9UNP0224SD_Jerry_Apps_WordPress

- Welcome to the Wisconsin Book Festival. I'm the Artistic Director of MadCap. Welcome to this event. Today's event is being presented by the Wisconsin Historical Society Pess. We do have a bookseller outside. I'm not exactly sure what they do have. But they do have the book tonight and other Jerry Apps titles. On behalf of the Wisconsin Humanities Council, I'd like to welcome you to the 2008 Wisconsin Book Festival. We wouldn't be here without our generous sponsors, so I'd like to take a moment to thank them. Our presenting sponsors do include the -- Foundation, the Evjue Foundation, IMS, Isthmus, Overture Center for the Arts, DailyPage.com, the Pleasant T. 

Rowland Foundation, The American Girl Fund for Children, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Dozens of other organizations and hundreds of individuals do contribute their time and funds. So thank you to all of them. A special thanks to all of our Festival volunteers, who are wearing bright green t-shirts, and can be found throughout the Overture Center and other venues. If you have any questions, please ask them. They're very helpful. Again, we do have books and are hosting a signing after the event, so please stop by and show your support to the bookseller by purchasing a copy of the book if you don't already have one. So thank you again for joining us. If you have a moment to fill out your survey and drop it off at the end of the event. These surveys and the data collected through them does help us keep this event free and open to the public. 

So if you could take a moment, that would be wonderful. So thank you again for joining us. And without further ado, a gentleman from my parents' home neighborhood, Jerry Apps.

- Thanks. 
(APPLAUSE)

Thank you very much. So pleased to see so many of you who are out here on a breezy Sunday afternoon. And I thank you for coming. First, my brief commercial -- out at the table where the books are for sale, I have some business cards. And pick one up if you're interested, especially in looking at my Web site where I have a description of many of my books, I also have links to all kinds of things. 

Some of you who know my work know that I've been involved with the preservation of rural buildings, especially barns, for a long time. And I have a number of links to barn preservation material, among other things. Further, and can you believe it an old guy like me, I have a blog. Yes, I do. And about a year ago my web master, who happens to be my nephew, said to me Uncle Jerry you need to have a blog. And I didn't have a clue what a blog is. My grandkids, of course, know about those things. Well, he said, you need to have one of those. So I started a blog. And what I do is I don't write them as if I were writing in a journal, and there's no problem with that, some people do that. 

But what I write is a couple three paragraphs of something related to the history of farming, to the environment, something that goes on at my farm which I'll be talking about today and then I have an old-timers saying. Things that I've collected over the last 40 years especially from farm and small town people where I've spent my career. Just a sentence or two about my background. I worked as a county extension agent for five years in Green Lake County and in Brown County, Green Bay. My wife Ruth and I were in Green Bay when Vince Lombardi was there so we have some interesting stories to share about our years when we were in Green Bay. Then I moved to Madison and -- Ruth and I moved to Madison in 1962 and I was the publication's editor for the state 4-H office at that time. A little-known piece of trivia. And in those days I was writing and rewriting and editing the 4-H bulletins that were available to 4-H kids all over the state. And after that I went back to graduate school and then spent 30 years as a professor of agriculture at the U W Madison. So that's just a little bit of my background. 

I started writing way back when I was 12 years old. It was something that I, discovered I guess would be the right word, when I was attending a one-room country school. How many of you attended a one-room country school by the way? Well there are a few hands. Well they're all long gone they pretty much all closed by the 1960s. But a one-room country school is one where there's one teacher and all eight grades in one room. A great challenge for a teacher. And anyway that country school and the teachers that I had somehow or another got me interested, especially in reading first because reading and writing go very close together, but then in writing. When I was about 12, one of my aunts gave me a diary, a wee little book where she said why don't you write down some of the things that are going on on your farm, because I was born and raised on a farm which is only two miles from the farm I'm going to be talking about. I began writing in this little diary and I still have it. 

And I wrote one or two sentences about the weather and about what was happening in school, it was nothing profound. But it was the whole idea of doing it I guess that was of interest. And I've never stopped doing that. I've been at it for years. My first book was published in 1970. So I've been in the book publishing business for quite a long time as well. But today I want to spend some time talking about my new book which is called Old Farm. And there's a cover photo of it right down in front that you can look at. And the Wisconsin Historical Society Press published it. It is a history book. 

It's a book of memories. It's a family story and it's much more. And today want to read a little bit from it and, well, give you some flavor for what I did in writing it. The book is -- how many of you were fans of James Michener when he was writing? Quite a few. You remember Michener, what Michener would do in all of his books and I especially remember Centennial, which is the history of Colorado, he goes back and spends, and I don't, 150 pages on what the glacier did. And if you can work your way through Michener's glacier story you're all set for a wonderful story. Well I started with the glacier with my book, not 150 pages of glacier, but a few. And it is absolutely fascinating if you're going to understand something about Wisconsin's agriculture, Wisconsin's environment, you need to spend some time -- I suggest this as an old professor talking -- spend some time looking at our geological history. Now our farm, the one that I'm talking about today, the one that's been in my family, it's not my old home farm, but it's been in our family for 40 plus years, is right on what is known as the terminal moraine. 

Now that's where the glaciers stopped. And the glacier that affected our land is the same one that affected the county in this area. It was called the Green Bay lobe And it began receding 10,000 years ago. And as it began receding, it left behind the hills and valleys and the rivers and lakes and the stones. Stones of every size. Stones the size of pebbles. Stones the size of Volkswagen cars. Big stones and little stones and as a farm kid, I grew up picking stones. And my dad would often say if nothing else grows on this farm, stones will grow. And there's truth to that because the frost each spring brings literally, literally does, brings up the stones that are embedded in that glacial till. 

