The Capital Times, WI
11-27-06
Wilda Nilsestuen: Voices are ringing on farming's future
By Wilda Nilsestuen
Experts on rural life and agriculture offered plenty to chew on at six forums
around the state this year on the Future of Farming and Rural Life in Wisconsin.
"Forum season" has come and gone. This project of the Wisconsin Academy of
Sciences, Arts and Letters will next feature a statewide conference May 14-15 at
Monona Terrace and a final report will be issued in mid-2007. But first, here are
some of our favorite quotes from the forums:
Gays Mills author Ben Logan said this: "We must find a way to make sure that
Wisconsin's long-range story is a positive one. That means a representation of
people in some kind of lasting harmony with the land that is so vulnerable to
human intervention."
Logan spoke in Ashland. Also on the program that day was American Indian
writer and journalist Paul DeMain of Hayward. He told a story about searching for
medicinal plants, only to find a newly sprouted subdivision.
"You built your house right in the middle of my pharmacy," he said. People
laughed, but not when he added, "A lot of things are precious to people. Make
sure you take an inventory of all that is out there."
Marathon dairy farmer Keith Langenhahn spoke about sprawl, too.
"Seventy percent of America's prime farmland is in risk of development," he said
in Wausau, citing American Farmland Trust figures. "Wisconsin has to do
something to preserve agriculture. We need a purchase of development rights
program as soon as possible. We don't have a lot of time to study. We have to do
some cramming."
The clock is ticking on saving rural schools, too, said Superintendent of Public
Instruction Elizabeth Burmaster.
"The fiscal problems of our rural school districts are great. We are at a crisis. We
cannot continue down this road of expecting access and equity for rural students
if we do not address funding for rural schools," she said at our Menasha forum.
That forum, in late August, also focused on rural health care, and participants
learned that vast numbers of farmers are uninsured or underinsured. Something
must be done, said Mosinee dairy farmer Sandy Cihlar.
"Farmers are no-nonsense, get-the-work-done people. I believe if people
debating these services would take that same approach, we could say that on
Aug. 25, 2006, a group of people who care about rural Wisconsin went forward
and said, 'Enough is enough.' "
In Platteville, longtime Wisconsin conservationist Gene Roark of Madison spoke
about forested lands. "Our kids today learn in school about destruction of the rain
forest, I think sometimes to the detriment of what they're learning about the
needs of American forests."
Conservation on forest and farm land was a major theme at our Platteville forum.
Tom Hunt, UW-Platteville Pioneer Farm director of research, had this to say
about the farmland side: "We need to diversify. We cannot put all our eggs in one
basket. We've got to follow total quality management - environmental, economic
and social."
A presenter at our first forum, in Menomonie, spoke about the economic
necessity of energy conservation on America's farms.
"If we want to look in terms of the future and what kind of agriculture can be put
on the landscape, it will be based on energy conservation," said.
Fred Kirschenmann, distinguished fellow at the Leopold Center for
Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University
"We're going to need alternative energy sources, but if energy conservation is not
part of the equation, I think we're in trouble."
Then there's this pithy quote from Greg Welsh, a Gays Mills orchard grower and
longtime employee of Organic Valley Family of Farms: "If a farmer is not paid
fairly, it's not a valid product."
The need for profitable and sustainable farm operations echoed time and again
as we moved around the state. So was the need to educate and help urban
citizens reconnect to the land.
Leave it to a farmer - Oconomowoc dairy farmer Jim Koepke - to capture it all in
a few words: "So few people are producing food that we have lost our attachment
to the land."
Wilda Nilsestuen of Sun Prairie is director of the Future of Farming and Rural Life
in Wisconsin project of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters.