University Place Wednesday Nite at the Lab  Ed Janus Creating Dairyland: How Cows Made Wisconsin  August 17, 2011 UP613    cc >> Tom Zinnen: Welcome, everyone, to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. I'm Tom Zinnen. I work here at the UW Madison Biotech Center and I also work for the UW Extension Cooperative Extension, and on behalf of those organizations and the Wisconsin Alumni Association, the UW Madison Science Alliance, and Wisconsin Public Television, welcome to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. We do this every Wednesday 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 Historical Society Press. Ed was born in Washington, DC, in 1945 and was graduated from Lake Forest College in 1968. Is that the one in Chicago? >> 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 West Side Organization and the Southern Christian Leadership Council of Chicago in 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 Evanston, Illinois, which he called the second best job he ever had, and later a dairy farmer, the best job he ever had, in Soldiers Grove, Wisconsin, where he and his partners milked 30 cows and plowed and planted and harvested 250 acres. Ed is also a member or was a member of the Phoenix Fellowship, a group whose members were well-known in Madison as the creators of the Ovens of Brittany and Bakers Rooms, the restaurants that changed the landscape of food here in Madison. He also led a group that brought the Madison Muskies to town and another group that founded the Capital Brewery for which I am eternally... [LAUGHTER] Now an independent audio journalist and oral historian, Ed is author of "Creating Dairyland," published this year by the Wisconsin Historical Society Press. Please join me in welcoming Ed Janus to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. [APPLAUSE] >> Ed Janus: Well, thank you all very much for coming. Tom mentioned I was a dairy farmer for two years, and I always tell people, especially when there are dairy farmers around, that it was the best job I ever had and that I loved every minute of it. And then I take a moment and I look at the dairy farmers and I say which of course means I wasn't really a dairy farmer. So I was a dairy farmer long enough to really fall in love with it but not so long that it broke my back and actually had to work really hard. 

I want to talk tonight about a really important, I want to talk tonight about how Wisconsin was created. It's really a remarkable story. I argue in my book that in some very real sense cows created Wisconsin. Dairying 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. It was not always so at all, and it was an act of tremendous intelligence, great will, and tremendous effort that created, really literally created our dairy industry from nothing. So I call this, and others have called it, the Wisconsin Idea of Dairying. Tom mentioned the importance of the Wisconsin Idea this coming year. Dairying and the School of Agriculture were the quintessential expression and I think maybe the most impressive success of the Wisconsin Idea. 

On this farm short course flyer, you notice it says get ready for tomorrow. 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 dairying did. It repudiated a European past and it created an American agriculture. And in some ways it created a quintessentially Wisconsin agriculture. So we drive around and we know there's something like a million and a half cows in Wisconsin, but let's stop a minute and ask 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 time. They must have been here right after God created the world on the 6th day or whenever it was he created cows, maybe it was the first day. 

So why are there cows? This is a really great story in my opinion. In my book, what I want to do, what I've hoped to do, is to teach people, farmers included but non-farmers in particular, how to read our beautiful landscape. We know there's a silo and there's a red barn and I think that's corn and that must be alfalfa in there. 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. It's also the minds of these farmers. You can't see that so that's what my book hopes to do is sort of open up the pages and help you see or read dairyland much more deeply. 

So there's the book. "Creating Dairyland," how caring for cows saved our soil, created our landscape, brought prosperity to our state and still shapes our way of life in Wisconsin. I always tell people when this picture comes up, what's not to love, right? [LAUGHTER] So here's a quote from a really remarkable book called "Queen Vashti: The Autobiography of a Guernsey Cow." Who knew that such things existed. The book was written actually as a response to "Black Beauty." "Black Beauty," the teenage girl story, tremendous success. So somebody said cows are more important than horses. So this guy Philips, whoever he was, wrote this book, but this is one of the lines in it. And I think this line, to me, sums up the beginning of dairying in Wisconsin because, as I'll tell you in a few minutes, it was a religious movement. It was an economic movement, but it was as well a religious movement. I hope you'll indulge me. If it gets boring, raise your hand. 