Something else about the terminal moraine that fascinated me, and you only have to go two miles west of my farm toward Plainfield, toward Plover, some of you know that area if you go up Highway 39 Interstate 39 north, and just two miles from our farm is old glacial lake Wisconsin. That huge flat area was at one time a lake. Huge lake. Thousands of acres. Most people don't realize that when that lake burst it created Wisconsin Dells. It went rushing south and created those wonderful stone formations that we today can see at Wisconsin Dells. So we were right on that terminal moraine, a place where the water our aquifer, where get our well water at our farm, that water runs east. And it ends up in Green Bay. And ultimately in the Atlantic ocean. And two miles west of our farm the water runs west. 

And it ends up in the Wisconsin River and the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico. So right at my farm, it's hard to think about that, but the water doesn't know which direction to go and my cousin happens to live right in the middle of that disjointed area and he has 350 feet to water, he's got to go below those competing aquifers to get water. That's one of the interesting parts of the glacier. It left for us, unfortunately, in that part of Waushara County, poor soil. Sandy soil. Hilly soil. Rocky soil. Soil that was very difficult for the farmers to make a living. We also are in the middle, not quite the middle, on the edge of what's called the biological tension zone. Now the biological tension zone, in addition to studying geology I would invite you to study some botany, to look at -- and zoology-- to look at a strip about 20 or 30 miles wide, imaginary area from a map's perspective, but a real area in terms of what's happening there, starting at the Mississippi River roughly at La Crosse and then winding through central Wisconsin and ending up north of Port Washington is this biological tension zone. 

Why is it called that? It's called that because at our farm we have bur oak that are native. We have white pine that are native. Bur oak are native to southern Wisconsin, white pine are native to northern Wisconsin. We have bear. Some of the southern Wisconsin counties are seeing bears these days, too. We've had bear in our neck of the woods for many years. So we have an overlapping of plant and animal species and if you combine that -- and I tell tall tales to my grandkids about, could you imagine, especially I take them out on night walks when it's dark and the moon is not out, and I say now just imagine what it would be like, what it's like here right now, where the biological tension zone and the terminal moraine are intersecting because this is the only place in Wisconsin where that happens. And their eyes get big and my grandkids -- now the older ones -- are spinning tales to the younger cousins that stands their hair on end about what might happen, mysterious things that might happen in this intersection of the biological tension zone and the terminal moraine. So I spent some time researching that and writing about that and there are some maps in the book that illustrate what I've just been talking about. 

But then to tell the story of a piece of land in Wisconsin, to tell the story of a piece of land in the Middle West and much of the United States as far as that goes, one needs to know the Native American history. And so then I began researching -- I knew some of it -- then I began researching the Native American history of our area and our area for thousands of years was Menominee country. The land west of Lake Poygan, the land north of the Fox River, the land east of the Wisconsin River and north, and that's where our farm is, that was Menominee country. Menominee Indian country. In 1847 there were 2500 Menominee Indians in that huge area as best the federal government could determine in their census count of Native Americans which wasn't all that easy. And of that 2500, and this is a little-known fact, there were as many as 300 of the Menominee who were farmers, who lived in one spot, who grew corn, who grew squash, who lived in one place near Oshkosh. Now those of you who don't know the history -- little of the history at least -- of the Menominee's know that their chief happened to have been Oshkosh. Chief Oshkosh. And in 1848, the year that Wisconsin became a state, the federal government, in its wisdom or lack thereof, decided that something had to be done about this vast territory that the Menominee called theirs. We needed another treaty. 

The United States wanted to buy those acres of land and so there was a negotiation with Chief Oshkosh and his sub chiefs. And that treaty was tentatively drawn in 1848, the same year that Wisconsin became a state. That was the last major Indian treaty. You can find all of this on the Internet, those of you are interested in reading Indian treaty, it's all there on both sides, the federal government, the Native American side, who signed the document. All of that is there. And when that document was presented to Chief Oshkosh and he began to understand the stipulations of the treaty, which suggested is that the Menominee, all 2500 of them including the 300 who had established themselves as farmers, should leave Wisconsin and go to Minnesota and be placed on a reservation on-- Well, I'll come to that in a moment to describe what it was like there. And Chief Oshkosh was a very wise person. Chief Oshkosh, some of you have seen pictures of him if you've been to the Oshkosh Museum, the Historical Society has pictures of him. He wore a big top hat and he's kind of a goofy looking guy but he wasn't goofy at all. He was very wise. 

He said I want to see that land before I sign this document. And so he and a couple three sub chiefs and the Menominees were very well organized. People think they were a bunch of savages. They were very well organized. And Oshkosh said I want to see that land and went out to Minnesota and discovered that the land that they were to now spend the rest of their lives on was God awful land. It was much worse than central Wisconsin land by far. And not only that, that Minnesota land, the reservation land where they were supposed to go was adjacent to a Sioux Indian reservation. And the Menominees and the Sioux had been for generations at war. And Chief Oshkosh came back, and I paraphrase now, we're not going to go. I'm not going to sign that treaty. 

Well that was something that the federal negotiators had not heard before because they had offered Chief Oshkosh the magnificent sum of money, about $.17 an acre, when all was said and done for all of that land. And what did Oshkosh do? But he and his sub chiefs went to Washington D.C. Because Chief Oshkosh said I'm not going to sign this document, we're not going to go to Minnesota, I want to talk to your big chief. Well they traipsed off to Washington D.C., and you all know who the President of the United States was in 1850? You don't all know that. You do all know that. Millard Fillmore. You get the prize I have yet to find anybody. 
(APPLAUSE)

Yes, clap for this woman. 

Millard, one of our favorite presidents. You hear of his deeds everywhere. 
(LAUGHTER)

He was very wise at that moment because he listened to Chief Oshkosh. And Chief Oshkosh pleaded with him that any -- and I'm paraphrasing again and it was translated, of course, as well, any land in Minnesota-- Backup, any land in Wisconsin is better than this land in Minnesota. Some of you are from Minnesota and I don't mean to throw stones at you but that part of Minnesota was not the best. Well what they ended up doing is, bless Millard Fillmore, he said you've got a point. And they renegotiated the treaty. And the result of that renegotiation was the formation of Menominee, was then the Menominee reservation, now Menominee county, where they are today. I did not know all of that history. 

