Category Archives: Economic and Community Development

Strengthening Our Global Engagement

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Dean Kate VanderBosch

Dean Kate VandenBosch

“The boundaries of the university are the boundaries of the state.” That belief has broadened since the inception of the Wisconsin Idea early last century. The boundaries of the university are now the boundaries of the world—and no college embodies this more than CALS.

CALS faculty members conduct research in some 80 countries around the globe. Their work includes everything from increasing vitamin A content in local produce and breeding hardy crop varieties for challenging climates to economic development and opening new markets for Wisconsin products. Their activities have resulted in a multitude of discoveries that benefit CALS, Wisconsin and communities around the world.

But could we be doing even better? That question was considered when we embarked on our CALS strategic planning effort, and it was answered with a resounding “Yes!” What followed was a thoughtful, committee-led process that included a wide range of voices from within and outside of the college. In a final report the committee stated that “renewed investment in international activities will produce excellence in CALS scholarship and teaching, advance the college’s strategic planning goals, have a significant impact on our stakeholders and generate a substantial return on investment.”

In order to achieve optimal results from that investment, they deemed that a faculty-led International Programs unit is needed—something CALS has not had for about a half-dozen years. Faculty leadership is essential, the committee said, to “reach the threshold level of coordination and expertise required to win large international research and training grants such as those recently awarded to our peer institutions.”

Enter Sundaram Gunasekaran (photo left), a professor of biological systems engineering who has been selected to serve as faculty director of CALS International Programs. Gunasekaran—or “Guna,” as he is widely known—is brimming with ideas and enthusiasm about his new role. This past spring he held a number of “listening and learning” sessions welcoming all CALS faculty, staff and partners to discuss their international work and how a robust reenvisioning of CALS International Programs could help them better pursue it.

“My vision for CALS International Programs is for it to become among the leaders in the nation’s land-grant colleges for international engagement—and for it to effect positive change in global agricultural and life sciences enterprises through research, education and outreach,” Gunasekaran says. “CALS is among the very best land-grant colleges in the nation. Thus it is very appropriate that we envision an international program of a similar stature.”

We’ll be hearing more about CALS’ “new and improved” International Programs in the coming months, including here in Grow magazine. In the meantime, on behalf of the CALS community on campus and around the world, I’d like to extend a warm welcome to Guna in his exciting new role.

The Futures Market—and Students’ Futures

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Using real-world commodity-trading software and armed with simulated trading experience in agricultural markets, a number of CALS students are finding paths to jobs after graduation.

“We prepare students by providing the knowledge of the trading software used by professionals and an understanding of how these sometimes-volatile markets work in real time,” says Sheldon Du, a professor of agricultural and applied economics.

Du says that the market for agricultural business management majors is promising—and students’ experience with professional software platforms and hands-on simulated commodity trading makes them more attractive job candidates.

Du has taught his spring undergraduate class, Commodity Markets, since 2012. His students learn about economic concepts related to commodity futures and options contracts, pricing mechanisms, and principles and techniques for using derivatives to hedge price risk. They also learn about commodity trading, wherein futures contracts of commodities—such as grains, dairy products and energy—are bought and sold through organized exchanges to generate returns or to manage price risks.

Last year, Du—with the enthusiastic backing of his department—received a grant from UW– Madison’s Educational Innovation initiative to expand the class experience to include an optional 10 weeks of training during the following fall on technical analysis using X_TRADER® software, a professional trading platform that was donated to CALS in 2014 by Trading Technologies International, Inc. The school has since migrated to Trading Technologies’ new TT® platform, which became commercially available in 2015.

Students can also go on to compete in the CME Group Trading Challenge, a simulated trading competition that pits hundreds of college teams from around the world against one another as they make real-time commodity trading decisions. Du’s students participated in the event in 2015 and then again this year.

Competing in the challenge requires students to use electronic trading software to execute trades on the CME Globex trading platform, offering students added experience with real-world tools and techniques. This spring, seven UW–Madison students on two teams took part in the competition.

Andrew Berger BS’15, who was on one of two trading teams last year, went on to become a risk analyst for Henning and Carey Technologies in Chicago after graduating.

“The fundamental knowledge that I gained about futures and options contracts, hedging techniques and financial market analysis prepared me well for the interview,” says Berger, who returned to campus this spring to speak to Du’s students.

Brad Jaeger BS’16, a fresh grad who landed a job as a grain merchandiser at Wisconsin’s Country Visions Cooperative, says his two years of competing in the challenge, plus the academic grounding he received, were instrumental in launching his career.

“We learned fundamental analysis, and although we never advanced in the trading competition, we received a lot of great live trading experience,” says Jaeger, who led a team this year.

Exposing students to the theory of commodity markets, along with practical trading situations and tools, helps them get a taste for the profession and the experience to impress prospective employers, says Du.

“I am always looking for ways to increase the trading component, which is important for students’ understanding of the markets,” Du says. “It’s also important for their professional futures.”

PHOTO – Students in the 2016 CME Group Trading Challenge included (left to right) Jackson Remer, Brad Jaeger, Carly Edge, Cory Epprecht and Sam Seid, with agricultural and applied economics professor Sheldon Du (far right).

Photo credit – Sheldon Du

Age-Old Traditions, New Media

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There is no better place to begin this story than on an August morning in the remote reaches of the Bad River Ojibwe Reservation, afloat on Lake Superior’s shining Chequamegon Bay beneath an expansive, cloud-filled sky.

Several flat-bottomed boats are lined up gunwale-to-gunwale, bobbing in the gentle waves. They’re filled with students—a mix of UW–Madison undergraduates and tribal youth—on a field project run through UW–Madison’s Global Health Institute. They are listening to Dana Jackson and Edith Leoso, Bad River tribal members and elders, talk about wild rice and the windswept, watery landscape around them, the sloughs and the tamarack stands, the distant islands and the shimmering headlands.

It is all ancestral home to the Ojibwe, and Jackson and Leoso bring it to life with their words. They tell the Ojibwe creation story of how their tribal forebears came to the land so many years ago from the east, seeking, as they had been told in visions, a place where “the food grows on top of the water.” They speak of the chiefs who signed treaties to protect this homeland and of the warriors who fought to protect it and of the threats that come with modern times.