I'm going to read a bit from the introduction of my book called "Creating Dairyland." Care of the cow has brought prosperity to Wisconsin. And in a very important way, I believe the cow created Wisconsin, that is, created the Wisconsin we know and love today. 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, and especially the cows, our avatars of contentment. All of this, our farms, their silos and cows; our farmers, their prosperity and their intelligence; all the fields of grass; and our remarkable history, make up what I like to call the book of Dairyland. During the 160 years since dairy cows began to reshape Wisconsin's landscape, economics, moral ethic, and way of life, many thousands of men and women have been initiated into a kind of faith, faith that care of the cow and the soil would bring them prosperity, even happiness. These are people who lived with mud, manure, and milk on their boots. They, and thousands of their children and grandchildren, have wanted nothing more than to stay on the land with their cows. Why that is so and how it has been possible is the story I hope to tell you. It is one of the great stories of Wisconsin. I got mud, manure, and milk on my boots for the first time in 1973 when I became a novice dairyman on a 30-cow farm in Crawford County. 

And although I no longer wear boots, that milk remains indelibly on my soul. It has been more than 35 years since I was a dairy farmer, but my love and respect for this way of life and my great interest for the people who live it has remained strong. So, like many others, I followed with anxiety the stories of farm failures in the late 1970s and 1980s, the auctions of small herds, and the abandonment of our iconic red barns. 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, I believed, on his ability to farm his own land and milk his own cows with only his children and his bachelor brother to help him. I worried that the craft of dairymen was being replaced by scientific management. I wondered what would happen to the moral fabric of our state when guys with milk on their boots were replaced with guys with ink on their fingers. But I'm a historian, so I know that time waits for no red barn. After all, what we take as the ancient landscape of our dairyland was created no more than 160 years ago by people who repudiated the past. I know too that the progressive 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. Karl Marx said that capitalism would be consigned to the dustbin of history, well you go around dairyland today and you'll notice old milk cans have been consigned, as I like to say, to the flower pot of history. So things change and that's really what history is all about, isn't it. It's about how things that we love and admire and take for granted no longer are valuable only because they're are memories. But they become new things like the first picture I showed you, thinking about tomorrow. So is yesterday's revolution only today's decoration. So here's a picture. This is from about 1910, I believe. 

You all are familiar with the hay wagon. And I want to read you a quote 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. Vast harvests are awaiting the tillers of her soil. Welcome to Wisconsin, 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. Welcome to Wisconsin, all ye who seek the chance to join the van of progress in the world's new renaissance." Put yourself back to 1880 and 1890 and think about our ancestors who came to Wisconsin. 

Where did they come from? They came from impoverished, enslaved Europe. Many of them were peasant farmers whose land they worked, they worked the land for somebody else. Wisconsin was the great promise. And as I said earlier, it repudiated the past. Only the future matters, not the old stories that the priest told us and the lords told us. This is a place we can create ourselves. That's exactly what they did. So, dairy cows created Wisconsin. I have this in because I love it picture. But so did people like Dennis Iverson. 

So this Dennis Iverson, a friend of mine, is sort of a quintessential Wisconsin farmer. He's in my book too. So this is a picture, so I say from a cow in a bush to 100 in the barn. These are real people. I know their great-great-grandson. He's one of the preeminent cheesemakers in the world today. Sid Cook, he's in my book, but these people are his ancestors. And they started in pioneer Wisconsin. 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 this one cow being milked by the mom here to our big barns? I was out at Hoard's dairy barn yesterday. They had 450 cows. So during the Civil War, before the Civil War, and right after the Civil War, Wisconsin was the leading wheat producing state. And what happened, of course, what happens with wheat is you cut it down and you ship it to New York or you ship it to England and you ship all the nutrients with it. Nothing gets put back into the soil. So pretty quickly people realized that we were mining the soil, they called it. We were exploiting, and of course this is America so they were going to move on, who cares, right? So somebody began to care. And that's where dairying was created. 