And I found that absolutely fascinating. So Chief Oshkosh is one of the heroes of my story. Now it's 1851 now, and the treaties have been signed. And all the land has to become available for sale. And I'm going to get to my farm in a minute -- you're wondering what's all this got to do with this guy's farm? That's when the surveyors came in. And again you could go online today and you can read the original survey notes, which I did, and they're in the book. And the original survey maps are absolutely fascinating. Can you imagine in 1851 the surveyors that came into where my farm is in Waushara County, wrote in their notes, as best as we can determine no white person lives here. That's kind of interesting. 

Now here they're surveying, they have no infrastructure they're intense and they're doing all of this without the lasers and all the stuff that surveyor's do today. So in 1851, in the spring, May, they came in and they lay into Waushara County and they laid out to the township line six miles square. A second group of surveyors came in October and they laid out the section lines, section 640 acres and the quarter sections, 160. So that's how the whole Midwest was surveyed. I just got fascinated with the whole survey system. So I probably went beyond what some of you are interested, I described how it works. And if you own property, it's just really fun. Once you know how the survey system works, you only have to look at your property description and you can find out how far you are from Illinois. You can find out how far you are from the fourth principle meridian. It's right there in the description. 

But you need to read about that. It takes a while. Ira Cook, he was the head surveyor. He wrote this about Rose Township which is where my farm is located. This township is mostly made up of a high ridge of barren hills on which there is very little timber but which are covered with a stunted growth of black oak brush. There's very little workable land in the township. The hills are filled with granite boulders. That was not a very promising description for someone who might want to buy that land. So it remained federal land until 1867 when a Civil War veteran by the name of Tom Stewart, who had been born in New York State, and a lot of early settlers here in Wisconsin came from New York, upstate New York, his name was Tom Stewart, homesteaded our farm in 1867. I found in my old house a stencil that has Tom Stewart. 

The stencil that he likely used when he was in the Civil War to put his name on his gear. So now I was off and running with determining the history of my own farm and how it was that Tom Stewart -- what happened to him, how did he work his way through. Well one of Tom Stewart's children, her name was Ina, Ina Stewart, she was born on our farm in 1876. Tom Stewart stayed on the farm until he proved up. Which means he stayed there long enough to build a building and a barn and a house and a cabin and plowed some of the land. We were right on the edge of the tall grass prairie. Those of you that do prairie restoration which is one of the things that I do, we have big bluestem and little bluestem and switch grass and Indian grass and all that kind of stuff growing there naturally. But right at the edge of that -- east of us a few miles of land it was heavier, more wooded. Well, Tom Stewart's daughter, she married of course and they moved around. And in 1911 Ina Stewart and her husband came back to live on the farm where she was born, which I find just really interesting because she was born, she came back there that's our place now and let me add another feature, I knew her. 

When I was in high school, we lived 2 miles from the farm. When I was in high school, her son worked for us, he helped us cut wood in wintertime. And I would take him home because they didn't have a car. I'll tell you a little bit about the family. The name was Combs then, John Combs was Ina's husband. They had no electricity, no indoor plumbing, they heated their home with a wood stove. They farmed with horses. They never owned a car. They drove a team of horses to Wild Rose, which is the nearest village, for groceries. And I would go home when I was helping chop wood, which was part of what kids did in those days, with Weston, and I would take him home. 

And I'm going to read just a little bit about Ina, his mother, this daughter of the person who homesteaded our farm. Mind you now this house didn't even have plastered walls. They broke apart boxes and nailed them on the wall. And she had these little sayings all over the house. An old friend is a good friend. That kind of stuff. They had absolutely nothing. People were poor in those days in our neck of the woods, our family was in that category, but we were no where near as poor as they were. So I've taken a regional story about when I took Weston home one time and here's his mother. Ina poured three cups of coffee from the sooty pot thick, black and hot. 

From somewhere on the counter three large white cookies appeared. Here you are, she offered, they'll warm your innards. Help yourself to a cookie or two. We sat sipping coffee, not saying much of anything. Going to be a long, cold winter, Ina said, like those when I was a little girl. Ina like recalling the story she had heard from her folks when they lived on the farm. Was it colder then, I asked. Colder, this ain't nothing. I remember when I was 10 years old, we went six weeks without the thermometer ever crawling above zero. Some mornings when I got up the water pail, one just like that one over there, was froze solid from the bottom to the top. 

And my mom put it right on the hottest part of the stove and it was still an hour before there was enough water for us to have a decent drink. Ina repeated stories she had heard from her parents about the Menominee Indians. Now this is another really interesting topic. I've heard all these Indian stories when I was a kid, that was another reason I wanted to do the research and find out more about them. Ina repeated stories she had heard from her parents about the Menominee Indians coming through Skunks Hollow, that's the name of our area, Skunks Hollow. Doesn't that really-- can you see a residential condo development, "Skunks Hollow?" 
(LAUGHTER)

I hope there's never one there. Ina repeated stories she heard from her parents about the Menominee Indians coming through Skunks Hollow each spring on their way to the trading post in Berlin. Berlin is on the Fox River, 30 miles to the east. 

There the Indians traded hides trapped the previous winter for supplies which is salt and sugar. The younger children and the women rode-- tied to the sides of the horses. The Indians camped near the storage pond, our pond now, as they rested on their journey to the Fox River trading post. Their campfires sent spirals of old smoke skyward. One of them could talk pretty fair English, Ina said. The others probably could talk it too but seemed this one fellow did most of the talking. Sometimes he and a couple of younger men would ask for sugar or salt and then they'd sit here by the stove and talk. Pa told me all about it. Some of the children in the neighborhood were frightened of the Indians, Ina said, but there was nothing to be scared of. Pa said we never had any trouble with them. 

We didn't bother them, they didn't trouble us. Now one of the interesting provisions of the treaty was that the Menominees were free to travel across any federal land that had not yet been sold. They had no way of knowing what was sold and what wasn't sold so they just went right through our area and camped at our pond. And when I saw the first survey map, I perked up because I saw just about less than a mile from our farm on the survey map is a crooked little trail and it's Indian trail. Today that's County Highway A. They never straightened it out. People always wondered why is County A so crooked? It was an Indian trail. A really fascinating piece of history. Well now, I'm going to tell you a little bit about how we came to get this place. 

The Combs' farmhouse burned in 1959. It was no surprise because they didn't have a chimney. The stovepipe went right up through the roof. And after the house burned, the family moved away. They moved to Wild Rose. And so the farm was there. We didn't realize this, my dad and our family didn't realize, that they had not paid their taxes for a long time. And somebody in the county clerk's office in Wautoma said to my dad one day, Norman, you need a little more land, don't you? And Pa said, I don't think I need any more land. He had 160 acres of his own where I grew up. 

And the clerk said you can get it cheap you just have to pay the back taxes. And so Pa paid the back taxes and now he had 100 more acres of land: sandy, stony, hilly land in Skunks Hollow. Well then my dad did a wonderful thing and he's been dead since 1993. In 1966, just a couple of years later, he sold the farm to my two brothers and me for $1. I paid $.33 for the farm that I talk about in this book. And I bought out my brother a few years later and I must fess-up that he, bless him, said I can't take just $.33 I need a little more than that. It turned out to be a lot more than that but anyway. Now we've got 65 acres that our farm is about. And the buildings-- now remember I said the house had burned, the pump house had started to burn, it was all charred on one side, the barn was about to fall down, and there was a grainery which had a chicken house lean-to on one side, and the machine shed, and the corn crib on the other side. And in my dad's words when we looked at the grainery, he said, you could throw a cat through the side of the wall any place. 

Which was true. It was just a shabby building. And Ruth and I-- I was teaching here at the university at that time and didn't have any money. But we wanted to live out there some of the time. And we thought of buying an A-frame. A-frames were popular in those days. We went into Fish Lumber. I don't know if any of you remember Fish Lumber in Middleton. And we looked at a wonderful A-frame. And they wanted, can you believe it, they wanted $1,500 for an A-frame, outrageous. 

Think about that today. So we looked at the old grainery and decided that maybe, just maybe we could make that old grainery livable. Now there happened to be a Norwegian carpenter, retired Norwegian carpenter, Ole Knutson-- 
(LAUGHTER)

Ole Knutson-- This is not fiction by the way. I do write fiction but this happens to be the true story. Ole Knutson lived in Wild Rose and my dad had gone to country school with Ole and he said let me talk to Ole. And let him come out and see if this old grainery is worth fixing. An Ole would know because the thing really looked shot. Well, Ole came out and looked at it and said you know fundamentally this building is not bad. 

They were smart enough to put a concrete wall under it so it's got a good foundation. The roof isn't in very good shape and the side walls are no good at all but if you've got a good foundation and the rest of it's mostly straight, I think we can do something with it. Well I want to read you a little bit about Ole, because Ole-- We camped there, we stayed in an old tent while we were working on our building. And Ole Knutson would come out from Wild Rose and help us. We didn't have any electricity. We were doing this all by hand tools. When Ole had agreed to our carpentry project, I had told him we had no electricity for his tools. I'll dig out all my old tools, my old ones, Ole said with a smile. Good to be back using them anyway. On this day he proudly showed me a box of saws all carefully stored in oil so they wouldn't rust. 

A crosscut saw. A ripsaw. A finishing saw, and others whose names I forgot. Our first task was to install the big 4x4 beam across the ceiling of the first floor of the grainery to give it more stability. Ole measured the beam, marked the wood and handed me the saw. Anyone who knows anything about wood knows that sawing oak can be a challenge. Especially dry oak. This old beam was more than 50 years dry. Looks to me like you're a little soft, Ole said as my sawing slowed. But you'll toughen up before this project's over, he said smiling. 

When he arrived that morning Ole had complained that his arthritis was bothering him. But he took the saw from me and soon a pile of sweet smelling sawdust had gathered at his feet. He hadn't even broken a sweat in the process. We lifted the beam into place. It fit perfectly. Ole had all of these wonderful sayings. Lucky aces, Ole said. I'd never heard of it. Ole proclaimed, and this is another famous phrase, ladies and gentlemen we now need a post to hold up the beam. He thought he was talking to a huge audience. 

We had a leftover piece of 4x4 which Ole measured and I sawed and sawed and sawed until it was cut all the while I was thinking about what it would take to bring electricity into the place. The Combs family never had electricity so there was no wiring, no nothing. So we would have to start from scratch. We slid the post into place after lifting the beam a quarter inch or so with dad's hydraulic jack. Make a good fit when we take the jack out, Ole said. With the jack out, we nailed everything in place. Time for a rest, Ole said. No sense hurrying. You'll live a lot longer if you take your time, do a better job too. Hurrying makes for mistakes. 

And mistakes make for a poor building. This was just one of the many bits of wisdom the old carpenter had acquired over the years. During our years working together, Ole taught me many carpentry skills but he taught me much more. As he was a storyteller and a country philosopher. Ruth and I immediately decided, because I had grown up with a garden, my mother always had a garden especially during the years of the Depression and World War II, we lived off of our garden. So I wanted a garden. And we decided to plant a garden. How old were our kids in about '67 or '68? They're just little guys. So we planted two acres of garden. 

Two acres of garden. Now that's a lot of garden. And I grew up hoeing the tomatoes and cucumbers and green beans and other garden stuff so we had this big garden and it was a wonderful garden. I wanted to teach my kids how to hoe. I had this mistaken idea that hoeing built character. Because that's what my dad always said. And my kids said to me, dad that ain't it. There's something more to character than hoeing. But that's another whole thing that we can talk about later if you want to. Now Ruth, I'm blaming Ruth for this. 

Hold up your hand Ruth so you can see her. You can speak with her later so you can see how much of this I've messed up. Ruth suggested we should try zucchini squash one year. In the days when summer squash and especially the zucchini were not yet popular. I had never grown zucchini. Neither had my folks. For them squash was something you harvested in this fall, stored in the cellar and enjoyed throughout the winter. In what quickly became known in our family as the year of the zucchini, we put in a long row of zucchini, 30 or 40 feet. Any of you grow zucchini? Yeah, you know about this. 

I planted them as I would winter squash, giving them lots of room to grow and spread out. The rains came on time. The sun was formed. The pests were few and the zucchini began growing and never stopped. The plants were soon three feet tall, dark green and rather handsome. Soon the big yellow blossoms began appearing followed by the fruit. We still haven't figured out what one does with zucchini. I assumed it was like winter squash so we let it grow. And it grew and grew and grew some more. What looked like cucumbers on Monday looked like green baseball bats on Friday. 

By the next Friday these long, green and fattening fruits were four feet long and still growing. I started to harvest some of them cording them up in my arms as I would stove wood. Quite impressive, Ruth said. What do I do with them? Bake them, I said. They're squash, aren't they. I had the giant zucchini but I couldn't figure out how to remove the seeds, as you would with the winter squash. I declared the entire project a disaster. An experiment that had clearly grown out of hand. I stacked the zucchini at the end of the garden row. 

And an impressive stack it was. I decided I would plow them under in the fall, give them back to the soil from which they came as a fertility gift. Slyly and discreetly I acquired of some of my gardening friends about what to do with zucchini. I didn't share the knowledge that I now had a pile of zucchini three feet high and four feet wide, not unlike a stack of cut pulpwood ready for hauling to a paper mill. I wish that paper mills had wanted zucchini, we would have prospered that summer. Oh, zucchini is wonderful, one friend gushed. She proceeded to talk about frying zucchini. Whoever heard of frying squash? Making zucchini bread and cake and slicing them up in salads. The little ones are best, those six inches or so long, she said. 

I didn't share that our zucchini was as large as baseball bats and bigger. You only need two or three hills and you have all you want, she added. How about 25 hills, I wanted to reply but didn't. Well that was a little bit of our garden adventure. I still garden. I have a garden right now. It's not two acres anymore but we still go at it. I'm going to wind this down here pretty soon. We operate our place now as a tree farm. It's got to pay for itself. 

It's not just something where we go and watch the sunset, though we do that. It's, we planted some flowers and trees this spring. We had a major forestry project a couple years ago. But there are benefits from our farm that go well beyond the economic. The economic is very important, but there are a lot of other things about our farm that are as important, if not more important. We do prairie restoration, as I mentioned. And I want to say a word about these pictures in a moment. They say something our prairie restoration. But I want to read you just a little bit about what I wrote on the topic of solitude, which is a little different than some of the other stuff I've been telling you about. Henry David Thoreau wrote, I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of time. 

To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearysome and dissipating. I have never found the companion that is so companionable as solitude. While I don't fully agree with Thoreau, it appears he would value solitude over conversations with others. I do need solitude in my life. And I found it at my farm. I enjoy being alone. I seek it out. And seldom, if ever, am I lonely when I am alone there. For me, solitude is a way to escape the demands, requests and pressures of everyday life. A way to run from the crowds who constantly push, literally and figuratively. 

Solitude is the road to finding the side of myself that is often buried and neglected. It allows me to come out from behind myself and blink in the light of the bright sun. Being alone allows me to think uninterrupted, or not to think at all. It is important to allow my mind to go blank from time to time. Without a need to produce, decide, consider, weigh, figure out, lament, or whatever other activity the mind does during the course of a typical day. I find great joy in friends and friendship, in children and family, but I also value dearly my regular opportunities for solitude. Both are important to me in liberal doses, and one is not more important than the other. To be sure, being alone and being with others appear to be opposites. But not for me. Connecting and being disconnected are part of the same phenomenon. 

I need both regularly and in near equal amounts. It is not difficult to find opportunities to be with others. Indeed, the invitations to do so come regularly. It is more difficult to find the opportunity to be alone these days, especially in the face of those who do not subscribe to its importance, and who see those who seek it as anti-social and strange. So I travel to Waushara, often alone for several days, in search of solitude. And I want to wind up with just a couple of paragraphs, then I'll say a word about the pictures. Then you can ask me whatever you want. As we have taken from this farm, and at the same time, labored to preserve and protect it, we have struggled with age-old questions about people's relationship to the land. The natural world is a vast expanse of overlapping layers of facts, ideas and perspectives, understandable at one level, and incomprehensible at another. It is always the same, yet always changing. 

It is science and mystery, chaos and calm. It's value exceeds by many times the sum of its parts. Botonists, zoologists, ecologists, and environmentalists have long sought to label, categorize, research and understand the elements of nature. But they are deluded in thinking that they understand, that they know, once they have labeled and categorized. Such work is only a feeble beginning in comprehending the natural world and its intricate relationships. Likewise, most of our learning about the land is draped in technical matters, classifications, scientific study, cause and effect relationships. What is often missing is what Aldo Leopold called a land ethic. Storied in history, community and compassion. The bigger picture. To value the land and the natural world demands an appreciation that goes deeper than knowing, deeper than an understanding, to a level that involves not only the head, but also the heart. 

And just one more little piece. My personal views about land developed from growing up years on a farm, and from my 40+ years caring for our farm, include a strong belief that land is something to cherish and revere, to pass on to those who follow in better condition than it was acquired. Our farm is a source of fresh vegetables for eating, trails for hiking, paths for skiiing and snowshoeing, hills for sunset watching, fields for running, wildflowers to appreciate, and birds and animals to study. It is a storehouse of history and stories. My land is also a guide and a listener when I face some crisis in my life, the loss of a loved one, a professional disapointment, a health challenge. I sit on a hill surrounded by sky and acres of trees and grass. This helps me heal. My farm is always changing, but forever the same. I know a good deal about this old place. But there remains much more to learn. 

