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everyone, to Wednesday Nite >> Tomat the Lab.lcome,
I'm Tom Zinnen. I work here at the UW Madison
Biotech Center and I also work
Extension, and on behalf of fothose organizations and theive
Wisconsin Alumni Association, the UW Madison Science Alliance,
and Wisconsin Public Television,
Lab. welcome to Wednesday Nite at the
night, 50 times a year. Tonight I'm delighted to be able
to introduce to you Ed Janus, who will be talking about his
recently published book "Creating Dairyland," which he
has published with the Wisconsin
Ed was born in Washington, DC, Historical Society Press.
Lake Forest College in 1968. in 1945 and was graduated from
That's right. >> With honors for his thesis on
the dramaturgy of political demonstrations.
And he will have to tell me how to put the emphasis on
dramaturgy. It looks like metallurgy
only different. He worked for a year as a
community organizer with the
Southern Christian Leadership WestCouncil of Chicago ind the
1966 to 1967 where he was deeply influenced by
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Eschewing an academic career,
Ed became a city bus driver in
called the second best job he ever had, and later a dairye
farmer, the best job he ever
Wisconsin, where he and his partners milked 30 cows and
plowed and planted and harvested
Ed is also a member or was a 250 acres.
Fellowship, a group whose members were well-known in
Madison as the creators of the
Rooms, the restaurants that changed the landscape of food
here in Madison.
the Madison Muskies to town and Hanother group that founded thet
Capital Brewery for which I am eternally...
[LAUGHTER]
journalist and oral historian, Now an independent audio
Dairyland," published this year by the Wisconsin Historical
Society Press.
Ed Janus to Wednesday Nite Please join me in welcoming
[APPLAUSE] at the Lab.
all very much for coming. Tom mentioned I was a dairyu
farmer for two years, and I always tell people, especially
when there are dairy farmers
I ever had and that I loved aroundevery minute of it.est job
And then I take a moment and I
say which of course means I lwasn't really a dairy farmer.I
So I was a dairy farmer long
with it but not so long that it broke my back and actually had
to work really hard.
really important, I want to talk I want to talk tonight about a
created. tonight about how Wisconsin was
I argue in my book that in some Itvery real sense cows created.
Wisconsin.
So you look around as you drive through the countryside, you see
this really iconic landscape of ours, and we say oh, my God,
it's Wisconsin, we just love it.
It was not always so at all, and It was not always so.
intelligence, great will, and tremendous effort that created,
really literally created our
So I call this, and others have called it, the Wisconsin Idea of
Dairying. Tom mentioned the importance of
the Wisconsin Idea this coming
Dairying and the School of year.
quintessential expression and I think maybe the most impressive
success of the Wisconsin Idea.
you notice it says get ready for On this farm short course flyer,
The idea of getting ready for tomorrow was a new thing in the
world when it was first thought of, say, in the middle of the
19th century. It was the Enlightenment, the
French Enlightenment's way of repudiating the past.
And that is exactly what
It repudiated a European past and it created an American
agriculture.
quintessentially Wisconsin And in some ways it created a
So we drive around and we know agriculture.
and a half cows in Wisconsin, but let's stop a minute and askn
ourselves the question, why are there cows in Wisconsin anyway?
We take it for granted. They're just here.
They've been here for a long
They must have been here right time.
the 6th day or whenever it was after God created the world on
the first day. he created cows, maybe it was
This is a really great story in So whmy opinion. cows?
In my book, what I want to do,
teach people, farmers included what I've hoped to do, is to
how to read our beautiful but non-falandscape.articular,
We know there's a silo and
that's corn and that must be there's a red barn and I think
Many of you probably know exactly what these things are.
But many people just don't. They don't understand what they
see as you drive by at 60 miles an hour.