The students, armed with video cameras and recorders, soak it all up. The land seems to take on new depth and meaning, peopled now with the ghosts and the place names and shrouded in the mystery and the magic of the old stories.

It’s an ideal classroom for the CALS professor who is the guiding hand behind this floating, open-air lecture session.

Patty Loew, a professor of life sciences communication, has brought these students here to share with them the lives and the culture of a people she knows well.

Loew is a tribal member of the Bad River Ojibwe. She can trace her family back to ancestors who were among the tribal leaders signing the tribe’s historic treaties in the 1800s. When she looks out upon the waters of Lake Superior and the winding sloughs of the reservation, she sees her own family’s history. These places are as special to her as to any other member of the Bad River community.

Two years ago, in a column in the Wisconsin State Journal about the importance of this place to the Ojibwe, Loew wrote, “You won’t see any stained glass or church spires in the Bad River or Kakagon Sloughs, but those wetlands are as holy to us as any temple or cathedral.”

A noted television journalist and the author of several acclaimed books on Wisconsin’s Native Americans as well as an accomplished scholar, Loew could easily be resting on her many successes.

Instead, she is deeply involved in a number of teaching and media projects that are not only bringing the stories of Wisconsin’s Native Americans to life, but also are providing new ways for those stories to be shared by tribal members themselves. Since 2007, she has led efforts to teach tribal teenagers digital storytelling and technology skills. Working with colleagues as well as tribal leaders, she has helped young people create documentaries sharing Native American issues and culture. In a 2012 project, for example, eight St. Croix Ojibwe students created a tribal history told through the life stories of five St. Croix elders.

In this work Loew has also partnered with the UW–Madison Global Health Institute. She’s currently in the midst of a project—the one that has us floating on Chequamegon Bay—in which global health students from a wide range of majors work alongside tribal youth to bring the power of digital media to bear on reservation health issues such as nutrition and childhood obesity. The Bad River reservation has some of the highest diabetes and cardiovascular disease rates in the United States, according to a 2008 Wisconsin Nutrition and Growth Study.

Loew’s projects can already boast some impressive successes. In 2013, three 14-year-old Bad River participants in her tribal youth media workshops produced a documentary, Protect Our Future, that detailed the potential environmental threats posed by a proposed iron mine in the Penokee Range above the Bad River reservation.

The video was an award-winning hit. It played to large audiences at film festivals throughout the Great Lakes region and was screened at the Arizona State University Human Rights Festival. The teens were on hand to introduce their film, which they also shared at the nearby Salt River Tribal High School.

The project followed a unique blueprint developed by Loew that melds traditional knowledge from tribal elders and leaders with the use of digital media skills now being deployed by tribal youth.
It is, in effect, an artful and sensitive blending of the old and new. Loew, not one to think small, says she sees the work in the context of a larger and more powerful dream. Oblivious to the breeze and splashing water from Lake Superior, she speaks from her seat in one of the boats as it motors through the reservation’s famed Kakagon Sloughs. In between her answers to questions, she patiently works with students as they learn how to use video cameras. She helps one of them frame a shot and assists another who is figuring out how to program a video card.

“My ultimate goal,” Loew says as she works, “is to help Bad River become the media center for Indian Country. We want to combine really strong media skills with a really strong sense of culture.”

Loew’s work has drawn praise from many quarters, from tribal leaders to academic colleagues.

Joe Rose is an elder with the Bad River Ojibwe and has watched young tribal members embrace Loew’s teachings. He describes the pride that the video Protect Our Future brought to the reservation.
“We were fighting against the mine then,” Rose recalls. “That was a very serious threat to us. We were very concerned about our wild rice. That was exceptional work that Patty did with the young people. She taught them how to use the media, how to do the photography and the interviewing. They even did the music. And it was all done by students, only 14 or 15 years old.”

Don Stanley, a CALS faculty associate in the Department of Life Sciences Communication who specializes in social media, has worked alongside Loew on the reservation, served as her co-investigator, and, Loew says, sparked the original idea for much of their tribal youth media work.

There are few better examples of the Wisconsin Idea in action, Stanley says, when it comes to sharing the department’s communication expertise and scholarship with a broader audience.

And, in this case, that sharing is with a community that few can reach as effectively as Loew. Loew has the ability to connect in a special way, Stanley notes, because of her deep tribal roots and connections. People know her and see her knowledge and respect for tribal life and culture. That understanding and empathy is not always common among academics.

“A lot of time in academia, we don’t understand that,” Stanley says. “Researchers come in, extract what they want and leave. But people you are working with relate on a scale that is much more real and visceral when they’re dealing with somebody who gets it.”

And Loew gets it.

“She’s got incredible street cred,” Stanley says of Loew’s work on the reservation. “It’s a blast traveling with her up there. Everybody is a family member. Everybody is ‘Hey, Patty!’ and big hugs. I also think that because she doesn’t take herself so seriously, she’s really approachable.”

Indeed, Loew is quick to laugh, and a talker. She will enthuse equally about her work or a Green Bay Packer game (she is a devoted fan). She evokes laughter from her students when, passing by a reservation boat flying a Packer pennant, she says, casually, “Oh, look. The tribal flag!”

Loew is quick to point out an important caveat when it comes to her work with the Bad River community as it relates to the Wisconsin Idea. This is not about just transferring knowledge from the campus to the reservation, she says. In fact, she prefers the phrase “knowledge exchange.”

The tribes, Loew says, are a rich and unrecognized source of information about the natural world. The elders and others on the reservation have much to share, and that traditional knowledge can inform and extend science and natural resource management in the non-Indian world, notes Loew.

In the Ojibwe, Loew sees a people who have valuable lessons for us in how to combine culture with a respect for the natural workings of the planet.

“Over the past 25 years, I’ve seen a real need for scientific information that has cultural relevance,” Loew says. “Native communities may be poor in an economic sense but they are rich in natural resources. And the culture is attached to those resources in a way that can’t be separated.

“So it’s a two-way street,” Loew continues. “We don’t necessarily have the scientific capacity. But what we do have is storytellers and people who know and embrace the culture.”

