Past programs and links
In Wisconsin Transcript #000607    Airdate: 10/18/2007
[Captioning made possible by U.S. Department of Education]
  Blacksmith
When Steve Hackbarth opened his business he called it Badger Village Blacksmithing, in part to evoke the famous Longfellow poem "The Village Blacksmith." Producer Andy Soth finds that like the poet, Hackbarth takes a decidedly philosophical view on the art of metalwork.

It's not the only art he practices. The story features Hackbarth performing his original music on guitar outside his shop on the Wisconsin River in Merrimac.

You can see Hackbarth's and many other artists work the weekend of October 19th during the Fall Art Tour. Artists and craftspeople from the Mineral Point, Spring Green, Dodgeville and Baraboo area will be holding open houses throughout the weekend.

related links
Studios of Working Wisconsin Artists
Badger Village Blacksmithing
  Land Trust Door County
Wisconsin is a very beautiful state with many gorgeous places to visit and enjoy. One of the most popular is Door County and not surprisingly, land prices in the peninsula are very expensive and climbing every year. So given that economic climate how has the Door County Land Trust, a small non-profit, managed to preserve some 4,000 acres of land in the county from development? These 4,000 acres are open to all the citizens of Door County and visitors and provide valuable green space for an area facing increasing development pressures.

related links
Gathering Waters Conservancy
Gathering Waters Conservancy Information on Land Trusts
Door County Land Trust
Watch Land Trust Door County- Real 06:46
Watch Land Trust Door County- Windows Media 06:46
  Fair Trade Coffee
A small Madison company, ‘Just Coffee' imports coffee from farmers in Chiapas, Mexico and Guatemala. They participate in the Fair Trade system, which guarantees a minimum price for the coffee and promises a long-term relationship with these farmers. Every year the partners in the Madison company travel to remote mountain farm communities to meet the farmers who grow their coffee.

related links
Equal Exchange
Global Exchange
Just Coffee Website
Fair Trade Month Events
  Budget Brief Series – Part Seven
Three months after the July deadline, Wisconsin lawmakers remain in a deadlock over the state budget. Wisconsin is the only state that still has not passed a budget. Producer Frederica Freyberg delivers an update on this week’s negotiations.

related links
View State Budget
Watch Budget Brief Sept. 13-Windows Media
Watch Budget Brief Sept. 27-Windows Media
Watch Budget Brief Sept. 20-Windows Media
Watch Budget Brief Sept. 13-Real
Watch Budget Brief Sept. 20-Real
Watch Budget Brief Oct.4- Real
Watch Budget Brief Oct.4- Windows Media
Watch Budget Brief Sept. 6- Real
Watch budget Brief Sept. 6- Windows Media
Watch Budget Brief Oct. 11- Real
Watch Budget Brief Oct. 11- Windows Media
Watch Budget Brief Sept. 27- Real
Watch Budget Brief Oct. 18- Real
Watch Budget Brief Oct. 18- Windows Media
  North White Pines Postcard
A fall sunset highlights the beauty of a lone White Pine.

related links
Trees Of Wisconsin
USDA Forest Service
Watch North White Pines- Real 00:31
Watch North White Pines- Windows Media 00:31
UW Extension Forestry Facts

Loew:
When Merrimac blacksmith Steve Hackbarth chose the name, Badger Village Blacksmithing for his business, it was done in part to evoke a famous Longfellow poem, the “Village Blacksmith.” Producer Andy Soth uses lines from that poem along with original guitar music performed by Hackbarth to create this portrait of an artist who takes a very philosophical view of his craft.

Andy Soth:
UNDER a spreading chestnut-tree
The village smithy stands;
The smith, a mighty man is he,
With large and sinewy hands;

Steve Hackbarth:
“The smith, a mighty man is he, With large and sinewy…” That sounds pretty good to me.

Soth:
His hair is crisp, and black, and long,
His face is like the tan;
His brow is wet with honest sweat,
He earns whate'er he can,

Hackbarth:
Blacksmithing is a noisy kind of physical profession. It's an athletic endeavor. You have to be pounding on iron or forming it, shaping it in some way, shape or form.

