The Pasture at Grandfather Farm

Sewn into a deeply rural environment, this defunct dairy farm is a cobbled mass of former smallholdings established by Norwegian settlers who first raised tobacco and later dairy cows as their cash crops. Criss-crossing hundreds of acres are white-tailed deer imported in the 1970s from a neighboring state which swapped deer for a portion of Wisconsin’s wild turkey population, all for recreational hunting purposes. Hunting continues legally, quasi-legally and illegally and is not easily monitored. Between the woods and cropland is a pasture that stretches over half a mile in a thin line following a small creek. The pasture is typically for grazing cows or other livestock, but it also houses a wild garden of edible plants, rough orchards of apple and black walnut trees, raw clay, coyotes, rabbits, raptors, thistles and nettles. Here you can harvest wild chamomile and watch both wild and managed bees work alongside one another. You can follow animal tracks and listen to how animals track you.

The History

Grandfather Farm began as a series of small homesteads founded by the outgrowth of various Norwegian immigrant families who came to the United States in the 1840s. Drawn to the midwest of the country, the first Norwegian settlers farmed tobacco as a cash crop with minor forays into dairy farming. Dairy farming soon became the focus because the area could not source the human labor necessary to support tobacco production (which was better supported by slave labor in the Southern United States until the Civil War, and extra-legal sharecropping work thereafter). These homesteads remained modest because of the lack of pasteurization and refrigeration of dairy products. After the Civil War a few small cheese factories were established in small towns, all of which could be reached by cart and horse in a few hours.

My grandfather Don stayed in one homestead cabin with an Aunt and Uncle following the death of his mother and brother of the flu in or around 1918. He later studied milk pasteurization after witnessing outbreaks ofscarlet fever among dairy families due to contaminated ice cream and other raw milk products. He spent time following World War II inspecting and making consistent the various pasteurization processes throughout Wisconsin and Minnesota as well as conducting research at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Don bought out the distant family members and heirs to assemble the farm in its current iteration.

The farm covers two hundred and seventy acres, sixty of which are wooded and the rest pasture or cropland.

The dairy farm shut down entirely in the 2010s, and the structures that still stand date from the 1920s and the 1950s.

Remaining buildings are a 1970s farmhouse, the main hay barn, the milk parlor, the hog shed, Don’s original homestead cabin and several found objects. The shortage of human labor, along with a general disinterest in throwing anything that might one day be useful, created around six generations worth of household and recreational trash. Propane and wood-firing cooking stoves, a television atop a patio table covered in fabric, gymnasium equipment, research notes, hunting kit, and a moveable hunting cabin show how pastime-hobbies were built into the fabric of the working day. Here what is lost to the past shapes the current landscape and the animals–our alien kin–who live there.

Thank you,

Kerstin