Loew did not come to these understandings suddenly. They are the result of a slow and gradual awakening on her part to her own Native American heritage and a lifetime spent learning the communication skills that would one day allow her to bring the power of story to bear on sharing the history and culture and struggles of not only the Ojibwe but all of Wisconsin’s tribes.

Loew’s path has led her to a very professorial office in Hiram Smith Hall on the UW–Madison campus, home to the Department of Life Sciences Communication (LSC) and just a stone’s skip from Lake Mendota.
But Loew, as her colleagues will point out, seems to have trouble staying in that comfortable office. Everyone who works with her in Hiram Smith Hall has had the pleasant experience of meeting a wide-eyed Loew in the hallway and being greeted by the phrase “Hey! I have an idea I wanted to try out on you.”

It is more than a charming aspect of her character. It is how she works, bringing to life the cherished Wisconsin ideal of “sifting and winnowing.”

Loew is an idea factory. In recent months, her friends and co-workers have listened and watched as Loew has worried about the many employees who will be out of work when Oscar Mayer’s Madison factory closes. Perhaps, she muses as she talks with her colleagues, there is a way one of her video classes can help provide video resumes.

More often than not, those ideas become reality.

“She’s phenomenal at taking ideas and making them come to fruition,” says Stanley.

Professor and LSC department chair Dominique Brossard says Loew heightens the department’s effectiveness at giving students a more global perspective on the intersections of culture and science in the natural world. Her courses in ethnic studies and Native American issues and the media are very popular, she notes.

And with her extensive background in television and video production, Loew is a key player in achieving another of the department’s goals—providing foundational communication skills to students.
“She’s uniquely positioned to do this kind of thing,” Brossard says.

Loew has traveled a long road to reach this stage in her career. She grew up on Milwaukee’s north side, little aware of her Native American background and the important role it would play as her life unfolded.

“I didn’t know I was Indian until I was 13,” Loew recalls. “I was just a kid growing up in a housing project in Milwaukee.”

Looking back, Loew believes her mother, who was born on a reservation, and her grandfather, who lived with the family, were trying to shield her from the discrimination frequently faced by Native Americans. Her grandfather, Edward DeNomie, was raised in the Tomah Indian Boarding School. Life in such schools was harsh, and children were often punished severely for speaking their native language or clinging to other aspects of their culture.

Even so, Loew heard and relished the stories of her ancestors. And by the late 1960s, she had become well aware not only of her rich cultural heritage but also the ugliness of racial prejudice. She recalls a growing sense of outrage, especially in the 1970s as Native American rights became a prominent news story.

Loew pursued a career in broadcast journalism. She earned a degree from UW–La Crosse and started her broadcasting career working in the city as a TV and radio reporter.

Eventually Loew moved to Madison, where she worked her way up to the anchor’s desk at the ABC affiliate, WKOW–TV. Her awareness of Native American culture and her desire to tell the stories of Wisconsin’s tribes grew. In the 1980s, she earned awards and gained respect throughout the state for her coverage of the fierce legal battle and sometimes ugly boat-landing confrontations as the Ojibwe fought to reestablish off-reservation hunting and fishing rights that had been included in the treaties.

Loew would go on to make dozens of documentaries telling the stories and covering the struggles of Wisconsin’s Native American communities. After moving on to Wisconsin Public Television, she made reporting on the tribes a regular part of her job as host of the show Weekend.

In a 2006 interview in the magazine Diverse: Issues in Higher Education, Loew described the important connection between her rediscovered culture and her professional life.

“As a journalist, a researcher, you have questions,” Loew said. “You realize you are struggling for answers about yourself. So you want to be open, to make connections to people. You find yourself being very relational, and that’s very Native.”

That willingness to be up-front about her debt to her past, and to be outspoken about the indignities that Native Americans have had to endure, have sometimes landed her in interesting, if not difficult, positions.

After she gave a talk about some of the more unpleasant truths of the first Thanksgiving, she earned the ire of none other than radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh. He accused Loew of being part of a “multicultural curriculum which is designed to get as many little kids as possible to question the decency and goodness of their own country.”

Few of Loew’s documentaries received more attention than Way of the Warrior, an exploration of the role of Native American soldiers in the U.S. military that aired on PBS in 2007. During her research, she stumbled across a film about her grandfather’s World War I outfit. Her quiet Ojibwe grandfather, it turned out, had fought in seven of WWI’s major battles as part of the 32nd Red Arrow Division.

Later, in another serendipitous discovery, she would find his diary. She describes how touched she was and how she is still so taken by the idea of Edward DeNomie raising his hand to take the oath and enlist in the U.S. Army—even though he had been denied citizenship in the country for which he was willing to give his life. Native Americans were not granted citizenship in the United States until 1924.

The popular, eye-opening documentary told the stories of many such Native American soldiers. And, later, after earning her master’s and doctoral degrees in journalism and joining the Department of Life Sciences Communication, Loew would continue telling the stories of Wisconsin’s tribes and of her own people at Bad River. She’s written several popular books, including Indian Nations of Wisconsin: Histories of Endurance and Renewal—which has been adapted for children and is now widely used in public schools—and, most recently, Seventh Generation Earth Ethics, a collection of biographies about 12 Native Americans who were key figures in environmental and cultural sustainability.

Sitting in the stern of one of the boats winding through the reservation sloughs, Loew reflects on her storytelling past and connects it with the ancient tradition of the Ojibwe and other native cultures.

“We are oral storytellers,” Loew says. But she is lending a new twist to the revered tradition. By adapting digital media to the old stories, the power of their message is amplified and made more accessible, especially important when it comes to lessons regarding nutrition and health among tribal members.

For example, some of the young tribal videographers have scoured the reservation collecting information from elders about age-old gardening and cooking skills. They hope to use that information at some point, Loew explains, to create “teen cuisine” cooking shows focused on healthy eating.

It makes so much sense to combine the old and the new, Loew says. After all, she adds, by the year 2020, 80 percent of content on the World Wide Web is expected to be video.

“These are new tools to help us be who we are, to help us capture the essence of who we are,” says Loew. “It’s a way to preserve our stories and a really unique approach to documenting life on the reservation at this particular time in history.”

Students from the Global Health Institute class, traveling with Loew on weeklong field trips, have worked side by side with tribal youth to gather information for the health and nutrition project and to create videos.