I try to follow what others have taught me, to listen, watch, experience, study, dig into history, look for old barbed wire, search out a gulley, watch a hawk soar on a cloudless day, and never forget to take care of the land. Thank you very much. I'm going to tell you about the pictures in just a minute. 
(APPLAUSE)

My son is a professional photographer, Steve. He works for the Wisconsin State Journal. He's their Green Bay Packer photographer. He would be here right now, except he's in Green Bay. The interesting situation. Steve and I have done, I don't know, a half a dozen books together. 

And the other day I was asking Steve, what's different about taking pictures of butterflies and photographing the Packer game. And he said, "Dad, the butterfiles don't try to run over you." 
(laughter)

It's a point. Now, the father has to brag about the son, too. This year, Steve received the Photographer of the Year award from the National Football Hall of Fame. So his picture of Brett Favre in a snowstorm, that was the one that won it. It's now at the Football Hall of Fame. He called me. He's a pretty modest kid. 

He doesn't talk very much. He says, I take pictures, you talk. I'll take the pictures. And he said, dad, I just found out today that I'm going to be in the Football Hall of Fame before Brett Favre. 
(LAUGHTER)

I said how could that be. Then he told me about this award. These are Steve's photos. There are 100 of them in the book. Those of you who are not into reading, Lord, I hope you all are. 

But if you're not, you can just page through the book and look at the pictures. They are stunning. The State Historical Society Press and the printer who worked with them did a wonderful job of capturing, beyond what any of us had hoped for, the quality of Steve's photos. This is our prairie. This is the cover of the book. But this is our prairie. And we are into preserving Karner Blue Butterflies. Does anybody know about Karner Blue Butterflies? A few of you do. We are right in the middle of a Karner Blue Butterfly range. 

And they are a federally endangered butterfly. They're little bitty guys. They're about the size of your thumb. Really little. And you see this little guy right there? Now, the question-- The other day I was giving this talk somewhere, and this woman came up to me. She said, "How in the world did you get that butterfly to land on that 'O'?" 
(LAUGHTER)

This is one of our little pastures, where I cut the hay. I'm still an old farmer. 

And we use it for a very practical reason. A couple, three or four winters ago, when we didn't have very much snow, our septic system froze up. So I now cover it with hay. So every year, we do a hay project. And this is the old-timer plowing through one of his other little pastures, little prairies that we're restoring. We heat our place with a wood stove. We do our cooking on a wood stove. I'm trying to teach my kids, and my daughter is right over there. Hold up your hand, Susie. Susie is a school teacher in town. 

I'm trying to teach them that when you use a wood stove, pine wood burns differently than oak wood, than cherry. They all say, dad, why do you tell us these things, it doesn't matter. When you're at the farm, it matters. This shot is when you lift up the lid on the stove and you look down into the stove. And that's a piece of wood burning in the stove. And Steve has a great story to tell. Before we modernized our place a little bit, and put in some other kinds of heat to supplement the wood stove, Steve said that his job when we were there Thanksgiving time each year, was he was our thermostat, our family's thermostat. So he would sleep downstairs. There's a loft above the grainery, which we used for a bedroom. And Steve would sleep downstairs. 

When he would wake up cold, he knew he had to get up and put wood in the stove. That was the human thermostat part of it. This is our pond. It's five acres when it's up. It's down now. It's a water table pond. And the glacier did some wonderful things in creating these ponds. A huge chunk of ice was left by the glacier. And when it melted and the bottom dropped out, it left these little ponds, kettle ponds. There are a whole bunch of them in the area. 

If you want to come up later and look, this is the Karner Blue, way blown up. Karner Blue Butterfly. A beautiful little butterfly. They depend, the Karner Blues, on Lupin. That's the final picture in the corner. Lupin flowers. They're wild. We have five acres of them. We literally have hundreds of Karner Blue Butterflies. And we've had a wonderful time trying to figure out what they're all about, what their hatches are, and that. 

I want to mention one other thing, and then I'll answer questions. On the first of November, at the Historical Society Museum, which is just a short hike from here, on the Capital Square, I will be doing a workshop from 10 to 2, on how to do the geneology of your land. Because a secondary purpose of this book, and this is the teacher in me always, I can't get rid of it, is to help others find the story of their land. For as you know the story of your barn, your old house, your old land, you're going to take care of it. The more you know about the history of something, the more likely you're going to cherish it. So my final thing would be, learn how to listen to the land. It has a story to tell that's unbelievable. Now, questions. Please, I've dumbfounded all of you? 
(inaudible)

The question is, is prairie restoration merely taking an older piece of ground that might have been a pasture, corn field, or whatever it might have been, and just letting it do its thing, will it come back. Yes and no. There are several ways of doing a prairie renovation. And I am doing the least-- I do not go in and plow up all areas and plant prairie seeds back. I don't do that. Some people do. And that's wonderful. What I'm doing, is getting out the invasive species, like scotch pine, anything that provides shade. Prairie grasses and wildflowers require full sun. And I am so pleased when I discovered this. 

There's a side hill on our farm that was too steep to ever farm. And that's loaded with big Blue Stem, this tall. It was there forever. And now, I'm encouraging that to come back to my prairie. Oh, the Lupin. We had tiny little patch of Lupin in our prairie. Gosh, it was like a quarter of an acre or less. And again, I cleared out the scotch pine and the scrub oak. And I never planted a Lupin seed yet. I've got five acres of it now. 

So my whole thing is be healthy so you can live long enough to see all of this happen by itself. 
(inaudible)

Yes. 
(inaudible)

- My question is, did you consult with an agent on which species are invasive?

