Past programs and links
In Wisconsin Transcript #000404    Airdate: 10/13/2005
[Captioning made possible by U.S. Department of Education]
  Homeland Security: First Response
Dane County Emergency Management stages a dramatic exercise at the Regional Airport using volunteer actors as victims and terrorists. Area first responders test out their new training and equipment, much of it provided with federal Homeland Security dollars.

related links
Department of Homeland Security
Wisconsin Political Leader Views on Homeland Security
Watch this Segment!
Wisconsin Homeland Security
  Watercolorist
Door County artist Charles L. Peterson paints highly detailed watercolors that tell stories of the past. He has now unveiled the last painting in The Memories Collection, a series created for release as limited edition prints.

related links
Charles Peterson Artwork
Charles Peterson Americana Artwork
Maritime Gallery at Mystic Seaport
  Land Trust: Bayfield
Rick and Janet Dale moved to Bayfield County more than thirty-five years ago with very little money and very big dreams. They wanted to raise their family in a rural setting and start a fruit farm. They succeeded and their Highland Valley Farm is well-known in the Bayfield County area.
The Dales' story is the first in a series on land trusts that In Wisconsin will feature throughout the next several months. Wisconsin has more than fifty different land trusts operating in different communities across the state. So far, using a variety of methods and working with private individuals, these land trusts have managed to protect more than 130,000 acres of private land in the state. Stay tuned! We ll show you how Wisconsin residents, like the Dales, have worked with their local land trust to protect private lands in Wisconsin.

related links
Gathering Waters Conservancy Information on Land Trusts
Watch Land Trust Bayfield
Gathering Waters Conservancy
Watch Land Trust Brule
Watch Land Trust Chippewa County
West Wisconsin Land Trust
Northeast Wisconsin Land Trust
  Cow of the Year
Sun-Made Jetway Shatzi is one special cow. The Brown Swiss dairy cow from Viroqua has been named Wisconsin Cow of the Year at the World Dairy Expo and owners Kent and Rena Thompson couldn't be more proud. The Thompson family has been raising Brown Swiss dairy cows since the 1930s and they say that Brown Swiss cows, like Shatzi, generate the best cheese. Governor Jim Doyle says cows like Shatzi "represent the outstanding attributes that make Wisconsin America's Dairyland."

related links
Shatzi named Cow of the Year
World Dairy Expo
Brown Swiss Association
Watch this Segment
  Postcard: Timm’s Hill
Travel to the scenic Timm's Hill in Price County.

related links
Timm’s Hill County Park
Price County Homepage
Timm’s Hill on Peatbagger

Patty Loew:
Hello, and welcome to "In Wisconsin." I'm Patty Loew. Each week we bring you stories about the people and issues in our state. This week witness a highly realistic fake terrorist attack designed to train Wisconsin's first responders. Travel back to a simpler time in the paintings of Door County artist Charles Peterson. And find out how a Bayfield farm family put a halt to development. All that, plus we'll meet a beauty who is a beast. We'll also take you on a fall color tour from the highest natural point, "In Wisconsin."

Four years ago, our sense of security changed forever. It was four years ago that terrorists brought down the World Trade Center killing thousands. Since then, creating Homeland Security has become a top priority. The federal government has poured tens of millions of dollars into new equipment and training for rescue workers in Wisconsin alone. But it's not enough to train in a classroom. First responders need to practice on the scene, and rescue workers around the state have been doing just that. In Dane County, a shockingly realistic drill took place a few months ago. Reporter Frederica Freyberg has this report.

Man:
We have a hostage situation with an airliner here.

Woman:
Command from fire five.

Frederica Freyberg:
This is only a drill, but it is a full-out terror disaster exercise that has hijackers taking over an airline full of passengers and then releasing an unknown chemical agent via an improvised explosive device.

Jay McLellan:
Crashing into the Twin Towers in New York City sounds farfetched, too. It all sounds farfetched, but it's crazy to think what terrorism could do, and that is part of the exercise, is to prepare people's plans, prepare people. We're first responders, to respond to a terrorist incident.