It is a remarkable story, not only what you see but even more
importantly what you can't see. It is that history, that's what
you can't see.
farmers. It's also the minds of these
what my book hopes to do is sort You can't see that so that's
you see or read dairyland much of open up the pages and help
So there's the book. more deeply.
for cows saved our soil, created "Creating Dairyland," how caring
prosperity to our state and still shapes our way of life in
Wisconsin.
picture comes up, what's not to I always love, right?when this
[LAUGHTER]
remarkable book called So here's a quote from a really
of a Guernsey Cow." "QuWho knew that such thingsaphy
existed.
a response to "Black Beauty." "Black Beauty," the teenage girl
story, tremendous success.
important than horses. So somebody said cows are more
was, wrote this book, but this So this guy Philips, whoever he
And I think this line, to me, isums up the beginning of.
dairying in Wisconsin because,
minutes, it was a religious as I'll movement.in a few
It was an economic movement, but
movement. I hope you'll indulge me.s
If it gets boring, raise your hand.
I'm going to read a bit from the
"Creating Dairyland." iCare of the cow has broughted
prosperity to Wisconsin.
I believe the cow created Wisconsin, that is, created the
Wisconsin we know and love
For when we drive through Dairyland we take in a scene
that truly defines us: the neat barns with their ranks of silos,
the undulating green of grasses,
avatars of contentment. All of this, our farms, their
silos and cows; our farmers,
intelligence; all the fields of grass; and our remarkabler
history, make up what I like to call the book of Dairyland.
During the 160 years since dairy
Wisconsin's landscape, cows began to reshape
of life, many thousands of men economics, moral ethic, and way
into a kind of faith, faith that and women have been initiated
would bring them prosperity, care of the cow and the soil
These are people who lived with mud, manure, and milk on their
boots.
children and grandchildren, have They, and thousands of their
on the land with their cows. wanted nothing more than to stay
been possible is the story Why that is so and how it has
It is one of the great stories I hope to tell you.
I got mud, manure, and milk on of Wisconsin.
1973 when I became a novice mdairyman on a 30-cow farm inn
Crawford County.
boots, that milk remains And although I no longer wear
It has been more than 35 years indelibly on my soul.
my love and respect for this way since I was a dairy farmer, but
for the people who live it has of life and my great interest
So, like many others, I followed remained strong.
failures in the late 1970s and with anxiety the stories of farm
herds, and the abandonment of 198our iconic red barns.mall
I heard and shared concerns about factory farming and the
spurning of pastures our cows had so loved.
I especially feared the loss of the virtues of the yeoman farmer
I had so admired, virtues based,
farm his own land and milk his I believed, on his ability to
and his bachelor brother to help own cows with only his children
I worried that the craft of dairymen was being replaced by
scientific management.
the moral fabric of our state I when guys with milk on theiro
boots were replaced with guys with ink on their fingers.
But I'm a historian, so I know
After all, what we take as the that time waits for no red barn.
dairyland was created no more than 160 years ago by people who
repudiated the past.
spirit in Wisconsin recreates continually with no sentimental
attachment to Eden. The Wisconsin Idea was born to
create prosperity for working people in the present and the
future. It worked.
So here is my little joke.
would be consigned to the dustbin of history, well you go
around dairyland today and
been consigned, as I like to you'll notice old milk cans have
history. say, to the flower pot of
really what history is all So things change and that's
It's about how things that we love and admire and take for
granted no longer are valuable
memories. But they become new things like
the first picture I showed you, thinking about tomorrow.
So is yesterday's revolution
So here's a picture. only today's decoration.
believe. This is from about 1910, I
hay wagon. You all are familiar with the
from a book written here in Madison in 1914 by a fellow who
I have no idea who he is, William Dawson.
"Here's what he said. Welcome to Wisconsin,
all ye who wish to toil.
the tillers of her soil. Vast harvests are awaiting
all ye who come for gain. An empire's wealth lies hidden
within her wide domain. Welcome to Wisconsin,
all ye who would be free. The justice she dispenses is
famed from sea to sea.
seek the chance to join the van Wof progress in the world's newo
renaissance." Put yourself back to 1880 and
1890 and think about our
Where did they come from? anThey came from impoverished,n.
enslaved Europe.
farmers whose land they worked, Mthey worked the land for
somebody else.
