- Announcer: The following program
is a PBS Wisconsin original production.
[upbeat Americana music]
- Welcome to a rainy day
here at the farm.
We're going to be celebrating Earth Day in Wisconsin
with a little shin dig up in Bayfield.
For the ingredients, I'm heading to Rice Lake
to North Star Bison
and then I'll stop up on the way
to do a little foraging for some greens.
But first, I need to take care of the scapes on the garlic.
Gather with us Around the Farm Table!
I'm your host, Inga Witscher.
Good morning, girls!
I'm Inga and I love everything about farming.
Midwestern farms are a bounty of good food
made by good people.
I love being able to travel, to search out good ingredients.
Cooking is all about what's seasonal, what's fresh.
Every day can be filled with good food, good friends
and a beautiful herd of cows.
Welcome to the farm.
affectionately to cow: Good girl.
- Around the Farm Table is funded in part by
Wisconsin Farmers Union,
united to grow family agriculture,
Heartland Credit Union
and Friends of Wisconsin Public Television.
[happy rhythmic guitar music]
- I've been really happy growing a garlic crop.
I've been at it for a few years now.
The only thing you really have to be thinking about
when you're growing garlic, hardneck varieties,
is that the garlic's going to send out a scape.
So what the scape is, it's basically the leafless shoot
that comes out from the garlic plant
and eventually it would send out a flower.
I want the energy of the plant to go into the bulb
so I need to take that flower off, otherwise the energy
in the plant's going to go to produce that flower.
So sometime around June you'll see your garlic scapes
starting to form.
Just head out with a knife
and just cut those scapes off.
I think they look really beautiful and they're delicious
in things like vinaigrettes, garlic pestos,
stir-frys, chop them up into salads.
They have this vibrant garlic flavor, so don't waste them.
I'm going to pick some more and then why don't we go see
if you can wrangle up some bison in Rice Lake.
[happy country music]
Hi, Marielle. - Hey.
- Thanks for meeting up with me today.
- Yeah, thanks for comin'.
- I'm doing a little celebration of Earth Day
and when I think about sustainable meat,
I often will think about bison.
Can you tell me a little bit about the farm
and about the grazing here?
- Absolutely.
Yeah, my father fell in love with bison
when he was a young boy and grew up on a dairy farm
and had some challenges, of course,
in the late '70s, early '80s.
My father's dream of having bison
started to become an interest,
and now today we use our bison as a tool
to graze our landscape of grass and diverse pastures.
- And how many acres are you grazing?
- We're grazing 2,400 acres this season.
- That's exciting, it's exciting to know
that there's that much grass out here,
because it's such a great habitat
for birds and the bees and everything.
- Yes, we believe so.
We think there's one thing that this part of dairy country
being so lush and nutritious allows for us
to provide a very nutritious product through growing grass,
and grass and just a wide variety of prairie flowers,
and also allowing them into some of the transition areas
and restoring oak savannas as well.
- And by having that diversity in the pasture,
they're getting different nutrients
and different minerals, right?
- Mm-hmm.
- Does it affect the nutrition of the meat then?
- Yeah, absolutely.
We focus heavily on our nutrients that are available
to them in what they consume, and so we do routine checks
to see what kind of nutrients are coming out in the grasses
that they're grazing, and it's been really fun to see
the land as the mineral cycle and the water cycle
starts to really click and you see that synergy,
the bison just shine.
It's fun to watch as the land starts to heal
and we see some tremendous animals
and we know that transfers over
to a very nutritious product on the table.
I think when people think about bison they don't think
about northern Wisconsin as being a place for raising bison
but bison were here back from the beginning of time, right?
- Marielle: Yeah, the last bison east of the Mississippi
was actually seen in Pepin, Wisconsin.
- Inga: Really? - Marielle: Mm-hmm.
- Inga: This is like the 10th largest state
for raising bison.
- Marielle: Yeah, I think because of the pasture quality
that we can achieve in Wisconsin
through very management-intensive styles
and really becoming a student of the land,
there's been some pretty good critics
of grazing that have called Wisconsin
the New Zealand of North America.
- Really?
For folks that have never tried bison before,
what is the favor of it?
- Sure, our flavor, as our customers call it,
is sweet and juicy, and we believe that comes
from our cool season grasses,
clovers and orchard, timothy, brome.