Freyberg:
Since 9/11, Wisconsin has received more than $100 million in Homeland Security First Responder Funds. It's gone for state of the art disaster response equipment, for things like up-armored police tactical units that appear ready to wage war.

Man:
Exercise communication at HazMat operations.

Freyberg:
From mobile radio communications centers, where incident commanders direct large-scale emergency response. The money also goes for training. Training like detonating explosives in a Homeland Security funded containment vessel tested out at a sheriff's law enforcement training center.

Woman:
Stacy, they're going to take good care of you.

Freyberg:
Training also includes federally-mandated full-out exercises, like one staged in the summer of 2005 at the Dane County regional airport. More than 100 volunteers pose as airline passengers taken hostage poisoned by the chemical and then released. The scene would be terrifying if not a drill.

Woman:
Help! Help!

Freyberg:
This exercise was kept top secret from the first responders, so they couldn't plan ahead. As it develops, they find themselves dealing with frantic, injured, contaminated victims.

Man:
It's been going as well as it could. Certainly anything like this is very difficult to handle, but we do the best we can.

Freyberg:
More than 50 agencies from the FBI to small town Fire Departments, several of them all volunteer, take part. More than 300 participants in all. Decontamination of passengers proves difficult. Hosing them off. Herding them into one place, putting them through de-con showers, tending to their injuries, and transporting them to hospitals.

Is it daunting to think of this in real life?

Tom DeMeuse:
Yes. I don't want to say anything about that more than it is. We've been practicing. We've been drilling. Obviously every drill we get better, but we never want to see it.

Freyberg:
A similar large-scale terrorist disaster drill was staged here in 2002.

Paul Bloom:
What I see different between the last time and this time is that we do have more supplies, more things to treat weapons of mass destruction, and organizationally-wise, it may not look like it, but we are definitely a lot more organized than we have been.

Freyberg:
Dane County is not alone in its preparedness drills. Regional teams of first responders stage similar exercises across the state.

Lori Wirth:
One of the lessons learned from 9/11 is that you can't wait for the federal government to send in whatever they're going to send in to respond to something, and that's the key point about first responders.

Freyberg:
Are we ready for the real deal?

Man:
I would say we're getting there. We still need some work, but if I were to put it on a scale of one to 10, we're at an eight.

Freyberg:
Wisconsin Emergency Management points out that all of the training and equipment serves the state in natural disasters, like tornadoes and flooding as well. A new study, ordered by Governor Doyle after Hurricane Katrina, shows Wisconsin is not ready to handle mass evacuations in the event of a large-scale catastrophe. The governor wants all 72 counties to be ready by the fall of 2006.


We change gears now from preparing for the future to looking back at the past. Watercolorist Charles Peterson has seen a great deal of change since visiting Door County almost 60 years ago. Producer Liz Koerner found his paintings play with this concept, capturing the ghosts of the past, who linger in the present day. Our story is narrated by Jim Fleming.

Jim Fleming:
A room full of admirers from across America gathered recently to get a glimpse of the illusive Door County artist Charles Peterson.

Charles Peterson:
I prefer the thought that my paintings are of great interest, but I would rather remain anonymous.

Fleming:
Peterson's paintings are of great interest, especially to collectors of limited edition prints. Mark Quale is the owner of the White Door Publishing Company.

Mark Quale:
He is without a question one of the most loved and most respected artists in the limited edition print industry not now, but ever.

Fleming:
Quale first saw photos of Peterson's artwork in the late 1980's.

Quale:
And you could see immediately looking at them that he's an extraordinary artist.

Fleming:
One piece in particular caught Quale's eye.

Quale:
There was one that was an old barn scene. The title of it was "Sleigh Ride" and as usual my discovery was that it was an old barn at first. But then you see look it, there's somebody there, there's somebody else. And I knew that there was a language there that people could understand.

Fleming:
The language of Charles Peterson's art speaks directly to the heart, telling stories of the past with accuracy and affection.