And as I said earlier, it Wisconrepudiated the past.omise.
Only the future matters, not the
us and the lords told us. oThis is a place we can createld
ourselves.
So, dairy cows created That's exactly what they did.
I have this in because I love it Wisconsin.
But so did people like Dennis Iverson.
So this Dennis Iverson, a friend
quintessential Wisconsin farmer. of mine, is sort of a
So this is a picture, so I say He's in my book too.
the barn. fromThese are real people.0 in
I know their
He's one of the preeminent great-great-grandson.
Sid Cook, he's in my book, but cheesemakers in the world today.
And they started in pioneer these peoplWisconsin.ancestors.
They had a cow. They had a couple pigs, I
assume. They had some chickens and a lot
of hard work. They had an axe, of course.
So how is it that we went from
mom here to our big barns? this one cow being milked by the
yesterday. I was out at Hoard's dairy barn
So during the Civil War, before the Civil War, and right after
the Civil War, Wisconsin was the
And what happened, of course, what happens with wheat is you
cut it down and you ship it to
England and you ship all the New York or you ship it to
Nothing gets put back into the nutrients with it.
So pretty quickly people soil.
soil, they called it. reaWe were exploiting, and ofthe
course this is America so they
cares, right? So somebody began to care.
And that's where dairying was created.
When somebody started to care.
go back to the wheat farming, So I like if I may.at, let me
So not only did wheat rob the soil, it also robbed men's and
farmer's moral core.
quick money. People were really into money,
he built them up, they flipped They flipped their farms, this
he came along and all the sudden them to some other sucker, and
And then, like I said, the wheat price dropped out.
These far-sighted prophets of dairying said we need to rebuild
the idea of building for the
We need to stop and we need to future.
build. sustain what we've got and
the cow brings good fortune, and So the Chinese say the care of
of the cow. thAgain, these early prophets,l
we'll talk about them in a
They called themselves minute, were missionaries.
the cow. missionaries of the church of
and make them prosperous. You might say that dairying was
the original sustainability movement.
Of course, sustainability, it's on everybody's lips today.
But dairying was
revitalize, as I say, the soil, in particular, but also men's
moral standing. The engine of sustainability,
the manure spreader.
So I like to say, if you'll pardon me, that there was
a book a few years ago how the
I like to say manure was the Irish saved civilization, well
[LAUGHTER] poop that saved Wisconsin.
days and in the wheat days they were not putting anything back.r
So I mentioned that this was a
economic one. This is from the newspaper, the
magazine Successful Farming.
and women who promoted the idea of dairying in Wisconsin, were
really promoting the idea of
That is the Wisconsin Idea. That's the progressive idea.
That's the idea of the French Enlightenment as translated into
the Wisconsin Idea. Improve human beings.
The gospel of dairy.
a get rich slowly scheme. SWhen I say that to formers, as
guy raised his hand once, he
but what about the rich?" said "I un[LAUGHTER]he slowly,
Actually, don't let farmer's
Sometimes they do very, complvery well. you.
So I think it is Oconto or
century. something around the turn of the
It took quite a while for Wisconsin farmers to convert to
dairying. In fact, there were actually
riots in some of the towns in Wisconsin.
The men refused to have anything
Well, it's women's work. to do with cows.
home in the evening, I'm going What do you mean I have to come
I'm not coming home, I'm not out to town and drinking.
So this transformation of men, being enslaved to the cow.
would actually be more diligent, in particular, to people who
program of the progressives. careful husbands was part of the
So from around 1880 to 1920 was this big expansionary period.
By 1927 half the income on
So it was a huge transformation Wiscin about 40 or 45 years.lk.
This is a picture from Hoard's
The caption reads, "Those kind magazine.
feed and lie down to comfort and contentment."
One of the things that the dairy
contentment. leaders were selling was
remember many more than half of Tour population were farmers in,
those days. They were trying to sell the cow
as a way of bringing a sort of a
So anybody know who this, well, spirthis is WD Hoard.ife.