Soth:
You can hear him swing his heavy sledge,
With measured beat and slow,
Like a sexton ringing the village bell,
When the evening sun is low.

Hackbarth:
And so it's not a profession that allows itself a lot of communication. The blacksmith is kind of trapped within that silence of noise. So he ends up being a philosopher of sorts.

There are many spiritual parallels in blacksmithing. The idea of shaping something. And often, if we look at ourselves as the iron that's being shaped, I often look at the fact it can't be a pleasant process for the iron to be heated up and pounded on. And all of us go through certain trials in our lives in relation to, you know, the sorrow and pain that is existing in this world, and you know, it shapes us. And some people, it shapes differently than others.

Soth:
Toiling, rejoicing, sorrowing,
Onward through life he goes;

Hackbarth:
Yeah, I couldn't rescue that one. Blacksmithing is about learning how to fail, and be okay with failing. Because you have to fail a lot of times before you get it right. And it's being willing to go through that failure, and go through that disappointment, and to get to the other side of it. And I find the same experience is true with my guitar playing. The material that I compose on guitar is built with small phrases. And I try to put stuff together so that it makes the composition. And blacksmithing to come up with a finished project is the same, where you build small items to make a final piece.

Soth:
Each morning sees some task begin,
Each evening sees it close;
Something attempted, something done,
Has earned a night's repose.

Hackbarth:
As a perfectionist, you know, I want everything to be just right. When you get to a point on a project you need to stop and you need to move on. Contentment, I think, to a certain extent is learning how to work the material, but then also learning when to stop working it.

Soth:
Thanks, thanks to thee, my worthy friend,
For the lesson thou hast taught!
Thus at the flaming forge of life
Our fortunes must be wrought;
Thus on its sounding anvil shaped
Each burning deed and thought.

Loew:
Blacksmithing is often called a lost art, but you'll find it very much alive at Steve Hackbarth's Merrimac studio. In fact, you can visit it yourself this weekend as Hackbarth and more than 50 other artists from the surrounding area open up their studios to the public as part of the region's Annual Fall Art Tour. More information about the art tour is available on our Web site at wpt.org/InWisconsin.


Loew:
Producer JoAnne Garrett takes us to Door County for our next report. Door County is one of our state's most beautiful areas. It's also an area that’s been seeing a lot of development. In JoAnne's report, she tells us about a plan that would pass to preserve one of the county's remaining natural areas from development. The folks behind that plan, a group of business people.

Dan Burke:
We couldn't let this one go. It was just too special of a place. This place was slated for 75 home sites. We had two weeks to do it. We knew what was slated for this property if we failed to act.

JoAnne Garrett:
The place is the Bayshore Bluffman's Preserve, overlooking Green Bay in Door County. Dan Burke was the president of the then small, non-profit, called the Door County Land Trust.

Burke:
It's one that our organization went out on a limb for six years ago when the main piece went for sale for over a million dollars.

Garrett:
That's right. They had to find more than $1 million of funding.

Burke:
It was one of those periods of time where you have, you know, you don't sleep much at night.

Garrett:
Funding for some 300 acres of land.

Burke:
We didn't have much in the bank at all, and we had really two-week period of time in which to enter into a purchase agreement with the landowner or not. And decided if we can't take this on, if we can’t protect this property, we really shouldn't be in the land business in Door County. This is what it's all about.

Garrett:
This is what it's all about. But it was a tortuous trek for the Land Trust. With a loan from a sympathetic local bank, a matching grant from the state’s stewardship fund, and an incredible outpouring from the community, they did it.

Burke:
It's turned out to be the best decision we have ever made, and obviously one of the prettiest places in the Midwest has now been permanently protected. We’re a stronger organization because we did it. In 1996, we didn't have any memberships, we had about 200 acres under protection. Today, we have over 2,000 members, and well over 4,000 acres permanently protected. These are community preserves. They are open for hiking. Many of them are open for hunting season. Educational opportunities, of course, exist on our preserves, as well as research. These are for the community.