Cali McAtee, a CALS biology major who went with Loew to Bad River in August, wrote in her journal about not only establishing close relationships with tribal young people, but also of gaining valuable insight into another culture. She recalls in her writings the feeling of traveling through a sea of rice at the edge of Lake Superior.

“I have seen a lot of wild rice in my life, but from far away. I probably assumed it was a field because you can’t really see the water in between,” wrote McAtee. “I liked hearing about the importance of rice to the Ojibwe because I don’t think I necessarily have anything as important or meaningful in my life as rice is to theirs.”

Loew has felt the power of story in her own life and in her own search for connections. Researching one of her books, Loew found herself reading the classic book Kitchi-Gami: Life Among the Lake Superior Ojibway, by Johann Georg Kohl. In the book she came across a story in which Kohl brings to life a meeting he had with a tribal elder.

That elder was none other than Loew’s great-great-grandfather, Loon’s Foot. Kohl wrote how, during his conversation with the old man, Loon’s Foot stepped back into his lodge and came out with a smoky, stained birchbark scroll. Unrolling it and speaking in French, Loon’s Foot showed Kohl the story of his family told on the scroll and the dots and lines that denoted the passing years and decades. The story reached back to the year 1142.

“Here I was just reading Kohl, and then holy smokes!” Loew recalls. “Not bad for an oral culture.”

Loew firmly believes it is possible to capture that same kind of magic today with new approaches to traditional storytelling.

Don Stanley has watched as Loew has found a way to navigate between two worlds—the quickly receding years of the elders and the fast-paced, media-rich present of the tribal young—to create a new way to tell and preserve story and tradition, and then apply their lessons to modern-day problems.

As an example, Stanley describes how, as part of the nutrition project, he has seen Loew work with Native middle school students, teaching them how to videotape an elder speaking about traditional foods and health. While Loew is helping the teens develop communication skills, she knows full well that she is also preserving the knowledge of that tribal elder for future generations.

No less an expert on Ojibwe tradition than tribal elder Joe Rose admires and respects Loew’s ability to bridge old and new worlds. He says that with the passing of the generation that experienced the assimilation policies of the boarding schools, it’s important that the young be able to hear the elders’ voices—to see their faces, lined and carrying the weight of the years, but still alive with the resilience and strength and wisdom of their ancient heritage.

“It is very important, since we do come from an oral culture,” Rose says of Loew’s task. “But you’ve heard the expression that a picture is worth a thousand words? Well, there’s truth in that, too.”
As for Loew, she says that the girl growing up in the Milwaukee projects has found her place.

“I’m doing what I was supposed to do,” Loew says. “I’m incredibly grateful that Don and I have found such a dedicated, caring community—our students, our volunteers, the Bad River kids and their families—with whom to pursue this work. They’re the ones who make it possible.”

A Portrait of Hmong in Wisconsin

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Image provided by UW–Madison Applied Population Laboratory

Image provided by UW–Madison Applied Population Laboratory

The population of Hmong in Wisconsin is still growing, but more slowly than in the 1990s—and, as of 2010, most Hmong living in Wisconsin were born in the United States. While the 1990s saw a significant reduction in poverty among Hmong, they made fewer gains in this century’s first decade. Nearly one in five Hmong remain below the poverty level.

These are some findings recently published in Hmong in Wisconsin: A Statistical Overview, a report by the UW–Extension/CALS-based Applied Population Laboratory, drawing upon data from
the U.S. Census, the American Community Survey and Wisconsin state health and public instruction agencies.

The report provides valuable information for state and local agencies, educators and other organizations that work with Hmong in Wisconsin, notes Dan Veroff, a UW–Extension demographic specialist and report co-author.

“It provides a broad range of data to both contextualize and understand the assets and needs of Hmong communities,” says Veroff. “Information in the report has been used to design educational programs, improve services for Hmong communities, apply for grants, and set the table for more focused outreach or research.”

One example comes from Yang Sao Xiong, who joined UW–Madison in 2013 as the first tenure-track faculty member in Hmong American Studies. Xiong notes that the high percentage of Hmong K–12 students (including those born in the U.S.) who are classified as limited English proficient, or LEP, is “alarming”: “It is likely that in some Wisconsin counties and school districts, Hmong students are over-identified as LEP students.” Making those circumstances publicly visible in a report is important for encouraging further investigation, he says.

Other findings include:

• The 2010 U.S. Census reported that some 47,000 Hmong live in Wisconsin, the state with the third-largest Hmong population, after California and Minnesota.
• The Hmong population is concentrated in a handful of counties. Milwaukee County has almost twice the Hmong population of the second-highest county, Marathon.
• The percentage of Hmong who speak English at home more than doubled between 2000 and 2010.
• Labor force participation and educational attainment both improved significantly for the Hmong between 2000 and 2006–2010. However, the recession appears to have attenuated some of the potential economic gains that might have occurred otherwise.

The report is available for viewing or downloading at http://www.apl.wisc.edu/publications/hmong_chartbook_2010.pdf

Cows for Kids

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Ruth McNair, a senior editor at the CALS-based Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems, recently published a charming children’s book titled Which Moo Are You?

The picture book, illustrated by McNair’s daughter Molly McNair, introduces young readers to a variety of calves, each one distinguished by a key personality trait, as they explore, play, eat and sleep on a farm. Characters include a shy calf, a curious one, a friendly calf and many others. The story ends with a positive message about how we are much more than the labels that others assign to us.

The book, appropriate for ages 2–6, is full of fun rhymes and engaging pencil and watercolor illustrations.

Ruth McNair lives on a farm that hosts grazing dairy heifers during the growing season, and has also been the home of sheep, goats, donkeys, chickens, rabbits and even a llama. Seeing animal-loving kids at farm events inspired her to write the book, she says.

Molly McNair is a costume designer and maker, with a special interest in historical costume. She has a variety of artistic interests and a love of animals.

The book is available for $16.99 from No Bull Press at nobullpressonline.com.

Milk, Motherhood and the Dairy Cow

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In the 1990s, dairy farmers were seeing a troubling trend in their herds. As cows produced more milk, their reproductive performance declined. This downward slope in reproduction, related to changes in the hormone metabolism of high-producing cows, spurred researchers into action. And CALS scientists found a solution—a reproductive synchronization system that could save Wisconsin dairy farmers more than $50 million each year.