That's him on the left. [LAUGHTER]
So I'm not supposed to ask
Anyway, that's WD Hoard, for questions yet.
Called the cow governor. governor of Wisconsin.
progressive, probably the first real political exponent of
Progressivism with a capital P, and something of a sardonic
scold of farmers. He's kind of a preacher.
Fought in the Civil War.
scold, became a journalist and Like I say, he's something of a
the cow. really the great spokesman for
what short course is, one of the Well, short course, we all know
progressives, the university things that Hoard, the
farmers, that's what Hoard wanted to do was turn hay seed
into intellectuals. Into people who used their minds
rather than their brawn.
population of the world lived Again, off the land. of the
And it was a really pretty
life. dNot a lot of intellectuall
stimulation, not a lot of science, not a lot of going
forward.
short course and, of course, So the progressives and the
School of Agriculture were the Dr. Henry and the university
farmers think. leading exponents of helping
county agents started, I think, around 1915 or so and with what
is called the better grass
The best thing we have going for movement.
dairying early on was our grass. us in Wisconsin in terms of
unimproved. So the university set abouty
working with farmers, with
And it's been a continual and very interesting progress since
then. We'll talk about that in a
little bit. So here's a typical farmer.
I like to say that over the years we know that we selected
the cows to milk in our barns.
getting the best cows. It's been a very big business
think cows selected us. BSo that today and 50 years ago
the people that remained on the farm, the people that worked in
the barns, that milked cows,
you'll pardon the expression. tSo it's been this symbiosis,
this Darwinian symbiosis, choosing the right kind of
person, the person who is willing to be diligent, the
person who is willing to care for a living being.
And these were not the pioneer
They didn't care that much, many farmers.
Science in the barn. of them.
barn, it's got all this modern We think now we know you go to a
computerized. It had to start with the minds
of farmers. They had to get the sense that
they could change their lives,
lives using numbers, using that they could improve their
So one of the great movements was the dairy herd improvement
movement where farmers measured their milk every day, weighed
it. They could say which cows were
doing good. It was no more opinion.
The old days you'd go to a farm and you'd say where's your good
cow.
Over there, Bessy, she's my best
Probably not. So the introduction of science
in the barn has made all the
And of course Babcock's test difference.
tell how productive each of his which meacows was.rmer could
So breeding cows for higher milk
butter fat production, it is production, especially higher
in Wisconsin by about 30% of the said increased milk production
So in 1900 a cow produced about 4,000 pounds, today it's not at
all surprising to find a 30,000 pound cow, that is a cow that
produces 30,000 pounds of milk a
So today if you say I believe in year.
tomatoes, local tomatoes thrown factory farmat you.ll get fresh
But in those days, the idea of
those days, I meant the 1900s, farm as factory, when I say
to think of farming as a they were trying to get farmers
Inputs, revenues, all sorts of a professional business.
And so the farm as factory means new mentality.
produced everything, you watched that you used everything, you
important. everything, everything was
And I would like to talk, maybe someone has a question when
we're finished, about some of the misconceptions, I think,
that people who don't know much about dairying have about
dairying. So I like to say that this is a
revolution in rural history.
is a dairy farm, before Bedairying, as I said, farmersis
were poor, they were not very educated, they were certainly
not very refined people.
making farmers prosperous to And the dairy movement sought by
middle-class. So this is a pretty middle-class
looking scene here. Father's probably wearing
slippers, not boots.
newspaper. Kid's got a radio, reading a
So the University of Wisconsin, in particular the Department of
Rural Sociology, was very, very,
people on the land because if everybody left, Wisconsin would
have no agriculture.
farmers the advantage of the So figuring out how to give
feel second cousins or a second fiddle to their city cousins was
a huge and very important success.
So progressives of the WD Hoard sort of republican version
believe in an expanding universe
free markets, open markets, minimally regulated markets, the
amount of protein in the world
Farmers have this mission, if you talk to a farmer today, they
have lots of missions, one of them is to feed the world.
So, again, remember what the
came out. worStarving people in China.ture
Starving people in Europe.
immigrations in Europe. So our farmers in Wisconsin
became dedicated to providing protein to the world.