Garrett:
Burke believes that land trusts are an essential part of the community, particularly if that community, like Door County, depends heavily on tourism as part of the local economy.

Burke:
And that's really our story, is that there are places out here that deserve to be protected and that will enhance the quality of our life here, and will enhance the tourist economy that this area depends on. There's not many places like Door County left in the world.

Garrett:
And for a local land trust to buy land outright costs.

Burke:
Ten years ago, we were looking at starter lots, two acres in size, lots going for $20,000. And we said we can't take this project, $20,000 a lot? Today, those same lots go for a quarter million.

Garrett:
How did they do it? They are creative and they count on the local community. Consider this community, the little village of Ephraim. They wanted to save a place in Ephraim called the Anderson Pond.

Burke:
This is a gem. And this is exactly the type of place that we would love to help the community protect.

Garrett:
Fran Burton is a member of the Ephraim community. She's an author, a local historian, and she volunteered to be a board member of the Door County Land Trust.

Fran Burton:
Anderson Pond is unique both ecologically and historically.
Garrett:
It's 30 acres, the last remnant of the Anderson Family Farm, owned by the same family since the 1800s. A family with very deep roots in Ephraim.

Burton:
It’s a real part of Ephraim’s history.

Garrett:
And the people of Ephraim wanted to save it.

Burton:
They have to raise $225,000 to make it go. They only had a couple months because of the time, there was a sunset clause. And the people of Ephraim came through.

Garrett:
The community came through in unexpected ways. Charles Peterson is one of the country's finest maritime painters.

Charles Peterson:
I’m showing a boat starting out.

Garrett:
He lives across the street from the Anderson Pond. The family often let him hike on the property. He knew it and loved it. Peterson has many fond memories of camping there with his daughter.

Peterson:
I remember in the morning she awoke before I, naturally. Sunlight streaming in and she said “Dad,” she was whispering. She said, “Dad, look.” And just outside the entrance to the tent is a fox standing and looking at us. And it serves other many, many other families in the same way.

Garrett:
So when Peterson heard the community was trying to raise money to preserve the land, he thought he could help.

Peterson:
I suggested that if they were interested, that I had done many paintings of that place over the years, that they could use one of those, make a print of it, and offer that as a token of appreciation for serious gift givers.

Garrett:
Peterson's print was made available to those who donated over $20,000.

Peterson:
We printed 50. And I'm told they have given out 38 of them, which is an astounding amount of money coming in.

Garrett:
It was the people of Ephraim, like Peterson, that brought the importance of this property to light. And use their connections in the community to try to save this green space. A green space with great meaning for Ephraim. It's just one story among many of land preservation through land trusts in Wisconsin.

Burke:
The evolution of land trusts, local land trusts has been a shining light in the conservation movement over the last several decades. There are lands that ought to be protected right here in your own back yard, and these land trusts have really been formed with that in mind. It empowers people at the local level.

Loew:
Producer JoAnne Garrett will bring us more stories in the coming months about how other people around the state are using land trusts in a variety of ways to preserve natural areas. While the business people in JoAnne's report were trying to preserve a natural place, the Madison business owners in our next report are trying to help preserve a way of life.


Loew:
Producer Liz koerner reports on how they're turning your morning cup of coffee into a helping hand for farmers thousands of miles away.

Music:
I love coffee
I love tea
I love the java, java
It loves me
Coffee and tea

Narrator:
Fresh, hot coffee. Many people are passionate about this bitter brew. So passionate, they sit through a lecture to learn more about these magical beans, and the people who grow them.

Man:
This is one of the farmers that moved the cooperative in Chiapas, his name is Roman. Please note, Roberto in his Green Bay Packers hat.

Narrator:
Matt Earley is on a first name basis with these farmers. He’s a partner in a small coffee roasting company in Madison called "Just Coffee."

Once a year, they visit the farmers who grow their coffee in Mexico and Guatemala. They witnessed firsthand how hard it is to grow this crop.

