By the turn of the 20th century, Wisconsin was well on the way to becoming — to cite the state license plate — “America’s Dairyland.” The switch from cultivating row crops to pasturing cows was neither intuitive nor easy. Many still considered the labor of dairy farming — milking cows, churning butter, making cheese — to be women’s work, distinct from the plowing, planting, scything, and flailing done by men. But an entrepreneur named William Dempster Hoard began to promote the fledgling industry with a well-organized advocacy campaign that included a dairy association, sponsorship of a dairy convention, and a dairy magazine. (Hoard’s Dairyman was founded in 1885 and is published to this day.) Hoard parlayed his prominence into a successful run for governor in 1888, and used the gubernatorial bully pulpit to further expand the industry. A decade after he took office, more than 90 percent of Wisconsin farms were raising Jerseys, Holsteins, and Guernseys.
The farm I now own was one of those that changed over in this period from wheat to dairy, and the barn’s threshing floor and side bays were repurposed as storage for the hay that fed the cows. Decades later, most farmers had switched their herds from hay to silage, and the tall round silos that flank red barns in the familiar images were built to store this fodder of fermented corn stalks and grass. The silo on my farm, made of poured concrete, dates to the 1930s, and — sadly — has proven remarkably efficient at directing rainwater from the barn’s roof to its stone foundation. The obvious sag in the roofline is a direct result of this undermining process, which began when my barn was already half-a-century old. Farmers who scraped together the money for timbers and siding in the 1880s were unlucky. Steam-powered machinery was poised to replace the hand-threshing and winnowing the barn was designed for, and Wisconsin farmers’ abandonment of wheat had begun. My barn was an obsolete agricultural technology almost from the moment it was constructed.
It wasn’t just economic and environmental forces that drove transformations and reinventions on my farm and others like it. Such smallholdings have always been projects of the federal and state government. The land that my farm occupies was ceded to the U.S. government by Ho-Chunk people in an 1832 treaty signed under duress in the aftermath of the Black Hawk War. Within a year of Ho-Chunk removal, the General Land Office, an agency of the Treasury Department, surveyed and platted the territory; the county was organized in 1839. Less than ten years later, in 1847, a man named Ole Larsen bought an 80-acre patent from the federal government, including the land that is now my farm. The property lines laid down in 1833 by a government surveyor and described in Ole Larsen’s 1847 patent still largely determine the extent of my farm today.