be working in basic discovery science,
whether it's stem cells or nano technology,
you will be coming across policy
and ethical and political issues.
They're just going to be there.
- I care deeply about stem cell research.
- I knew that there was a great deal of potential
in the technology, but I had no idea
where it was or how it was done.
- Caitlin Bowie of New Glarus attended
the first stem cell camp in 2007.
She had paid attention to the ads with Michael J. Fox.
- Michael J. Fox has Parkinson's disease and that's a disease
that's pretty similar to my mom's disease, which is MS.
And, it was really interesting to see
someone talk about how promising it could be,
especially for a disease that was so similar,
because it made me think, if it's promising for Parkinson's,
then there's probably a lot of potential for it
to help patients with MS.
- Bowie wrote about her mother's Multiple Sclerosis
in her essay seeking admission to the camp.
- Nine years ago, my mother was diagnosed with MS
and I've watched her cope with the results
of her condition for more than half of my life.
If there was any way for my mom to walk again,
to cure her illness, then I would pursue it wholeheartedly.
I had been under the impression that it was a fix-all.
Like, it could, you know, just inject stem cells
and you'll regrow a body part that you need
or it'll repair a damaged liver, or something like that,
but it's so much more complicated than that.
- So, that's the kind of thing we're looking at.
It's the small changes in people's lives
and I think you get absorbed with trying to cure ALS
so they're gonna play tennis again, but we're talking about small steps.
- Caitlyn Bowie is now a student at UW-Eau Claire
with a double major in biology and art.
She asked if she could come back to this year's camp
and see what changed.
- There's a few different presentations that they've made,
a couple advances that are really intriguing.
- Go back and get the rest of those.
When you're doing that, you should be seeing
the neural parts of those colonies fall right off.
- Bowie spent time under a lab hood sorting stem cells
which then turned them into nerve cells.
- Good. Excellent.
- It seems like it's taking a long time,
but when you look at the leaps and bounds that
they're making in a matter of three years only,
it's very impressive.
- And she learned applications involving
the nervous system are progressing faster than
other areas of stem cell science.
- The only approved stem cell transplant trial
in America is the so-called Geron Trial.
Has anybody heard about that?
You already talked about that? For spinal cord injury.
And the idea is that in spinal cord injuries
myelin around the cells dissolves.
- Myelin acts as an insulator between nerve cells
and the other cells that surround them.
- In MS, the myelin coating on the nerves is destroyed
and it disrupts the connection between your brain,
and it telling your muscles in your body to do things.
So, if they could somehow repair the myelin,
I feel like that would do so much good for MS
and I think it would provide a lot of hope.
- Perhaps hope for Caitlin's mother.
- One of the stem cell campers is looking
for his own cure, and he's on a very personal quest.
Here's a preview of his story airing
next Thursday on "In Wisconsin."
- This is "In Wisconsin" reporter Art Hackett.
Cody Gensen is searching for answers deeper than
his local science class can provide.
- There's not very much science up here that is involved.
That you can just be a part of.
- Learn why he went on a quest to a unique camp at UW-Madison.
- An update now on a report we first brought you
six years ago about an unexpected visitor
to Wisconsin's Northwoods.
In the winter of 2005, food was so scarce in Canada,
the great gray owls moved south in record numbers.
At that time there was a prediction they could return.
"In Wisconsin" reporter Jo Garrett shows you
these phantoms of the north in Douglas County.
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- For us to have this many in Wisconsin is just jaw dropping.
It's beyond what anybody has ever seen.
Mind-boggling, jaw dropping,
once in a lifetime experience.
It's a huge owl from the north.
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Evidently, the small rodent population in Canada
is so small that these owls got really hungry up there
and they moved south, and if they hadn't moved,
they would be starving to death by the hundreds.
I would guess there's at least 100 birds in Douglas County.
- And in a normal year how many great gray owls would be in Douglas County?
- Um, if you're lucky, one.
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It's a cycle similar to, say, grouse and goshawk.
Every ten years or so, the grouse are real high in numbers
and they plummet, and the goshawk follows.
Rabbits and foxes is another cycle.
Well, it's the same with the mice and the owls.
Very docile animal eats mice.
Diurnal, which means it hunts in the daytime
rather than the middle of the night.
They like to hunt at least a corridor of open country.
That's why they're found along roads so much.
They hunt with their ears.
You can see them watching the snow, clueing in on
where the mouse is, and they'll plunge in the snow
without ever seeing a rodent.
So, they hunt by sound, even though they're hunting
in the daytime and can see really well.
They do it by hearing.
You can pull up right across from an owl,
but keep in mind that if he's hungry,
just the vibration from your car
could be messing up him hearing.
The bird is counting on being able to hear a mouse
walking under the snow, in order to eat.
So, a lot of traffic or cars sitting and idling
definitely interfere with that bird eating.
I've heard there are people here from New York
and California, and everything in between.
I've seen great gray owls before, but there are so many.
There's something special about
driving around and seeing 20 in a day.
You end up giggling.
There's another one, there's another one.
Never heard of something like this before.
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- Those magnificent birds are the world's tallest owls.
We checked with Robbye Johnson this week to see
if the gray owls did return as predicted six years ago.
So far, they have not.
Every year, a few great grays make their way to Minnesota,
but since that incursion in 2005,
Johnson, an avid birder, has never seen another
Great Gray owl in Wisconsin.
Now here's a look at some of the reports
we're working on for the next edition of "In Wisconsin."
Street cars in Wisconsin.
- Milwaukee has an opportunity to bring
street cars back after an absence since 1958,
when the last ones operated.
- This week, new information about
the low-speed rail plans for Wisconsin's largest city
with some answers coming from as far away as Germany.
- This is "In Wisconsin" reporter Andy Soth.
You'll see robo deer in action.
And it's not just Bambi's hi-tech brother...
- Conservation Warden! You're under arrest.
- ...that's helping the DNR move in and take down poachers.
- Also, Frank Lloyd Wright's vision for America.
- This is the only Model B-1 of the American System Homes
that was ever built.
- See how one Milwaukee neighborhood
is being transformed.
Join us for those "In Wisconsin" reports
next Thursday at 7:30
right here on Wisconsin Public Television.
Finally this week, a journey to Pewits Nest
outside of Baraboo in Sauk County.
In winter, the waterfalls along Skillet Creek
are frozen in time.
The deep gorge was formed during the retreat
of the last glacier.
Pewits Nest is owned by the Department of Natural Resources
and was designated a State Natural Area in 1985.
Enjoy the view and have a great week "In Wisconsin."
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- 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, we're on for you.
And Animal Dentistry and Oral Surgery Specialists
of Milwaukee, Oshkosh and Minneapolis.
A veterinary team working with pet owners
and family veterinarians providing care for oral disease
and dental problems of small companion animals.