“The development of these systems has been one of the greatest technological advances in dairy cattle reproduction since artificial insemination,” says Paul Fricke, a CALS professor of dairy science and a UW–Extension specialist. “It is highly, highly significant.”

For the past 20 years, Fricke has been working on the synchronization systems with fellow dairy science professor Milo Wiltbank. The systems, called Ovsynch, consist of treatments with naturally occurring hormones and are based on Wiltbank’s research into the basic biology of the cow reproductive cycle. The hormonal treatments synchronize the cycles so that farmers know when their cows are most likely to become pregnant.

Pregnancy rates in a herd are a product of two numbers: the service rate (the percentage of eligible cows that are inseminated) and the conception rate (the number of inseminated cows that become pregnant). Historically, farmers relied on visually recognizing when cows were in heat in order to time insemination—a tricky feat that often resulted in missed opportunities and low service rates.
“One of the biggest problems in dairy cattle reproduction is seeing the cows in heat,” says Fricke. “If you can proactively control the reproductive cycle, you can inseminate cows without waiting for them to show heat.”

Synchronization systems take the guesswork out of insemination, increasing service rates and pregnancy rates. Since the technology was first published in the mid-1990s, Fricke, Wiltbank and their colleagues have worked to optimize the systems. Researchers now see conception rates of more than 50 percent, and pregnancy rates of 30 percent or higher. Just 15 years ago, average conception and pregnancy rates were around 35 and 15 percent, respectively. A 30 percent pregnancy rate in herds producing high volumes of milk was unimaginable.

With impressive pregnancy rates and the safety of the system—the natural hormones used are short-lived and do not end up in food products—researchers and farmers alike are excited about further adoption of the technology. The payoff is substantial, considering the costs and benefits of breeding dairy cows, says Kent Weigel, professor and chair of the Department of Dairy Science.

“If we say that this technology will result in a 6 percent improvement in pregnancy rates, and we assume that it costs about $4 for each extra day that a cow is not pregnant, the technology could save Wisconsin dairy farmers about $58 million per year with just 50 percent of farmers using it,” explains Weigel. “This is a prime example of basic biology that turned out to have a practical application with huge economic benefits.”

PHOTO—Dairy scientist Paul Fricke has developed a way to inseminate cows before they show signs of being in heat.

Photo by Sevie Kenyon BS’80 MS’06

Five Things About Daylight Saving Time

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1. A Founding Father was an early advocate. In 1784 Benjamin Franklin observed that during summer months, people slept during the daylight hours of morning and then burned candles at night for illumination. Thus adjusting schedules to begin earlier in the day during summer months would substitute free sunlight for costly wax. Though Franklin advocated changing schedules, he did not propose changing the clock. This idea was first suggested in Britain in 1907, and it was implemented in warring nations in 1916 as an energy-saving measure.

2. Farmers were not. The notion that farmers pushed for daylight saving time to give them more time in the field is a myth. In fact, farmers consistently came out against a peacetime daylight saving time, which was not implemented in the U.S. until 1966. Losing an hour of morning light meant an early rush to get crops to market. And dairy farmers noted that cows respond poorly to changes in their schedule.

3. The health effects of DST are a mixed bag. More time spent pursuing outdoor activities and increased exposure to vitamin D can be beneficial. However, studies have found increases in such maladies as workplace accidents, heart attacks, headaches and even suicides at the start and end of daylight saving time, attributable to the negative effects of disrupted sleep rhythms. This is particularly so for people with mental health problems.

4. It’s good for business—except when it’s not. Outdoor sports facilities (think golf courses), the grill and charcoal industries and retail groups have long argued that DST is good for business—and for theirs, it is. Less fortunate: airlines that have to scramble to keep international flights running smoothly during the time changes, and television networks that lose prime-time viewers to the extended daylight.

5. The biggest argument for DST is questionable. The idea that daylight saving time saves energy has been the most formidable argument for its implementation and extension. Most recently, the U.S. Energy Policy Act of 2005 extended DST in 2007 by three weeks in the spring and one week in the fall. But studies by economists in 2008 and 2011 suggest that DST leads to the same amount of electricity use, but shifts it to different parts of the day, or even increases energy use slightly if people engage in additional energy-intensive activities (examples: driving and using air-conditioning).

Daniel Phaneuf is a CALS professor of agricultural and applied economics.

Ecuador: Better Health through Messaging

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Some communities in Ecuador face high incidences of water-borne illness because of contaminated water or poor hygiene and sanitation. It’s a multipronged problem calling for an interdisciplinary approach combining natural, medical and social sciences. Bret Shaw, a CALS professor of life sciences communication, last year helped implement a social science approach with funding from the UW–Madison Global Health Institute.

“I used a social marketing perspective, which utilizes psychological and communication tools, to try to help villagers make lasting behavior changes in how they interact with water and sanitation,” explains Shaw.

Shaw worked with two undergraduates, Lauren Feierstein and Brenna O’Halloran, to create health behavioral prompts—small signs in Spanish left in important areas where a reminder to wash hands is vital, such as in bathrooms, near sinks and on bottles of water. Since many people in the community have limited literacy, it was important for the prompts to use images and very few words.

While the concept can seem intuitive, years of research show that the most effective prompts focus on self-efficacy—showing individuals how easy a behavior is—and making sure that the people in the graphic are relatable to the target population. The images and words Shaw’s team used were as specific as possible, showing an individual washing his or her hands with just a simple phrase underneath.

“Understanding the perspectives on why someone wouldn’t do something such as boil their water or wash their hands was very important,” says Feierstein, who also worked with residents on making and distributing organic soap. “Knowing those barriers was crucial to addressing the issue from all angles.”

The project was an extension of a course called “Water for Life Sustainability and Health,” a partnership between the Madison-based Ceiba Foundation for Tropical Conservation and the Global Health Institute. The course is led by Catherine Woodward, a faculty associate with UW–Madison’s Institute for Biology Education and president of the Ceiba Foundation. Shaw was brought in to offer guidance about how social marketing strategies can encourage healthy behavior.