Matt Earley:
Coffee is such a labor intensive crop. Arabica coffee, because there's no possible way to pick all the Cherries at once. So, basically, you are going back over and over again over the same trees and picking the ripe fruits. This one right here is almost ready to go. You see how red that is? But it's really the only one in this cluster, really on the whole tree, that is, that is ripe for picking. So inevitably, the farmers will have to go over and over the same parts of the grove and individually pick those cherries. They get up before 5:00 in the morning and are headed to the fields and don't leave until after the sun goes down.

Narrator:
Earley tells the audience what life is like for the farmers both in the fields and at home.

Earley:
Most of the communities, to varying degrees, are suffering from pretty intense poverty.

Narrator:
Earley cares about the people in these communities. In fact, that's why he got involved in the coffee business. In the late 1990s, he and a friend, Mike Moon, traveled to Chiapas, Mexico to work with the indigenous people in this region, the Mayan Indians.

Earley:
The people in Chiapas are involved in an incredible struggle that’s been going on since before 1994. And we are working in communities of the Zapatista movement, which is a movement in opposition to the Mexican government. It’s a movement of indigenous people seeking indigenous rights, and trying to preserve their traditional ways and culture.

Narrator:
On their first trip five years ago, they met a local man trying to help the farmers by organizing a cooperative.

Earley:
And he was able to take us to different communities and showed us the problems going on, and talked to us about what they felt like would be a viable path to bringing more funds into the community in order to buy the things that they can't grow.

Narrator:
At that time, the most viable path out of poverty was coffee. The biggest obstacle was finding companies to buy and roast their coffee in America. So Earley and Moon went to work. They formed "Just Coffee," a company that imports coffee beans. They roast the beans in small batches at very high temperatures.

Man:
Kind of a light roast, roasting to 450 degrees.

Narrator:
Then they bag it up by hand.
The coffee arrives at the grocery store in the company's old fashioned delivery vehicle. The coffee itself is different from most other store brands. It's grown and sold as a part of what's called the Fair Trade System. Fair Trade guarantees farmers long-term contracts and the minimum price per pound. Without the Fair Trade System, farmers are usually paid 30 to 60 cents per pound. With Fair Trade, farmers are paid $1.26 per pound for non-organic, and $1.46 per pound for organic coffee. Today, most Fair Trade coffee is organically grown. The Fair Trade System pays the farmers more by cutting out the middleman.

Earley:
It's a great way to help folks stay on their land, and be involved in democratic processes within their communities.

Narrator:
Earley and his partners learned recently the fair trade prices no longer covered the cost of production for the farmers, so they are working to change that for the future.

Earley:
I think it's important to note in fair trade, we are not talking about handouts and charity and dropping, you know, money and advisors on people. But we’re talking about paying people what they deserve for the hard, hard, hard work that they are doing.

Narrator:
Earley is passionate about the people who grow his coffee. That's why he and his partners visit different farm communities in Mexico and Guatemala every year, to meet each of the farmers and build personal relationships.

Earley:
That's what it's about for us, is the relationship with the people that we work with.

Narrator:
Their most recent visit was not your typical business junket. They traveled to a remote farm community in the back of a pickup truck. Mike Miller is another partner in the "Just Coffee" company.

Mike Miller:
This is a very, very isolated community. We drove for probably an hour and a half on barely what is considered a road at all. I mean it was windy through these beautiful mountains, scary and treacherous in the back of a pickup truck.

Narrator:
What they saw on this visit was not a surprise. It simply reinforced their determination to help the farmers.

Earley:
This is the level of poverty that they are dealing with in this community, and it varies from community to community. Sometimes they have nicely planed cut wood on the houses. Sometimes they’re made out of cinder blocks. These folks, dirt floor, one room, sticks. And I would be surprised if they even have a metal roof. But it's completely open and it's just devastating.

Miller:
And also for me personally, it's just like it helps me come back here and work. Meeting these people. I have this job here. It provides for my family here, and you know, these people's hard work that allows us to have it. Without them I don't have a job here. So I just feel like I have to stay connected to them. And meeting them face-to-face, and talking to them, becoming a part of their community, and allows me to bring it back here.