Peterson:
I have a powerful inclination toward historical things, so I take great pleasure in reconstructing some of the history of our part in Wisconsin.

Fleming:
Peterson taught college art classes before taking up a paint brush full time some 30 years ago.

Peterson:
My training, but also I think my natural interest in history has turned me into what you would properly call an illustrator. My artwork tells stories about human experience. And I tended to concentrate on ordinary human experience.

Fleming:
The Miller Art Museum in Sturgeon Bay recently hosted a retrospective of Charles Peterson's work. Bonnie Hartmann is the museum's director.

Bonnie Hartmann:
There is such extraordinary love and detail even in the shadows. In a sense, these paintings, they're actually two paintings, and he actually composes them that way. There's a tremendous amount of work that goes into placing all of the ghost images so that one almost happens upon them. Those are also placed compositionally to work with the rest of the painting. They're very complex paintings, taking months to do.

Fleming:
Adding to the complexity of composition, Peterson uses watercolors, one of the most difficult mediums to master.

Peterson:
There's a perversity in me. I enjoy the immense difficulty of doing these things in watercolor.

Quale:
As a matter of fact, the way he paints, he paints the entire back scene and having massed out all of the area ahead of time, where those memory images are going to be and they're painted in last. And when you look at them, and understanding when a watercolor artist paints-- there's existing paint, he's got to get up to the edge. If he doesn't get close enough, there's white paper there. It shows through. If he goes too far, there's a hard line. It overlaps. And you won't find hard lines.

Fleming:
Even though Peterson has great control of the medium, the creative process can be quite frustrating, a fact his wife Sue knows very well.

Peterson:
I was doing a field sketch of a little pond across from our house several years ago, and a man came by, who had to see me about something. And Sue said to him, just go down the path and listen for the sound of cursing. You'll have no trouble finding him, and that was the case. He did.

And apparently share the experiences with others in your family, your friends.

Fleming:
The recent gathering for Charles Peterson was a retirement party. He's retiring from the demands of the limited edition print market. Tonight at this event he unveiled the last one in a series of 60 paintings.

Man:
The final release in "The Memories Collection" a painters memories.

Fleming:
Charles Peterson may be retiring from publication, but he plans to continue painting for a long time.

Peterson:
There's no way I could quit painting at this stage in my life because it has become an obsession. My soul, my inner being supplies an endless hope that a perfected painting will result.

Loew:
According to the publisher, 2,500 prints were made of Charles Peterson's "Final Memory" series painting. The series sold out within 30 days of its release. While Peterson preserves the past through his art, others are looking for tangible ways to hold on to the world as it currently is.


Landowners, in particular, are increasingly trying to find ways to preserve their land even after they're gone. More and more they're turning to what are called land trusts. Producer Joanne Garrett visits a family who owns land in Bayfield County.

Rick Dale:
This represents our life's work. We've poured more than 30 years of our lives into this, and it would be almost unbearable for me to see it cut up, to see a bulldozer move in and cut it up into something other than what I've made it.

Joanne Garrett:
Rick Dale and his wife Janet came to Bayfield County some 30 years ago and founded Highland Valley Farm.

Rick:
This is a real business. We take risk and we make investments.

Garrett:
It's a fruit farm with raspberries and blueberries and bees.

Rick:
Poke it in. Put that in your mouth.

Garrett:
A fruit farm that's situated on what has come to be some of the most highly desirable real estate in Wisconsin. Bayfield, a tourist hub, is just minutes away. The lure of nearby Lake Superior draws in buyers. But those winds that blow across the big lake also wash across these farms making this area unique in the state.

Rick:
The thing that enables us to grow the crops that we grow here is this unique microclimate affected by Lake Superior. Every wind carrying weather to us crosses water, except the southwest wind, and the southwest wind is always a warm wind. And so that really moderates our climate.

Garrett:
These small fruit farms are part of the economy, part of the experience of the Bayfield area.

Rick:
There's an ambience about fruit growing that's very attractive to people. It's the flavors, the beauty of the farms. They're gorgeous to look at.