“I’m a biologist and most of the people we work with are biologists, so having a communications person on board was a critical part of getting the message out,” says Woodward. “And not just about the message and having people understand why it’s a good idea to conserve natural resources—but also to actually get them to change their behavior.”

Eyes on the Green

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Traveling around the windswept golf course called The Straits, with its massive greens of bentgrass and rumpled, horizon-bound fairways of fescue, it’s easy to see why course manager Michael Lee BS’87 would arrange to keep his own yardwork to a minimum.

“My lawn takes me 20 minutes,” says Lee. It’s a cool spring morning, and we’re bouncing his pickup around the stunning environs of The Straits, one of two Kohler Company 18-hole courses that comprise Whistling Straits on the shores of a steely-surfaced Lake Michigan in Haven, Wisconsin.

“I have mostly mulch and woody ornamentals,” Lee says of his home lawn. “Everything I have to do for weed control I can do while I mow my lawn.”

This is in great contrast to the daunting challenge Lee faces in maintaining what has been deemed one of the country’s great championship golf courses.

And now the task has become almost herculean. The Straits, built and owned as part of The American Club by the Kohler Company, is hosting the prestigious PGA Championship this summer. From August 10 to 16, the eyes of the world will be on that course.

Though Lee will be toiling anonymously that week, guiding a staff of hundreds, his hard-earned skills as a golf course manager will be very much on display. Few, however, will truly understand what Lee and his staff do behind the scenes to maintain fairway and tee and rough and allow the television cameras to create what, in effect, is golf course art on our screens—sweeping vistas of perfectly tended dune and grass and emerald greens, with the big lake shining in the background.

But more than artful views are at stake. Lee, personable and easygoing and quick to smile, stands up well to pressure, those who know him say. And pressure there will be.

The PGA Championship, which dates back to 1916, is one of the most heralded events in golf. Each of the last two PGA Championships played at Whistling Straits, in 2004 and in 2010, drew upward of 300,000 people, and millions of households around the world tuned in to television broadcasts. The Wisconsin economy benefited to the tune of more than $76 million for each of the tournaments.

Lee is the first to say he could not shoulder the responsibilities of preparing The Straits for such worldwide scrutiny without plenty of help. And one of the places he counts on most for guidance in dealing with the course’s fussy turf is his alma mater, the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences at the University of Wisconsin–Madison—and, more specifically, the CALS-affiliated O.J. Noer Turfgrass Research and Education Facility, named for Oyvind Juul Noer, a CALS alumnus and one of the earliest internationally known turfgrass agronomists.

The facility, where scientists use tools ranging from high-powered microscopes to lawn mowers, opened in Verona, Wisconsin, in 1992 as a partnership between the Wisconsin Turfgrass Association, the University of Wisconsin Foundation, and the CALS-based Agricultural Research Stations.

Toiling in its maze of test plots, often on their hands and knees, are researchers who study everything from insects and soil to plant disease. For Lee, they are like a staff of doctors who can, at a moment’s notice, diagnose what is ailing a green or a fairway and prescribe a treatment. The Kohler Company (like many other golf course operators) contracts with the facility annually for these services.

Before and during the PGA championships, that role becomes even more crucial. The university specialists help Lee keep disease and insect problems at bay throughout the year. But in the weeks leading up to the championship they become his urgent care clinic, providing immediate help if something suspicious shows up. During the week of the championship they staff on-site, portable laboratories.

“We’re kind of at Mike’s beck and call,” says Bruce Schweiger BS’84, a CALS plant pathology researcher who serves as manager of the Turfgrass Diagnostics Lab housed at O.J. Noer. “If he calls, we’ll be there. We’re CSI Turf! That’s who we are.”

Of course, such high-profile events are just a small—albeit exciting—part of the facility’s wide-ranging mission. And you certainly don’t have to be running a world-class golf course to seek help from the scientists at O.J. Noer.

The turfgrass industry is a $1 billion-a-year business in Wisconsin and keeps about 30,000 people in jobs. Chances are, if you manage a sod farm or a park, maintain an athletic field, try to keep a 9-hole golf course at the edge of town up and running, or just wonder why your lawn looks like a bombing range, you could benefit from expert advice.

Paul Koch BS’05 MS’07 PhD’12, a CALS professor of plant pathology and a UW–Extension turf specialist who once worked as an intern for Lee, says the broad reach of the CALS turfgrass program, throughout the state and the country, is a fine example of the Wisconsin Idea at work.

“Just think of all the mom-and-pop golf courses around the state,” Koch says. “There are all these excellent little 9-hole courses. The owners have to manage their problems within the confines of the budgets they have. They really rely on our experts.”

Lee, preparing his course for the world stage, takes full advantage of the sharing of knowledge upon which the Wisconsin Idea is based. He long ago learned how important the concept is to people in all corners of the state. It was part of his education at UW–Madison, he says. Lee graduated in 1987 with a degree from CALS in soil science, specializing in turf and grounds management. He also worked as a student hourly helping conduct research in the Department of Plant Pathology.

Lee credits that education and several crucial golf course jobs—including five years as assistant superintendent at the Blue Mounds Golf and Country Club in Wauwatosa—with equipping him to handle the rigors of managing a course such as The Straits.

It was mostly his work afield at CALS that best prepared him, Lee says. He remembers long days spent crawling around test plots with a magnifying glass looking for diseases with names like dollar spot or nearly invisible insects such as chinch bugs. He literally learned his craft on the ground, he says.

“I learned the technical side of the business,” Lee says. “The need to know what’s going on at deeper and deeper levels.”

The willingness to work hard and learn has long been one of Lee’s most noticeable traits. At age 14, he went to work at the Blackhawk Country Club golf course in the Madison suburb of Shorewood Hills. His boss was Monroe Miller BS’68, now retired but for many years the respected and colorful superintendent at Blackhawk.

“He was a real special kid,” Miller says. “There were two things about Mike. He was smart and he had a great work ethic. He was probably never, ever, ever once, late for work.”

Miller recalls that off-season was always a time for catching up on chores such as painting. Around Thanksgiving in 1982, he told Lee and another young worker that among the jobs on their list was painting the inside of a pump station.

“They went down there on Thanksgiving Day and went to work,” Miller says. “I had to go down and kick them out so they would go home and spend time with their families.”