When somebody started to care. So I like to say that, let me go back to the wheat farming, if I may. So not only did wheat rob the soil, it also robbed men's and farmer's moral core. People were really into money, quick money. They flipped their farms, this he built them up, they flipped them to some other sucker, and he came along and all the sudden the wheat price dropped out. And then, like I said, we'll just move on. These far-sighted prophets of dairying said we need to rebuild the idea of building for the future. We need to stop and we need to sustain what we've got and build. So the Chinese say the care of the cow brings good fortune, and that was the progressive gospel of the cow. Again, these early prophets, we'll talk about them in a minute, were missionaries. 

They called themselves missionaries of the church of the cow. The cow would save men's souls 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 self-consciously an effort to revitalize, as I say, the soil, in particular, but also men's moral standing. The engine of sustainability, the manure spreader. [LAUGHTER] So I like to say, if you'll pardon me, that there was a book a few years ago how the Irish saved civilization, well I like to say manure was the poop that saved Wisconsin. [LAUGHTER] Believe me, in the early pioneer days and in the wheat days they were not putting anything back. So I mentioned that this was a moral crusade as well as an economic one. This is from the newspaper, the magazine Successful Farming. 

And our dairy leaders, the men and women who promoted the idea of dairying in Wisconsin, were really promoting the idea of transforming human beings. 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. So dairying, I like to say, was a get rich slowly scheme. When I say that to formers, a guy raised his hand once, he said "I understand the slowly, but what about the rich?" [LAUGHTER] Actually, don't let farmer's complaints fool you. Sometimes they do very, very well. So I think it is Oconto or something around the turn of the century. 

Maybe they had two cows. 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 to do with cows. Well, it's women's work. What do you mean I have to come home in the evening, I'm going out to town and drinking. I'm not coming home, I'm not being enslaved to the cow. So this transformation of men, in particular, to people who would actually be more diligent, careful husbands was part of the program of the progressives. Took a long time, like I say. So from around 1880 to 1920 was this big expansionary period. 

By 1927 half the income on Wisconsin farms came from milk. So it was a huge transformation in about 40 or 45 years. This is a picture from Hoard's magazine. The caption reads, "Those kind that in lush pastures feed and lie down to comfort and contentment." One of the things that the dairy leaders were selling was contentment. They were trying to get farmers, remember many more than half of our population were farmers in those days. They were trying to sell the cow as a way of bringing a sort of a spiritual aspect to life. So anybody know who this, well, this is WD Hoard. That's him on the left. [LAUGHTER] So I'm not supposed to ask for questions yet. Anyway, that's WD Hoard, governor of Wisconsin. 

Called the cow governor. Republican governor, 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. Like I say, he's something of a scold, became a journalist and really the great spokesman for the cow. Well, short course, we all know what short course is, one of the things that Hoard, the progressives, the university wanted to do was turn hay seed farmers, that's what Hoard called them, hay seed farmers, into intellectuals. Into people who used their minds rather than their brawn. Again, remember most of the population of the world lived off the land. And it was a really pretty difficult, brutal, physical life. Not a lot of intellectual stimulation, not a lot of science, not a lot of going forward. 

So the progressives and the short course and, of course, Dr. Henry and the university School of Agriculture were the leading exponents of helping farmers think. So here's a county agent and county agents started, I think, around 1915 or so and with what is called the better grass movement. The best thing we have going for us in Wisconsin in terms of dairying early on was our grass. But the grass was very, very unimproved. So the university set about working with farmers, with science, to improve grass. 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. It's been a very big business getting the best cows. 

But in a real interesting way I think cows selected us. So that today and 50 years ago the people that remained on the farm, the people that worked in the barns, that milked cows, they were a special breed, if you'll pardon the expression. So 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 farmers. They didn't care that much, many of them. Science in the barn. We think now we know you go to a barn, it's got all this modern equipment, everything is computerized. It had to start with the minds of farmers. They had to get the sense that they could change their lives, that they could improve their lives using numbers, using statistics. 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 cow. Maybe, maybe not. Probably not. So the introduction of science in the barn has made all the difference. And of course Babcock's test which means the farmer could tell how productive each of his cows was. So breeding cows for higher milk production, especially higher butter fat production, it is said increased milk production in Wisconsin by about 30% of the total milk increase. 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 year. 