There's a certain sugar content in the maturity of the grass
so we try get past the high protein level of the grass
and getting into the high sugars which comes from the sun.
We harvest solar energy and turn it into a nutritious,
juicy protein that finishes very well in the fall
with a very high Omega-3 and C-L-A content in the fat,
really the fat that your body and your brain craves.
- And this is, you can use bison in place of beef
in any recipe, really.
- Absolutely.
Yeah, bison tends to be, it doesn't marble so sometimes
people say, well bison is really lean.
It can be leaner.
We're on a pure grass diet so depending on if the cut
was from March or August or October, there's going to be
a different fat profile, none of which will marble.
So, we think about the juice and the flavor in the meat
and we just be careful as we're cooking,
and as we're cooking that product, keep it contained
and enjoy that fat and don't cook it out.
That's the magic.
- Well, I'm excited to try some of this bison
but before we do, let's head out and collect
a few more ingredients for the table.
[upbeat guitar music]
Hey, Alan, how are you? - Hey, Inga.
- What are you doin'?
- I am trimming a burdock flower stock.
- What are you going to do with the burdock?
- So this is a, believe it or not, it looks a little weird
but this is the best part of the burdock plant.
- Really?
I've got a ton of this around my farm.
- Everyone has a ton of this around their farm
and you can eat it and it is great
but I don't dig the roots.
This is a lot easier to pick.
All I got to do is go in with a knife and cut it
and it is excellent.
I was talkin' to another forager that I speak with sometimes
about market prices,
and this one's going to go for about $20 a pound.
- Are you kidding me?
And I've just been mowing down my burdock.
I should be harvesting it and selling it.
- Everyone has been mowing down their burdock.
- I wish my cows would eat it.
Maybe if I tell 'em it goes for $20 a pound
So what is this thegoing to taste liket.
and how are you going to prepare it?
- Well, you can almost think of it like the texture
of a root vegetable.
I like to compare it to salsify,
which is kind of an old-fashioned root vegetable
but I'm going to peel it, I'm actually going to peel it twice
and first I like to
go through and peel this like this
with a knife, and then after that, I will go through
with a vegetable peeler and peel it again.
And after that, I put into a little bit of lemon water
and then I can cut it into pieces and cook it
in some chicken stock, and then after it's nice and tender
I could put it on the grill, I could slice it and eat it
just like that, I could marinate it.
- So how did you get into foraging?
- Well, I was working at a restaurant and I noticed
that the most expensive stuff that we bought
was wild food,
nettles, mushrooms, all that stuff.
And I knew how to cook a chicken breast,
I knew how to put a steak on the grill,
I knew how to cook with herbs,
but this was, wild food was a new challenge.
It was something new to study and something new
to master and I quickly found out
that I will never master it.
- What are your favorite wild foods to get?
- That's not a fair question, 'cause I got to list them all.
It depends on the season.
I mean, things can change from day to day, in one week.
Stuff that I could pick today will be totally gone
and it will change and it won't be in a good stage to eat.
A lot of these things are only available for,
it could be a few days.
- What are some of those other things
that we're going to forage for today?
I'm hoping to kind of put together
a little salad on the side.
- There's still a lot of nice
little greens available.
There's going to be lamb's quarter,
there's going to be chickweed, wild mustard greens,
and depending on what you do, you could even use
some of the burdock stalks.
- It looks a little too intense for me. [chuckles]
I'm more of a farmer than I am a chef.
- You got to give 'em a shot. [laughs]
You're a farmer with wonderful ingredients sitting
right on your property.
- That's the thing, they're so much out there
that we're just sort of wasting.
- Yeah, it's a very healthy way to eat.
It's a way of life.
I don't have to pay for a lot of groceries during the season
for vegetables and I can consume pound for pound,
infinitely more by harvesting them out here in the field
than I would do if I'd go to a grocery store.
- Good.
Well, I'm hoping to do a little bit more foraging with Alan
but I wanted to show you something
I did a few months ago.
I visited a native prairie and I thought it'd be a perfect
little tidbit for Earth Day and I think you'll all enjoy it.
[upbeat guitar music]
We're here in Brodhead, Wisconsin,
home to one of the largest native plant nurseries
in the Midwest.
You should see the acre upon acre of blooms here.