As for Lee, he says of Blackhawk and his apprenticeship with Miller: “I learned to work. I learned discipline.”

It was apparent even in those days, Miller says, that Lee had a special talent for everything to do with maintaining a golf course, from a love of the machinery to understanding the special care grass needs to become the meticulously groomed stage necessary for the game.

“Mike is one of those guys you could call a turfgrass clairvoyant,” Miller says.

Whistling Straits is a world unto itself, a haunting landscape that seems to have been dropped from the ancient countryside of the British Isles onto the Lake Michigan shoreline. That was exactly the intent of Kohler Company CEO Herbert Kohler and legendary golf course designer Pete Dye when they created both The Straits and The Irish, the other 18-hole course on the property.

The Straits, especially, evokes the rugged environs of renowned seaside courses such as the Old Course at St. Andrews in Scotland, frequent site of the British Open. These are known in the golfing world as links courses, dramatically different from the grassy, intensely manicured courses most Americans are familiar with. Greens are connected less by fairways than by long reaches of rugged, seemingly unkempt terrain pocked by deep, cylindrical bunkers known as pot bunkers. These are another naturally occurring feature of the old courses, terrifying hazards into which unlucky golfers can disappear for long moments before chopping their wayward ball out again.

The old links courses in Ireland, Scotland and England are characterized by a coastal topography of dune and scrub-covered ridges. They evolved as the setting for a terribly frustrating game called golf because they were good for little else other than grazing the sheep that chomped away while early golfers swung away.

Though some may associate the word “links” with linked golf holes, the word actually comes from Old English and predates the game. It is the name given to that particular harsh and scrubby landscape behind a beach.

This is the world that Dye wanted to create with The Straits. He started with a wasteland along the shore of Lake Michigan, a flat and dismal area that had been the site of a military antiaircraft training range. He ordered up 7,000 truckloads of sand and went to work.
What emerged was a course of bluff and dune along two miles of Lake Michigan shoreline with holes named Gremlin’s Ear and Snake and Cliff Hanger and Widow’s Watch and Pinched Nerve. Each hole has a view of the lake. There are four stone bridges and a stone clubhouse that looks as though it were transported rock by rock from the Scottish countryside. A flock of Scottish blackface sheep roam the grounds.

“We had to hire a shepherd,” Lee says. “Sometimes one of the sheep gets lost and we all have to look for it. You can spend hours out there looking for that one last sheep. It’s like something straight out of the Bible.”

But few characteristics connect The Straits to the old-style links courses more strongly than the wind. Lee, traveling the course, seemed almost always aware of the wind off the big lake.

“Out of the north today,” he says, during our drive. “Look at those waves.”

The wind gave the course its name. Herbert Kohler was walking the property during construction and, apparently teetering in a steady gale that whistled along the course’s heights and raised whitecaps on the lake, the name came to him very naturally.

The attention to detail in the course’s design, construction and maintenance has impressed the world’s best golfers. Lee keeps a file of comments from professional golfers, and he pulled out one from Tom Lehman, three-time winner of the PGA’s Player of the Year, who was interviewed about the course during the 2004 PGA Championship.

“It’s quite a feat of construction,” Lehman said. “I mean, it’s quite a vision they had . . . This golf course is almost otherworldly.”
Lehman also spoke of the course’s ruggedness. Players and spectators alike generally come off The Straits exhausted, Lee notes. During the 2010 championship he spent part of his time giving rides to exhausted spectators worn out by walking the up-and-down course.

Lee enjoys banging around the course in his truck, sharing its charms and its quirks, especially now as preparations for this summer’s championship are well under way. On one jaunt he points out the paths that are designed like narrow country lanes (no carts here; every golfer walks with a caddy). He pauses at the large staging areas for gravel and sand that will serve as platforms for the big corporate suites and viewing stands.

The course is being set up, Lee says, to make it more spectator-friendly, with better walking areas and viewing locations that place golf fans close to the action.

And Lee shares an interesting and somewhat startling detail that, upon reflection, makes perfect sense for a course owned by the Kohlers of bathroom fixture fame. He stops his pickup truck and points to what looks like gravel along the side of the road.
“We used crushed toilets to make that,” Lee says matter-of-factly, but with a faint smile playing on his face.

On this early spring day, the bentgrass on the greens and the fescue in the fairways has yet to begin changing from winter’s browns to the green of spring. But that green will soon enough begin creeping across the course—and Lee will be paying close attention to any disease or other problems that may try to establish a foothold.

For Lee and his staff, preparation for the PGA Championship has been going on for years: the close monitoring and treatment for disease and insects, the careful maintenance of the course throughout the playing season, when Lee’s crews are out morning and night raking, mowing and grooming.

Staff with the PGA have been on the site for two years, working from a large office trailer and keeping track of preparations, figuring out such details as where structures are going to go and where ropes will be placed to guide and control spectators.

The PGA course conditioning guidelines for championship competition give some indication of just how much attention to detail is necessary—consistent green speeds that are calculated with an instrument called a stimpmeter, mowers that are very precisely calculated to mow greens between .150 and .100 of an inch, the required use of bunker sand with grains that are measured so that no more than 25 percent of them are .25 mm or smaller.

“We go out all day with the guys from the PGA,” says Lee. “We’ve learned to pack a lunch.”

So it’s easy to see why Lee’s relationship with the experts at CALS becomes even more important as the championship draws near. Though Lee is adept at dealing with most of the challenges turf has to offer, the researchers at the Turfgrass Diagnostics Lab can often spot problems that remain invisible to most.

Back at the lab, Bruce Schweiger remembers puzzling over disease samples sent in by another client. To the client, the problem looked like dollar spot, but Schweiger knew that was not the issue. CALS entomology professor and UW–Extension specialist Chris Williamson was working nearby, and Schweiger asked him to take a look.

“Oh,” Williamson said. “Ants.”

It turned out that Williamson had done research on the problem some time before and had discovered that, during the mating season, some ant species go to war. They attack each other by spraying a nerve toxin that contains formic acid. That acid burns the turf and leaves lesions that look suspiciously like dollar spots, Schweiger recounts.

Such are the strange problems that could arise to plague Lee and his crew as they tend the course during the championship.