- Of course. 
(inaudible)

- Yes. 
(inaudible)

Thank you. 

The question is, do you study the area long enough to know what's an invasive species and what's a native species. And then, do you go about removing the invasive species. The answer is yes. I could do a lot more and speed up the process. But I'm thrilled with the idea. I've been doing this for 30 years, this prairie restoration. And now, each year, I find a new wildflower that I've not seen before. I find a new grass that I haven't seen before. I don't know where in the world they came from. That, to me, is just absolutely thrilling. 

But most people want to do it more quickly that that, and that's fine. 
(inaudible)

Of course they are. 
(inaudible)

That's right. 
(inaudible)

But they're not hay. There are a number of publications. There are publications on native plant species in Wisconsin. I don't know about North Carolina. 

Although I talked there one time. I don't know it very well. We have a real problem, everybody does, with invasive species. In central Wisconsin, as strange as it sounds, one of the invasive species happens to be the scotch pine. And why is that? Well, the scotch pine was brought in as a Christmas tree. There was thousands of acres of Christmas trees, and that whole market has gone south. And so those trees are all over the place spreading their seeds. And they do remarkably well. And they are not a commercial tree for me. 

I grow red pine and white pine. Here's another thing. A natural rejuvenation of a forest, I have five acres of white pine that are naturally rejuvenating, because you when everybody said that white pine are native to our area, so they grow pretty well. Back in the '30s, during the Dust Bowl years of the Depression, both together, John Combs, Ina's husband, who I told you about earlier. He planted a row of white pine as a wind break. When we got the place in '66, the land, the five or six acres just east of that wind break was a corn field. And I said we're just going to leave it be. That's one of the most beautiful, natural white pine, five- or six-acre plots you can find. And when we did a thing, and this is kind of interesting I think. We did a thing of our planted trees, our red pine. 

Then the forester, they have a tree cutter, these huge machines that come in and grab the tree, slice it up and all that. And he looks at me and he says, "Jerry, where are the rows?" I said, "These are self seeded." He says, "I can't cut trees where there aren't rows." What does that say about what's happening to the world? So we had to figure out a way so he could cut trees where there weren't any rows. Somebody else? Yeah? 
(inaudible)

- Wouldn't you ever take a position among corporations, when corporations get into the area of purchasing and acquiring farmland, that all this wonderful sentiment about preserving nature and loving the land goes out the window?

- Well, I have to quickly say it depends on the corporation. But that has happened.

- I'm thinking of the cranberry growers in the Roche A Cris area. I'm thinking of the vast potato fields.

- Oh, yeah.

- And I'm thinking of a time when I remember when you could drive from Madison to Middleton through corn fields, lots of them. And where are they now? And who loved that land? What happened to those land lovers?

- I think another perspective on that is, and the Historical Society Press people who are here, and there are several, and they will at this moment cringe, because I'm going to promote their competitor. 

My novel, "In A Pickle," deals with the political question of corporate farmers driving out the small family farms. That's out on the table, by the way, for those of you interested in that perspective. Somebody else? Anybody? Yeah?

- How much diversity do you find in your self-seeded woods and prairies?

- A tremendous amount of diversity. An unbelievable amount of diversity. In my book, I tried to key out every wildflower that I know about, every tree that I know about, every wild grass that I know about. And I thought I had it done. 

I went to, I have a couple of friends who have a lot of experience with botany, to get the names right, and all of that. I thought I had it all straightened out, then I'd find another one. So it's unbelievable. We have a couple things going for us. Remember I was talking about the biological tension zone. Well, we naturally are going to have more species, because we're getting northern and southern species together. But the fact that they will come by themselves, that comes back to your point. My idea on my farm, for the most part, outside of my forestry stuff where I plant trees, because the place has got to pay for itself, is to stay out of the way. As much as possible, stay out of the way. We've screwed up more stuff by interferring with what nature tends to know best. 

That's not a very polite or academic way of saying it, but it's the way it is. Somebody else? Somebody in the back. Yes?

- Do you talk about your neighbors in your books?

- Oh, I write about all of our neighbors! Some of our neighbors are so wonderful, I had to change their names. 
(laughter)

We have the most wonderful neighbors. Just a quick story about one of our neighbors. 

When I was a kid, community was a very important part of rural life. We all, literally, we depended on each other for everything. Butchering, wood sawing, and everything. These new neighbors moved in. And I've written about them in one of my books. And I did change their names. We went there for a house warming. In those days, when somebody moved in, you went to their house warming. And my mother, she was, with my two brothers, my dad and I, she was saying, you know, there's something strange about that family. And we found out very quickly, could they ever cuss. 

I mean, they could not speak a sentence without cussing. And I was really impressed with that, because I was hearing words that I had not heard before. And so my brothers and I were really paying attention, because these kids, just the little bitty ones, were cussing away. Finally, we're driving home, and two things about it. My mother said to my dad, we are never going to have anything more to do with these people. And my dad said, and I've never forgotten it, no matter what you may think of them, they're still our neighbors. That's a powerful statement. He knew that there may come a day when he needed their help. And he was right. Because a tornado blew our barn down, and they were one of the first ones there. 

Now, why were they a problem? They were a problem because someone had discovered that they had come from the south. Waukesha. 
(laughter)

Anything south of Portage was south. Anybody else? Yes.

- You mentioned that the property has to sustain itself.

- Yes.

- You mentioned your trees. 

So are you talking about making the land stronger, or do you occasionally have someone come in and pull out the trees that are ready to be harvested and sell them as lumber? And then eventually, passing the land down, it will be worth more because of your hardwoods?

- You've asked several questions. Indeed, I intend to pass it along. I have five grandchildren. And the fact that I planted 7,000 trees this spring. Somebody looked at me the other day and said, how old are you, anyway. I was talking about how it takes 25 years to get a crop of trees. How old are you, anyway? We did, to answer your question, the question was, do we systematically, do we hire somebody, a forester to come in and mark trees, and do a systematic selection cut. 

The answer is yes, we do that. In fact, I'm a part of the State of Wisconsin Forest Stewardship program, where we sign a contract for 25 years, and then are required to follow established management procedures. We work with both a county forester employed by the Department of Natural Resources, and we hire a consulting forester to help me, as well. We ended up, the consulting forester, we had to figure out a way of marking the white pines so this goofy guy with the cutter could make it work. So we had our challenges. But it's not just a haphazard thing. We do it, there are certain things we have to do every three or four years. We clearcut, oh, one of the agonizing things-- My photographer son, he loves that place. And he's my wood splitter. And he's my brush cutter, and all that kind of stuff. 

And we have five acres of black locust, talk about an invasive species. Five acres of black locust. How many of you know about black locust? It's a bugger, and it's poisonous. Just the other day, I didn't realize that the sawdust itself was poisonous. Don't let a horse get anywhere near a black locust. It's a legume, by the way, in the pea family. And it grows, man does it grow fast. We have five acres of the stuff. They planted it to fill in the gulley after the Depression, when the rains came and washed out all these gulleys. 

They planted black locusts. I suspect the state recommended the stuff at that time. They marched out of the gulleys and filled up five acres. Well, I had this cutter going and cut these all off. Little did I know, but I should've known, you cut off a locust tree this big around, I counted 32 new locust trees on one stump. So you have to cut all that stuff off. There's a lot of work to this. But I love it. I mean, that's why I'm still 32 years old. 
(laughter)

- In terms of having the land stay the way you want it, are you doing a trust? Are you doing easements that the federal government?

- All of which I've considered, but right now, you can't touch my land with my contract with the DNR. That ties it up just as tight as can be. I've got 65 acres. I have 58 acres under contract.

- With the DNR?

- Yeah, so you're not going to touch my land for a long time. There are a lot of ways of doing it. She raises, the question was, there are land easements, there are land trusts. 

Land trusts are becoming very popular in Wisconsin, where you can work out an agreement in a land trust, so it can stay in your family, but it can't be developed. And those are fine. Not only fine, it's a great idea. My home farm, where I grew up, 160 acres. I think there are now seven families living on our home farm. It's ruined for anything. And one of the things that I want to do and I feel very strongly about this. We need to have large parcels of land together. It's great to do a lot of prairie renovation with your acre lot, and all that, that's fine. But there are certain animal species, certain plant species that need more room. 

You're never going to have, well you shouldn't have one anyway, a black bear in your backyard when you've got two acres. My farm is adjacent to 600 acres of woods. And we've got everything. I think we're in a couple years of a wolf pack. Just to the west of us is a wolf pack. I'd love to have a wolf pack. We've all got too many coyotes. They're all over the place. We have a large wild turkey flock, which I love to see the wild turkeys. I plant my garden each fall to winter rye. 

And it's up about that high now. And it's what the turkeys and the deer are feasting on. All summer long, I keep them at bay. Now don't cringe, you folks, who are animal lovers. But I have an electric fence around my garden. That's the only way that I will ever grow anything. And the deer, and the turkeys too, very smart. They come up once, touch it, that's it. I don't have any trouble anymore. So I feel that I need to give something back to these poor critters that have tried all summer to eat my sweet corn, and my zucchini, of which I now have only five plants. 

So they eat my rye. Somebody else?

- Do your children approve? 
(inaudible)

Sadly, you know, there's so much money to be made now in the subdivisions, so it's becoming this magnet. Families are being torn apart. Some of them want to split it up and make money, and the other half doesn't want to. I'm wondering.

- That's a great question. You should ask my daughter what she thinks about it. 

She's right there. That's not likely to happen where we are. Do you know the language, in the boonies? Well, we're in the boonies. We are 90 miles from Madison. We're 50 miles from Oshkosh. We're 35 miles from Stevens Point. Wonderfully so. We're not close enough. Although, what's happening in Waushara County and those sand counties in central Wisconsin, there are a lot of old guys like me, who are coming back. 

They are living some other place. They're coming home to die, I suppose. It's terrible to say it, but it's true. They're coming back to retire where they grew up. And I see that again and again. I have a whole story about that. Those of us who were farm kids, and during the '50s, when we had this tremendous-- Some of you have probably gathered by now that I'm an agricultural historian. During that time, the '50s, after the war, and into the '60s, we saw this tremendous transition in agriculture. Everything changed. And we're going through another such transition right now. 

Well, thousands of us were driven off the land, literally, there wasn't a place for us. They didn't need us anymore. And we all want our little tractor. My little John Deere. I'm just blessed that I have 65 acres. A lot of them are sitting on an acre with a big tractor, and not knowing where it goes. 
(laughter)

But Susie, you want to speak to that? Say it louder.

- It's just going to be there for us to enjoy. 
(inaudible)

- Susie has two boys, my grandsons. And they have a great time out there. They help me with the garden. And my other son's kids, from Colorado, they live up in the mountains. So they don't garden at all. And it was such fun this summer. One of my grandsons, he'd never seen a carrot come out of the ground. Can you believe that? He was just thrilled to see this carrot come out of the ground. 

And I'll also tell you, that Susie's oldest son who's 16, he has some storytelling genes in him. Because we were on the back end of a farm with the little guys, his cousins, and Josh was saying, I want you boys to know that this is the intersection of the biological tension zone... 
(laughter)

And these guys were perking up. He said, besides that, a huge-- He's a lot worse than I am. A huge Indian battle took place right here. 
(laughter)

Anybody else? Well, I'll be out by the desk signing books for those of you interested. Do pick up one of my business cards. 

Do sign up for my blog. I love to hear back from you. "That's the dumbest thing I ever read," you know, I appreciate that kind of stuff. I eliminate it real quick. 
(laughs)

Thank you all so very much for coming. 
(applause)