It is absolutely gorgeous.
Now let's go find Corrie in the greenhouse
and she's going to talk to us a little bit more
about what native plants really are.
[upbeat guitar music]
Corrie, thanks for taking time out of your day today
to be with me.
It's fun to be around so many beautiful plants.
Tell me, what do you do here?
- We grow native plants.
Everything that we do here is native to the upper Midwest,
southern Wisconsin, northern Illinois, especially.
- So define native, 'cause I know people talk
about native grasses, native this.
What exactly is a native plant?
- You know we get asked that question all the time.
My mother will say, well I was born here, I'm native.
[laughs] That's not what we're talking about.
We're talking about plants that were indigenous here
that were here at the time, prior to, actually,
European settlement.
- So not like a dandelion.
I think, oh, a dandelion, it's in my yard,
it's been there forever
but that was really brought over and introduced.
- It was brought over.
There are so many, even ones that we love, like chicory,
one of my favorites, Queen Anne's lace
- That's one of my favorites, I love Queen Anne's lace.
That's not native? - No, not native.
Beautiful, does good things, but not native.
- Well a lot of these I feel like, this is familiar.
I think I've seen this or something like it growing
in my pasture.
- Exactly, this is blue vervain and it's actually
pretty common if you drive along wetlands, as you said,
old pastures, you will see this.
This is a plant that's servicing pollinators out there.
It's an important part but common.
- And it looks beautiful, too.
What are some other common plants that we might see
driving through Wisconsin?
- Oh, black-eyed Susan is one
that most will be familiar with.
Milkweed is one, of course that's big right now.
Everyone loves the milkweed.
- And that's the monarchs, is that why?
- That's the monarch host plant,
so that's a common one that people will know.
Another one that people will often see if they ever get
out in the woodlands is this one,
and this is the great blue lobelia,
a gorgeous plant.
Bumblebees love it, you can, bumblebee pollinated.
Lot of good, rich nectar in this particular one.
- Interesting.
Can you do something like this in your backyard
or is it only beneficial on a big scale?
- Large scale is great, of course, that's the ultimate
beneficial thing that you can do but we can all do a part.
I'm doing a part in my backyard.
People are startin' to get excited about it.
Butterfly gardens, rain gardens, that kind of thing.
As you can see, there's some really lovely choices
that you can make.
- Well, I'd like to see native plants on a bigger scale
so I'm going to go head over to Steve's farm
and see what he's done over there.
- Oh, you're going to enjoy it.
[upbeat Americana music]
- Steve, thanks for having me up to the farm.
I just came from your nurseries and talking with Corrie.
You're the founder of A-E-S.
Tell us all that you do, 'cause it's kind of amazing things.
- We work on about 1,500 projects a year
all over the world
that are ecological restoration projects,
reclamation projects converting old mine sites
into beneficially reusable landscapes,
doing alternative agricultural projects,
doing prairie, wetlands, savanna restoration,
designing urban parks and restoring farms
to prairie and wetland and so forth.
- Making the world a better place.
- Yeah, trying.
One little acre at a time, yeah, exactly.
- So your farm looks a little bit different than
a lot of the farms that I see around Wisconsin.
There's a lot of diversity here,
a lot of prairie.
How many acres of prairie do you have here at your farm?
- We have probably around 70 acres of prairie
and eight to 10 acres of wetland
and several acres of savanna
and first order trout stream we've restored,
and then a couple of acres of gardens and orchards.
- You've got everything here, you don't have to ever
leave the farm.
- It's awfully nice to be here.
A lot of people have a summer cottage.
We don't need one. [laughs]
- One thing that you talked to me about is how
you're seeing in these native prairies like you have here
at your farm, you're seeing food sources, not only
for the pollinators or for the animals,
but there's human food in there, too.
I never thought of it as a food source for human beings.
- Well, it used to be.
Native Americans harvested many of the species, seeds,
and other plant materials and utilized the products for food
and we're experimenting with the same,
and what we're learning is some of the native legumes
are 38% digestible protein, just the seeds,
and some of the native grasses are 25% digestible protein,
and very, very palatable and actually quite delicious
and we've made some beer and we've made some bread
and a whole range of different food products
that we're experimenting with.
We're not selling it or anything like that
at this point.