Narrator:
For the partners at "Just Coffee," it's not business as usual. It's business with a social conscience. Business that’s aiming for a fair trade.

Earley:
So the coffee is sort of only a vehicle to deepen these relationships, and we all feel like the people down there and all of us at "Just Coffee," we feel like this is the kind of enterprise that it's going to take to change the world.

Loew:
October is Fair Trade Month and the folks at "Just Coffee" have organized lots of events for people to learn more about the fair trade idea. You can go to our Web site at wpt.org/InWisconsin to find out more.


Loew:
What a week in politics. There's still no new state budget, despite Governor Jim Doyle calling a special session of the legislature for a budget bill vote. Reporter Frederica Freyberg focuses on the fallout from the continuing impasse in this week’s Budget Brief and explains why the governor says the shortfall is looming.

Frederica Freyberg:
Both houses of the legislature voted on the governor's special session budget bill. It passed in the Senate, where democrats hold the majority.

Fred Risser:
The Senate passes Special Session Bill 1.

Jeff Fitzgerald:
The governor, the only time in the history to introduce another budget, his first one was so bad he had to get to this one. This one will fail.

Freyberg:
And, true to that prediction, it did fail in the republican-controlled Assembly.

Jon Erpenbach:
Okay, what now? Okay, we said yes, you said no. What are we gonna do? We are going to look for foolish today than we did yesterday. Collectively as a body, as an institution, we look like fools.

Freyberg:
But having no budget could be worse than that. Governor Jim Doyle says he is now preparing for fiscal crisis.

Jim Doyle:
In order to fund essential services that are needed to protect the health and safety of Wisconsin residents, a partial shutdown may well be necessary. The legislature's failure has left the state with no other option but to plan for the disaster that they have caused.

Freyberg:
The governor says his need to plan for disaster is caused by Assembly republicans, saying an extreme faction of them does not want a new budget at all, but wants to save money by coasting on the old one.

Mike Huebsch:
It has never been our position we would not have a budget. But we'll have a budget in the taxpayers' means and not simply in the level of wants of the government.

Freyberg:
Democratic leaders blame Republican Assembly Speaker Mike Huebsch.

Jim Kreuser:
He's holding the state hostage. That's what he's doing right now.

Freyberg:
The kind of compromise that could get a budget passed does not yet appear to be in the air. But the clock keeps ticking.

Jim Doyle:
Our universities will run completely out of money by the middle of the next semester. Our prisons will run completely out of money in April of next year, as well.

Fitzgerald:
The governor's message of the chicken little story, go around and scare everybody into getting a budget.

Freyberg:
But for its part, the UW System says it is running in the red every single day, because money budgeted two years ago isn't keeping pace with higher costs this year for things like fuel and salaries. And, they say, with no new budget, course offerings could be cut and a tuition surcharge could be imposed. And this week, the Department of Corrections is preparing to cancel contracts with county jails which house state inmates. Corrections officials say they are nearly out of money now for those contracts. Cancelling them would force 600 additional inmates into state prisons that are already full.

According to the Legislative Fiscal Bureau, there are some state services that under law continue to be fully funded, even without a new budget. The state legislature is one of them.

Loew:
This week also marked a big deadline for schools. Monday, the state was required to give funding levels for school districts. Absent a new budget, schools were told they must budget using the funding set two years ago. That amount is nearly $80 million less than the legislature's Joint Finance Committee approved in June for school funding next year.

The state superintendent of schools says using last year's figures means that most school districts will be receiving less in state aid this year than if the legislature had reached a budget agreement. It's expected that districts would have to raise taxes or cut programs as a result. Assembly Seaker Huebsch is now calling for an extraordinary session to take up the school's budget separately. As the budget process continues with no end in sight, we would like to know what types of budget-related issues you would like us to cover. You can also give suggestions by contacting us by email at or by phone at 1-800-253-1158.


Loew:
And, that's our program for this week. We leave you with a fantastic fall sunset trip to Douglas County. For "In Wisconsin," I'm Patty Loew. See you next time.

 
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