[gentle guitar]
- Narrator: Stevens Point lies
in the Central Sands region of Wisconsin,
a landscape made up of sand, gravel, and boulders.
- Christine Thomas: We're a very glaciated area here.
The glaciers have defined what our topography looks like.
When the glaciers melted,
they left behind a very important water resource
and a very important soil resource.
- Justin Isherwood: They ground up northern Wisconsin and Canada
into sand, and we're sitting on what was the rummage sale
of the north end of the continent.
- Narrator: The rocky, sandy soils in the area
were low in fertility,
but immigrant farmers brought a tradition
of growing one crop that did well in sand: potatoes.
- Justin Isherwood: Stevens Point is the urban focus
of Wisconsin's potato industry.
When the railroads came in,
and they get loaded on the car and go to Chicago or wherever,
suddenly you had the world at your door.
- Patti Wolfe: Everyone was a potato farmer.
They raised potatoes as a main crop.
Schools had a potato vacation when it was harvesting time.
And you got two weeks off.
We were all supposed to help your mother and dad
with harvesting the potatoes.
Every day, we had potatoes.
Fried, baked, cooked every way.
I don't think there ever was a dinner made without potatoes.
- Narrator: To celebrate the success of potato farming,
Stevens Point had their first potato festival in 1936.
The prize-winning bushel of potatoes
was sent to President Franklin Roosevelt,
and a potato queen was crowned.
The humble potato had gone from farm table staple
to a source of community pride.
In good years, farmers on the Central Sands
grew enough food to feed their families
and sell the surplus.
But periods of drought created hard times
as the sandy soils quickly dried up
and potato yields went down.
[upbeat big band music]
After World War II,
farmers began to take advantage
of a new lightweight aluminum piping
to irrigate their crops.
- Newsreel: The whole operation is quite simple.
The sprinkler line distributes water
for about two hours or more.
Then it's disconnected,
carried over to the next location, and reassembled.
It just couldn't be much simpler.
[machinery creaks]
- Edward Okray: We started to irrigate potatoes
in the early forties,
out of a stream about a quarter of a mile away from here.
And at that time, we thought the yields,
the yield increase was dramatic.
In other words, we got up to 250, 300 bushels per acre,
which was double what we were used to getting.
- Justin Isherwood: Early irrigation
was basically out of ponds
or, specifically, they were called pits.
They were dug with steam shovels and large backhoes.
- Narrator: Portable irrigation transformed the farms
of the Central Sands area,
which now joined the agricultural revolution
sweeping across the country.
The UW-Madison Hancock Research Station,
located south of Stevens Point,
helped farmers apply the latest research and technologies.
- Christine Thomas: Their mission
is to serve the local farmers
in the kind of farming that they do
and help them figure out how to address problems.
They keep farmers up to speed
on what's the latest and greatest
with potato and vegetable production.
They basically extend their research to the local community.
- Justin Isherwood: The Hancock Field Days are almost as good
as farm auctions and funeral suppers.
You have a chance just to get together.
Then the researchers present what they've been doing,
and they cue us in to what's going on.
- Narrator: With help from the Hancock Research Center,
the farms of the Central Sands flourished.
- Justin Isherwood: It really was a bit like discovering gold
when we realized sometime in the late 40s and 50s
that down there was a big body of water, the aquifer.
[machinery hums]
- Narrator: In the late 1950s,
growers used a new drilling technique
to put in wells capable of pumping up
much larger volumes of water
for a new type of irrigation.
- Justin Isherwood: Perhaps the biggest evolution
was the invention of the center pivot,
and it has defined our part of the state.
- Christine Thomas: It's basically a set of pipes
whose center point is in the middle of a circle
that goes around in a circle
and waters your crop.
- Justin Isherwood: Irrigation brought stability.
It largely impacts the vegetables,
and that's potatoes, it's green beans,
it's peas, it's carrots,
cabbage.
And it would transform the value of the field
and its production two or three times.
About the same time, commercial fertilizer became possible.
The yields, again, from 40 hundredweights to 100, 150.
Add the water, just remarkable.
- Christine Thomas: Like everything in life,
there are pros and cons.
And the great thing about Central Sands agriculture
is that we grow wonderful crops
and these crops contribute to the Stevens Point economy.
Along the way, we have learned
when you apply fertilizer and chemicals
to sandy soil,
that some of those excess chemicals
can end up in the groundwater.
In the 1980s,
we had a professor here at Stevens Point.
His name was Byron Shaw.
His students discovered a pesticide in groundwater
that was a byproduct of potato production
in the Central Sands.
And so then the problem had to be addressed.
Well, it's 30 years later.
And we've figured out ways to grow potatoes
without this particular chemical.
[upbeat music]
- Justin Isherwood: It's all developing science.
There's new ways to deliver the product
that may be easier, simpler, cost-effective,
maybe even more ethical.
- Narrator: With irrigation, university research,
and generations of hard work,
Central Sands farmers made Wisconsin
into the largest producer of potatoes
east of the Mississippi
and one of the largest vegetable producers in the country.
- Justin Isherwood: We still have that love affair with the potato.
*