So I like to say that caring
farmers. became the new morality for
the pasture. So here's an article caring for
So what the progressives were trying to do in terms of
improving humankind was to make men kinder.
I know it doesn't sound, we're
but the early farmers could be not used to thinking this way,
Not necessarily very concerned pretty gruff fellows.
So part of the progressive about their families.
kinder. And so cows, if you have a cow,
you better be kind if you want
So here was a typical thing. to get any milk from her.
business and spiritual values are kind of synonymous.,
They are different sides to the same thing.
So a comfortable cow was good for business, a comfortable cow
was good for your soul. Beautiful picture.
I like to say that calves are the spiritual and economic
foundation of dairying. Falling in love with cattle is
something that happens on every dairy farm in Wisconsin,
probably every dairy farm every where.
Especially among the children.
This caring, learning to care at And it is really the foundation.
living dependent being was all a very young age for another
And, you know, our dairy farms part of the dairy program.
We have 100-year farms, 150-year stay in the same family.
measures because of some of the spiritual rewards that dairying
brings. In fact, let me read a quote
here. Apropos of this picture.
This is a letter to the editor
The gentleman writes, "I liked of Hoard's Dairyman in 1912.
in dairy work. your talk about sentiment
must be in love with the cow. I wanted to get up then and tell
the audience that there was at
road to success. least one young dairyman on the
of the convention, I saw a boy, Jjust a chubby little fellow of
10 or 12, standing by the head
The little fellow placed one of a little jersey heifer.
placed his mouth to her ear aas if to whisper to her, and
then pressed his lips to the eye
I imagined he said to her, of the little beauty.
get a blue ribbon if you can, but if you get none I will
love you just as well as ever.
successful dairyman." ThWhat's not to love?e a
I want to talk about one
historic series of events, as an particular historic event or
from history. Something that we drive by every
day, we see silos, but we don't think about what transformation
occurred because of silos.
be the most important invention Siloin creating dairyland. may
So in the old days, cows were fed in the spring and maybe they
scrounged around in the summer
they had a little more to eat in when there wasn't much grass and
And then they dried up. They were basically useless for
a good six months of the year,
So the typical agricultural equation is abundance and then
scarcity. With the invention of the silo,
it's reversed.
long. So a silo is a pickling jar in
which good grasses are stored and they're made palatable.
The cows enjoy eating it much more than they do dry feed.
It's got usually more protein,
It's better feed and you can get more fiber in it.
into a silo. a lot more out of your fields
new dispensation. So Again, a sort of religious a
terminology.
winter. So what happened is they started
building silos, and then they could begin to milk all
year-round. Well, when you begin to milk
all year-round, you need labor
So the boy can stay. all year-round.
Or the neighbor boy can find a There's work for him.
This stabilizes the labor job omarket.farm.
There's enough work all of the
So when there's enough work, sudden.
because he's got a job. theAlso, this having milkied
all year-round encouraged capitalists so start building
cheese factories because without
couldn't afford the capital and a straining and so forth in aou
cheese factory. So in a sense silos created our
cheese industry.
the cheese industry. So in the beginning, this was
But, let's see, I don't have the Not really an industry.
Here's a quote from Mrs. EP Allerton, 1875.
"In many farm houses the dairy
A mountain that it took all work summer to scale.year.
But the mountain is removed.
cheese factory." It has been hauled over the to
dairying was part of the Dairying, don't laugh,
of the last century. women's liberation movement
In which women were more and Not the 20th century.
Men took over the milking. more freed from toil.
Milk was shipped to professionals who could make
cheese out of it. All of the sudden women had
time, they had money, and they
families. This is part of that progressive
idea that strong families, close
refinements, domesticity, would fmake all the difference ine
mankind.
sense began the liberation of Andwomen from drudgery toeal
homemaking. So the first market for
Wisconsin cheese was the
And women, like this woman in the previous picture, made
butter during the summer and
down to the store and traded it storeto the very reluctantok it
storekeeper for bonnets and buttons and threads and so
forth.
he sold it as what used to be Acalled Wisconsin wheel grease.