- Oh, that'll be interesting to see
how you take that further because thinking about these
plants coming off of this prairie,
I don't have to tell you,
the root systems must be so long and just going down so far,
and they're pulling up all that nutrients, is that correct?
- Well, that's exactly right.
Many of the plants here have root systems that go down
6 to 10 feet, as opposed to conventional crops,
which some, they may have straggling roots
that go down that deep but most
are much shallower than that.
So we're remineralizing the full soil column by growing
these plants that are bringing up cations
from two or three meters deep and it's doing it
without any fertilizer, any help.
- Do you think a prairie like this would be beneficial
to me as a dairy farmer to run my cows through
so that they can kind of get mineralized, too?
- Well, I would say the buffalo had it right,
because the buffalo and elk lived on this sort of landscape
and I've seen very weak
and drab-looking buffalo and elk.
They usually are big and healthy animals.
You'll have to ask them. [Inga laughs]
- Well, I know that you're a busy man and I'll let you
get back to work, but if you don't mind, I would love
to be able to walk through and see what different kind of
species and see if I recognize anything that's growing
that may be growing on my farm.
- Have at it and enjoy it.
Enjoy the butterflies, they're quite abundant right now.
- Well, thank you, Steve.
Have a great rest of the day. - Steve: Enjoy your walk.
[upbeat guitar music]
- As we approach the 50th anniversary of Earth Day,
I thought it would be nice to stop by Clear Lake, Wisconsin
to visit where Gaylord Nelson was born.
This is where he developed his love
of everything environmental.
He was not only a Wisconsin Senator and Governor,
he's also the founder of Earth Day
and I'm excited to be able to celebrate Earth Day
and his legacy with his daughter, Tia.
[Native American flute]
I'm here at Blue Vista Farm near Bayfield.
I wanted to move up with Tia, Gaylord Nelson's daughter,
to celebrate Earth Day with her and some of her friends.
- Inga: Hello, Tia! - Tia: Oh, hi, Inga,
welcome to Blue Vista Farm. - Thank you.
I was just coming up from Clear Lake, which is where
your father was born, and now we're in another special place
overlooking the Apostle Islands.
- It's really my favorite place, most magical place
in all the world for me and for my father.
He came here as a child and later brought
President John F. Kennedy to visit here and that became
the beginning of an effort to protect the Apostle Islands.
The largest freshwater archipelago in the world
is now the Apostle Island National Lakeshore
and the Gaylord Nelson Wilderness area.
- Inga: Wisconsin has so many treasures.
- Tia: Oh, certainly.
- I'd love to hear more about it
but I need to get out of the heat.
- Yeah. - Could we head to the shade?
- Sure.
[Native American flute]
- Tia, can you tell me a little bit about your father
and why the environment was so important to him?
- Sure, he was born in Clear Lake, Wisconsin,
a small town in northwestern Wisconsin, Polk county,
and nature was his playground and his experiences
as a child very much imbued in him an environmental ethos
that stayed with him all his life
and became a distinguishing part of his career
once he was elected governor,
and later a United States senator.
- He's not only a governor and a senator, but he was also
the founder of Earth Day.
How do we celebrate Earth Day beyond April 22nd?
- There's lots of things we can do.
Doing our best to avoid single-use plastic
whenever we can.
That has a big environmental footprint.
It doesn't tend to be recyclable because it has less value
so aluminum is more frequently recycled,
glass much more frequently recycled
because they have higher value.
So, things like the choices we make about the food we eat,
the choices we make about the food we purchase
but don't consume, choices about single-use plastic
and packaging of food products, as well.
It's the nice thing about buying at the farmers market,
right, you don't have all this--
- All the extra.
- All the extra packaging that goes with some of your
grocery store trips, you know?
- Well I'm absolutely so excited to be able to come up here
and to meet you and to be with you today,
and to celebrate your father and to celebrate Earth Day.
Thank you so much for having me.
- Well, thank you.
I'm so grateful and thank you for your interest.
I'm really happy to be here.
- Well, I'm going to head over to my little makeshift kitchen
and get our feast started.
[upbeat happy music]
For today's Earth Day celebration,
I wanted to do something simple but really delicious.
Since we're using these amazing ingredients
and they're so fresh, I decided to turn the bison
into a bison tartare.