Garrett:
But 30 years of building up this business has had a cost.

Rick:
Here I am pushing 60 years old. You know, truth be told, I'm probably earning what a beginning teacher starts with.

Garrett:
For a farmer's money is in the land.

Rick:
A common adage is farmers are rich when they die.

Garrett:
Or if they sell their land to developers. A lucrative prospect and an unbearable possibility for the Dales. Their solution? Call the local land trust. That's what the Dales did. There are 55 land trusts in Wisconsin, each with different missions and methods. They're private organizations, which sometimes pair up with public entities, and they've managed to protect over 135,000 acres in the state. Vicki Elkin is the head of "Gathering Waters," a consortium of all the land trusts in Wisconsin.

Vicki Elkin:
A land trust is a nonprofit private organization that specializes in protecting land for future generations. They either buy land or accept donations of land or they work with private landowners to create permanent land conservation agreements on their properties so that these privately-owned lands will never be developed.

Garrett:
Which is what the Dales did. They put a conservation easement on their property. They worked with their local land trusts, the Bayfield Regional Conservancy and the Bayfield Township, which voted to raise taxes to help preserve these fruit farms. The Dales sold their right to develop their land, to sub divide it. Their land is not a public park. They still own it and work it. They've simply sold one of the rights they have as property owners.

Rick:
If you think about property ownership as a bundle of sticks and each stick represents a certain property right, you can pull out some of these sticks or straws from the bundle and sell them on the market. For instance, timber rights. The paper company comes and buys your timber rights. You still own the land. The paper company now owns the right to harvest that timber if you've sold that right. One of those rights that has been identified is the right to develop the land. An entity like a land trust or a municipality, like a township government, or a partnership of those two, can approach a farmer and offer to buy his right to develop his land. The purpose of which is to prevent the development of the land.

Garrett:
Two appraisals were done of the Dale's farm. The first as divided and sold to a developer. The second, as kept intact as a farm. The difference equals the development rights. That's what the Dales sold through the conservation easement placed on their deed, and that easement that specifies no development of the land stays with the deed forever.

Rick:
And the beauty of farmland preservation under land trust, everybody wins. Everybody. There are no losers. The community benefits for the open space. The retiring farmer now has options. We still had six more years of debt load for the expansion and improvements that we've made. The buyout for the easement immediately paid down that debt. There was still enough left over to create a substantial retirement account for my wife and I.

Garrett:
And when the land is finally sold …

Rick:
When it's offered out there for sale, the developers are no longer bidding on the land because there's nothing they could do with the land. It's protected from subdivision and development. So the only people bidding for the sale when the farmer finally retires are people who want are interested in living on that property as a whole and hopefully farming it. Okay.

Garrett:
The Dale's son, Chris, has recently returned to Bayfield to work with his dad and to someday take over the farm.

Rick:
This has enabled us now to take that income that might have been used for debt retirement and offer a salary to a son, who's eager to return to the land. Chris has come back now at an earlier age than anticipated, and he'll work with me for the next 10, 12 years.

Then after that four-day interval we'll go ahead and get some water here, because the berries are forming rapidly now.

And everything that's up here in my head gets transferred to his head and his wife's head and they will be the next generation.

Rick:
What did you get for this field, Chris?

Chris:
Twenty-two.

Rick:
We're in pretty good shape. Yesterday it was at 19. This field does have more qualities.

Chris:
It takes a lot of pressure off in the future. I don't have to worry about anybody coming in and trying to buy property out from under me, or being in a situation where I feel like it's my last option to sell, because it's not even an option anymore.

Did you do the raspberries yesterday, or today?

Rick:
No, that's probably a prime candidate.

A future generation could decide not to farm. Maybe they don't want to work this hard. But three generations following that, there may come a young couple with a vision to bring it all to life again, and if the land hasn't been cut up and the roads haven't been developed and the septic systems and the basement's poured, you know, it will be here for them. The berries look great.