It was really, really bad.
to England, and they used it in Andtheir carts and so forth. it
So that really wasn't much of an
But, with winter milking, with industry.
could afford to become the silo, all the sudden people
this woman whose professional cheesemakers, like
are making cheese today on their great-great-great-grandchildren
Took 20 years, but then all of farm.
modern cheese industry. So having a cheese industry made
all the difference. It started putting money in
farmer's pockets, making them convert completely to dairying.
So we all know Miss Wholesome Wisconsin here on the right and
the ugly horrible rapacious capitalist here on the left.
Well, it ain't that simple, of
capitalists, ugly as they might coube, we would have no dairyor
industry. If we had no dairy industry,
we'd have no cows.
beautiful landscape. If we had no cows, we'd have no
landscape, we might as well live If we had no beautiful
[LAUGHTER] in North Dakota.
this tension. A cheesemaker friend of mine
tells me he was at a, the old cheesemakers always had money,
they always made money, but they
don't like people showing off. had to hide it because farmers
car every year, but it would be exactly the same car as the onew
they got rid of.
he's not doing that good. SSo capitalists essential.l,
So this is something I find very
I suppose everyone knows, or interesting.
the turn of the last century, pearound the 1890s, turn thend
century, milk was one of the
Killed children, may have been most dangerous foods on Earth.
may have been the second or third biggest killer of children
in the cities.
It was raw milk, of course, and there was no refrigeration and
it was very expensive to have clean milk, certified milk.
So with the invention of
all of the sudden safe. As milk became safe, it became
nature's food.
sold it, nature's perfect food, Thaonce it was safe again.try
And so right at that moment when
because really milk was kind of thea secondary thing for mostk,
people most of the time except
dairy state. for babies, Wisconsin was the
and wholesomeness get married. So all of the sudden Wisconsin
east and if somebody said Wisconsin I had this vision of
hillsides with Heidi on it, long blond curls and nice flower
dresses, very pure. So Wisconsin was very lucky in
that sense that we got on the boat of nature's perfect food.
Well, the progressives, as you
regulation. There was something called the
filled cheese crisis in which perfidious dairymen and
cheesemakers ruined the cheese
We used to send half our cheese businto England.onsin.
Very popular over there.
it, just like the Chinese did a But theyfew years ago.erating
Well, we did that too.
all sorts of nasty things, and And they filled it with lard and
and the bottom dropped out of the Engthe cheese market.ered it
It was desperate. So WD Hoard and the progressives
realized that while mankind was not perfectible, perhaps he was
improvable. And this is where the idea of
regulating us for our own good
now, came around. By the way, so Hoard institutede
the first dairy commission, a guy who regulated health in the
milk industry.
them down on the farm? So how are you going to keep
keeping boys on the farm Again, the biggest challenge was
people leaving Wisconsin. We didn't want people abandoning
the farms.
North Dakota. AgSo how are you going to keepe
them down on the farm?
problem. It's a huge and interesting
Boys would always argue with It's a perennial problem.
piece of equipment. And the father would say that's
pretentious.
equipment. You don't need that new
And the boy said, basically, We're not spending money.
I'm leaving. if you don't spend the money,
technology in dairying. That's in a[LAUGHTER]pur to our
So then the father discovers the
So they like that. boy can do some more work here.
picture and then invite your So I'm going to end with this
I believe we're at or have questions if you have any.
moment in agriculture. recently crossed a very historic
on a farm and that's where he Used to bewound up.uy was born
He really didn't have a lot of
Today, every dairy farmer in choice.
nearly every dairy farmer in Wisconsin, I would say, or
And they choose to be there for Wisome of the reasons I talked.
about.
the prosperity. Dairy farmers love the freedom.
They love the sort of spiritual parts of nature.
So, like I say, if you go,
that they're there by choice. So what are the things that keep
them on the farm? So I'll leave it at that and if
anybody would like to ask questions.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]