It's something my cousin CeCe and I ate all over France.
It's very popular there and I just thought,
with a great piece of meat, it's something
that I wanted to serve today.
I'm going to serve that
alongside of our wild green salad,
so we have some of the greens that we collected,
and I added a few radishes and tomatoes
just to make the color bright, and I'm going to dress that
with a garlic scape vinaigrette.
And if you've never had fresh garlic before,
I suggest you find yourself a farmers market
and get some fresh garlic.
It's a whole different experience.
Or better yet, grow your own.
And I'm just going to use three garlic scapes
and then, to that I'm going to add a couple of scallions.
And I'm just going to dice these up real quick.
And right in they go.
And then some lemon,
a fresh squeeze of lemon.
That's going to be my acid.
If you wanted to add a little red wine vinegar,
you could do that, too.
And then I'm going to do a little Dijon mustard.
Alrighty.
And then some salt and pepper.
If you had some local honey, you could put a little drizzle
in there to sweeten it up a bit.
[blender whirs]
Once it's pureed a little bit, then slowly add
a little bit of olive oil.
[blender whirs]
And that is how you can make a quick, simple vinaigrette.
So I'm just going to pour that into a bowl here.
And look at how gorgeous it is.
It looks like a green goddess dressing.
It's going to be really good.
And then just give it a taste.
It's nice and garlicky, but the perfect amount of garlic.
I'm going to get this kind of cleaned up
and then, we'll start making the bison tartare.
[birds chirping]
So you can make different tartares.
Today we're doing a bison tartare, but if you wanted to do
a salmon tartare or even a beet tartare, it's basically
just a raw formation with some different spices and things
added to it.
So, let's get our spices all ready.
I'm going to do some shallots.
I think that will be a nice flavor with this.
I'm big fan of that sort of oniony, garlicky flavor.
I like everything strong.
And with some fresh parsley.
I love cooking with fresh herbs,
especially if they're coming out of my garden.
So I'm just going to chop up some cornichons right here,
and a few capers, and I'm just going to do a rough chop.
Now I'm going to add this to my bowl here.
You really want to know where your meat's coming from.
I know the farmers that it's coming from, I trust that.
You don't want to buy just ground burger from the store
because there's oftentimes more than one animal
in that package of burger, and so you don't know
what you're getting into.
So you want to make sure it's a full joint that you're using
and that you know the person that's growing it,
and you're handling it well.
You could also put some salt on it and leave it
in the fridge for an hour with a coating of salt,
and then rinse that salt off after an hour
and then dry the meat well
so that you know there's any bacteria
that may have been on there is getting off.
And now you just want to dice this up as thinly
as you can get it.
So once you have it diced to the consistency that you want,
just add it into those capers and the shallots
and some of those lovely cornichons and the parsley.
Now you can add your seasonings so I'm going to use
a nice Dijon mustard and then a little ketchup
and some hot sauce is traditional.
Spice things up. I love hot sauce.
I'm going to put a little bit of lemon juice in there
just to brighten those flavors up a little bit
and some salt and pepper.
And then, now I'm just going to mix everything together.
So when I plate it, I want it to look really beautiful
so I'm going to get a little help from, just a little can
is going to be my guide.
If you do this ahead of time, just make sure you put
the mixture back in the fridge to chill.
Look at that.
And then you can top that off with a little quail egg
to be extra pretty.
And then maybe some greens around there.
And it's kind of a fun celebratory lunch
that you can have with a fresh glass of champagne.
I'm going to get the other plates plated
and then we'll all sit down for a feast.
[acoustic Americana music]
- Inga Voiceover: Serve the tartare
with cornichons and toast points.
Spice up the wild green salad with radishes and tomatoes.
Top the tartare with a quail egg.
[loud pop] [people exclaim]
[laughter]
- That's a good senior moment. [laughter]
- Inga: A bit of sparkling wine to cool you down
on a hot summer day.
Well, I hope this has inspired you to celebrate
Earth Day every day,
and I hope you'll gather with us next time
Around the Farm Table !
I'm your host, Inga Witscher.
Cheers, guys.
[upbeat Americana music]
- Around the Farm Table is funded in part by
Wisconsin Farmers Union,
united to grow family agriculture,
Heartland Credit Union
and Friends of Wisconsin Public Television.