Loew:
As you heard in that report, the money to purchase the development rights to the Dale's farm came in part from their local land trust and in part from a tax increase which the Bayfield township voted for. Other land trusts work in different ways. We'll bring you more reports on land trusts around the state throughout the upcoming months. If you'd like more information, check out our web site at wpt.org/inwisconsin. You'll also find information there about the largest land trust conference in the nation, which takes place in Madison October 14 through the 17th.


Last week, 65,000 people from around the world came to Madison for the World Dairy Expo. They came to learn about the latest in dairy technology, check out the best dairy livestock on the planet, and see Governor Jim Doyle select one animal as Wisconsin's Cow of the Year. Okay, so maybe people didn't come from around the world to see the governor proclaim the cow of the year, but "In Wisconsin" producer Art Hackett did.

Art Hackett:
The World Dairy Expo is the place to see the best cows in the business. These cows happen to be Guernseys. But if you look at the signs surrounding the arena, it's hard not to conclude, well, it's a Holstein world.

The Holstein is enshrined in toys, advertising and art. After all, the theme of this year's World Dairy Expo is the Art of Dairying.

Gena Cooper:
Wisconsin is certainly well known for our Holstein breed. That's certainly what we see a lot of and we're very proud of those black and white cows. We have all the breeds in this state, everything from the Holsteins to Ayrshires, Milking Shorthorns and of course Guernseys, Jerseys, Brown Swiss. What else can you name?

Hackett:
So when it's time to pick Wisconsin's Cow of the Year, letting one breed constantly steal the show would be unpolitic.

Jim Doyle:
Did you know you had the cow of the year?

Man:
No.

Hackett:
It would be a little like the governor asking the mom, if the baby he was about to kiss was her favorite.
Cooper:
Thank you for joining us today as we celebrate Wisconsin dairy and our 2005 Cow of the Year.

Hackett:
In some places, things like this start civil wars. In 1972 the legislature passed Wisconsin statute 167.1.10, designating the dairy cow as the Wisconsin domestic animal. Shortly thereafter, governor Patrick Lucey had the good sense to issue executive order 32, designating first the Holstein as Cow of the Year and then rotating the designation alternately among the remaining recognized pure breeds.

Rod Nilsestuen:
And so in keeping with believe it or not Wisconsin state statutes and long tradition and the rules of this show that each year a different breed is featured as Cow of the Year, and this year we're joined by an exemplary example of a wonderful brown Swiss animal.

Doyle:
It is my pleasure to proclaim their dairy cow Sun-Made, Jetway, Shatzi, the 2005 Cow of the Year. Congratulations

Hackett:
The long name describes Shatzi's genetic heritage. She belongs to Kent and Rena Thompson of Viroqua. Kent found out Shatzi was the winner of the annual meeting of the State Brown Swiss Breed Association.

Carter Thompson:
And they started describing the animal that had one, and we knew it was her then.

Hackett:
And what was your reaction then?

Kent Thompson:
I didn't know it until they got back from the meeting, and he was still smiling ear to ear when I got back.

Hackett:
Kent Thompson says she was picked because of the amount and quality of the milk she produces, and there are aspects of a beauty pageant enter.

Thompson:
Her udder, mammary system, and feet and legs, as she gets around. As you can see, she just keeps chewing her cud and wanting to eat again.

Hackett:
That, and this was the year a brown Swiss got its turn to hog the spotlight.

All of the little signature cows that you see about Wisconsin, they're always Holsteins. Do you think you could do something about that?

Thompson:
I like my color. I like the colored ones, the brown ones.

Doyle:
The idea that we're going to highlight a cow, I think really shows the strength of the dairy industry, and it shows what great dairy farms we have in the state.

Hackett:
It's not important that she's a brown Swiss. It's important that she's a cow.

Doyle:
It's important she's a dairy cow.

Loew:
That's our program for this week. We leave you with a trip to the top of the highest natural peek in the state, Timm's Hill in Price County. For "In Wisconsin," I'm Patty Loew. See you next time.


 
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