So today if you say I believe in factory farms, you'll get fresh tomatoes, local tomatoes thrown at you. But in those days, the idea of farm as factory, when I say those days, I meant the 1900s, they were trying to get farmers to think of farming as a professional business. Inputs, revenues, all sorts of a new mentality. And so the farm as factory means that you used everything, you produced everything, you watched everything, everything was important. So it was a good thing. 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. Before dairying, you notice this is a dairy farm, before dairying, as I said, farmers were poor, they were not very educated, they were certainly not very refined people. And the dairy movement sought by making farmers prosperous to usher them into the middle-class. So this is a pretty middle-class looking scene here. 

Father's probably wearing slippers, not boots. Kid's got a radio, reading a newspaper. He's in a jacket. So the University of Wisconsin, in particular the Department of Rural Sociology, was very, very, very interested in keeping people on the land because if everybody left, Wisconsin would have no agriculture. So figuring out how to give farmers the advantage of the middle-class so that they didn't 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 of prosperity that by having free markets, open markets, minimally regulated markets, the amount of protein in the world will increase. 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 world was like when this picture came out. Starving people in China. Starving people in Europe. 

Mass movements, mass immigrations in Europe. So our farmers in Wisconsin became dedicated to providing protein to the world. So I like to say that caring became the new morality for farmers. So here's an article caring for the pasture. Caring for cows. 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 not used to thinking this way, but the early farmers could be pretty gruff fellows. Not necessarily very concerned about their families. So part of the progressive movement was to make farmers kinder. And so cows, if you have a cow, you better be kind if you want to get any milk from her. 

So here was a typical thing. So for the progressives, 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. And it is really the foundation. This caring, learning to care at a very young age for another living dependent being was all part of the dairy program. 

And, you know, our dairy farms stay in the same family. We have 100-year farms, 150-year farms, and I think in large 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 of Hoard's Dairyman in 1912. The gentleman writes, "I liked your talk about sentiment in dairy work. You said that to succeed, one must be in love with the cow. I wanted to get up then and tell the audience that there was at least one young dairyman on the road to success. Just before the morning session of the convention, I saw a boy, just a chubby little fellow of 10 or 12, standing by the head of a little jersey heifer. The little fellow placed one arm around the heifer's neck, placed his mouth to her ear as if to whisper to her, and then pressed his lips to the eye of the little beauty. 

I imagined he said to her, do your best jersey love, get a blue ribbon if you can, but if you get none I will love you just as well as ever. The boy will surely be a successful dairyman." What's not to love? I want to talk about one particular historic event or historic series of events, as an example of what you can learn from history. Something that we drive by every day, we see silos, but we don't think about what transformation occurred because of silos. Silos, in some real sense, may be the most important invention in creating dairyland. So in the old days, cows were fed in the spring and maybe they scrounged around in the summer when there wasn't much grass and they had a little more to eat in the fall. And then they dried up. They were basically useless for a good six months of the year, maybe even longer. So the typical agricultural equation is abundance and then scarcity. With the invention of the silo, it's reversed. Now there's abundance all year 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, more fiber in it. It's better feed and you can get a lot more out of your fields into a silo. So they actually called silos a new dispensation. Again, a sort of religious terminology. So I call it the greening of 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 all year-round. So the boy can stay. 

There's work for him. Or the neighbor boy can find a job on your farm. This stabilizes the labor market. There's enough work all of the sudden. So when there's enough work, then the boy can get married because he's got a job. Also, this having milk all year-round encouraged capitalists so start building cheese factories because without a sufficient supply of milk you couldn't afford the capital and training and so forth in a cheese factory. So in a sense silos created our cheese industry. So in the beginning, this was the cheese industry. Not really an industry. But, let's see, I don't have the quote. 

Here's a quote from Mrs. EP Allerton, 1875. "In many farm houses the dairy work loomed up every year. A mountain that it took all summer to scale. But the mountain is removed. It has been hauled over the to cheese factory." Dairying, don't laugh, dairying was part of the women's liberation movement of the last century. Not the 20th century. In which women were more and more freed from toil. Men took over the milking. Men took over the dairy. Milk was shipped to professionals who could make cheese out of it. 

All of the sudden women had time, they had money, and they started developing their families. This is part of that progressive idea that strong families, close families, families that have refinements, domesticity, would make all the difference in mankind. And so dairying in some real sense began the liberation of women from drudgery to homemaking. So the first market for Wisconsin cheese was the neighborhood store. And women, like this woman in the previous picture, made butter during the summer and stored it, and then she took it down to the store and traded it to the very reluctant storekeeper for bonnets and buttons and threads and so forth. And then he took the butter and he sold it as what used to be called Wisconsin wheel grease. It was really, really bad. And he just took it and sold it to England, and they used it in their carts and so forth. So that really wasn't much of an industry. But, with winter milking, with the silo, all the sudden people could afford to become professional cheesemakers, like this woman whose great-great-great-grandchildren are making cheese today on their farm. 

Took 20 years, but then all of the sudden we have this real 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 course, because were it not for capitalists, ugly as they might be, we would have no dairy industry. If we had no dairy industry, we'd have no cows. If we had no cows, we'd have no beautiful landscape. If we had no beautiful landscape, we might as well live in North Dakota. [LAUGHTER] So there's always been 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 had to hide it because farmers don't like people showing off. 

So they'd always buy a brand new car every year, but it would be exactly the same car as the one they got rid of. So the farmer thought, well, he's not doing that good. So capitalists essential. So this is something I find very interesting. I suppose everyone knows, or perhaps you don't, that around the turn of the last century, around the 1890s, turn the century, milk was one of the most dangerous foods on Earth. Killed children, may have been the biggest killer of children, may have been the second or third biggest killer of children in the cities. Milk was dangerous. 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 pasteurization, milk could be all of the sudden safe. As milk became safe, it became nature's food. 

That's how the dairy industry sold it, nature's perfect food, once it was safe again. And so right at that moment when the world was discovering milk, because really milk was kind of a secondary thing for most people most of the time except for babies, Wisconsin was the dairy state. So all of the sudden Wisconsin and wholesomeness get married. When I was a kid I grew up out 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 know, also believed in regulation. There was something called the filled cheese crisis in which perfidious dairymen and cheesemakers ruined the cheese business in Wisconsin. We used to send half our cheese to England. Very popular over there. But they started adulterating it, just like the Chinese did a few years ago. 

Well, we did that too. And they filled it with lard and all sorts of nasty things, and the English people discovered it and the bottom dropped out of the cheese market. 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 that some republicans don't like now, came around. By the way, so Hoard instituted the first dairy commission, a guy who regulated health in the milk industry. So how are you going to keep them down on the farm? Again, the biggest challenge was keeping boys on the farm because, again, we didn't want people leaving Wisconsin. We didn't want people abandoning the farms. Again, we didn't want to become North Dakota. So how are you going to keep them down on the farm? It's a huge and interesting problem. 

It's a perennial problem. Boys would always argue with their dad about getting a new piece of equipment. And the father would say that's pretentious. You don't need that new equipment. We're not spending money. And the boy said, basically, if you don't spend the money, I'm leaving. That's in a sense a spur to our technology in dairying. [LAUGHTER] So then the father discovers the boy can do some more work here. So they like that. So I'm going to end with this picture and then invite your questions if you have any. 

I believe we're at or have recently crossed a very historic moment in agriculture. Used to be that a guy was born on a farm and that's where he wound up. He really didn't have a lot of choice. Today, every dairy farmer in Wisconsin, I would say, or nearly every dairy farmer in Wisconsin, chooses to be there. And they choose to be there for some of the reasons I talked about. The financial, of course, the prosperity. Dairy farmers love the freedom. They love the sort of spiritual parts of nature. So, like I say, if you go, so today think about that, 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]