And those worries are on top of the intense maintenance that requires around-the-clock diligence once the event begins. Most crew members stay on-site working hours on end during championship week, Lee says, sleeping in big shelters set up for that purpose, snoozing in reclining chairs and watching the golf action on television screens.

Plant pathologist Paul Koch worked during the 2004 championship as an intern on one of the two- and three-person green crews that are charged with caring for a particular green and making sure during the week that it is cut morning and night and maintained to the PGA’s exacting specifications.

Sometimes, Koch says, that requires a cut of a mere sliver, no more than the depth of three credit cards or so stacked one upon the other.

One damp early morning during the championship, Koch recalls, Lee dispatched crews to squeegee the dew from tees. Koch was met during the chore by one of the professional golfers, who marveled at what Koch was doing.

“He said, ‘I can’t believe you guys are doing this so that we don’t have to walk in dew,’” Koch recalls.

Through the entire championship, Koch says, Lee remained cool and collected.

Of course, going into the week of a championship, Lee has already made sure there is little that can go wrong. A recent tour of the course included a visit to the maintenance building garage, located just outside the door from Lee’s spartan office (aerial shots of the course being the most elaborate decoration).

Lee walked to one of the 60 big mowers lined up and gleaming in neat rows. He tilted one up and suggested running a finger across one of the blades.

It was razor sharp.

Learn more at the following websites:
O.J. Noer Turfgrass Research and Education Facility: http://ojnoer.ars.wisc.edu
Whistling Straits: www.americanclubresort.com/golf/whistling-straits
PGA Championship: www.pga.com/pgachampionship

Second Life for Phosphorus

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Phosphorus, a nutrient required for growing crops, finds its way from farm fields to our food and eventually to our wastewater treatment plants. At the plants, the nutrient causes major problems, building up in pipes or going on to pollute surface waters.

Brushite bounty: Phil Barak displays brushite produced during trials at the Nine Springs Wastewater Treatment Plant of the Madison Metropolitan Sewerage District. Each jar contains brushite harvested from 30 gallons of anaerobic digest. Photo courtesy of Phil Barak

Brushite bounty: Phil Barak displays brushite produced during trials at the Nine Springs Wastewater Treatment Plant of the Madison Metropolitan Sewerage District. Each jar contains brushite harvested from 30 gallons of anaerobic digest.
Photo by Rick Wayne

But soil science professor Phil Barak has an idea about how to retrieve the nutrient from wastewater in a valuable form—and it started from a basic lab experiment. “I was doing some work on crystallizing phosphorus, just out of pure academic interest,” explains Barak. “That led me to crystallize a mineral called struvite. Then I realized it was forming in wastewater treatment plants as a nuisance.”

If he could form crystals in the lab, he reasoned, why couldn’t it be done in the wastewater treatment plants in a controlled way? It could. And, even better, if he collected the phosphorus early on in the treatment process in the form of a mineral called brushite, he could harvest even more of it.

Beyond removing phosphorus from wastewater, brushite can serve as a nutrient source for growers. While Barak will do further testing to prove its utility, brushite is a phosphate mineral that’s actually been found in agricultural fields for years.

“When conventional phosphorus fertilizers are added to soil, brushite forms. I maintain that we’ve been fertilizing with brushite for decades, but nobody’s been paying attention to it,” says Barak.

Being able to remove phosphorus from wastewater and supply it back to growers is a win-win situation, Barak notes. “We’re collecting phosphorus where it’s localized, at really high concentrations, which is the most economical place to collect it,” says Barak. “This works out in just about every dimension you can consider, from the treatment plants to the cost of recycling phosphorus as opposed to mining it new.”

Graduate students in Barak’s lab suggested that he commercialize the technology and start a company. After the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) passed on the patent, Barak and his students sought help from the UW Law and Entrepreneurship Clinic. They received two federal Small Business Innovative Research grants, and, with some additional funds from the state, including the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation, their efforts have turned into a spinoff company: Nutrient Recovery & Upcycling, LLC (NRU).

The company’s next step was a big one. This summer, a phosphorus recovery pilot plant is being implemented in a wastewater treatment plant in Illinois. The pilot project will test the research ideas on a larger scale.

Additionally, the NRU team will participate in the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District’s granting system to determine if a pilot project would be a good fit in Milwaukee. They hope to start collecting and analyzing data from Illinois by September, using that pilot system to lay the groundwork for others in Milwaukee and beyond.

Uganda: The Benefits of Biogas

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Generating enthusiasm for a new kind of technology is key to its long-term success. Rebecca Larson, a CALS professor of biological systems engineering, has already accomplished that goal in Uganda, where students at an elementary school in Lweeza excitedly yell “Biogas! Biogas!” after learning about anaerobic digester systems.

Larson, a UW–Extension biowaste specialist and an expert in agricultural manure management, designs, installs and upgrades small-scale anaerobic digester (AD) systems in developing countries. Her projects are funded by the Wisconsin Energy Institute at UW–Madison and several other sources. Community education and outreach at schools and other installation sites are an important part of these efforts.

Children get excited by the “magic” in her work, she says. “It’s converting something with such a negative connotation as manure into something positive,” Larson notes. In an AD system, this magic is performed by bacteria that break down manure and other organic waste in the absence of oxygen.

The resulting biogas, a form of energy composed of methane and carbon dioxide, can be used directly for cooking, lighting, or heating a building, or it can fuel an engine generator to produce electricity.

Larson’s collaborators in Uganda include Sarah Stefanos and Aleia McCord, graduate students at the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies who joined forces with fellow students at Makarere University in Kampala to start a company called Waste 2 Energy Ltd.
Along with another company, Green Heat Uganda, which has built a total of 42 digesters, Waste 2 Energy has helped install four AD systems since 2011.

“Most of these digesters are locally built underground dome systems at schools and orphanages,” Larson explains. Lweeza’s elementary school is a perfect example.

The AD systems use food waste, human waste from pit latrines and everything in between. The biogas generated by the digester is run through a pipeline to a kitchen stove where the children’s meals are prepared. Compared to traditional charcoal cooking, the AD systems greatly reduce the school’s greenhouse gas emissions.

Larson and her team are now focusing on enhancing the efficiency and environmental benefits of these systems. Their goals are to improve the digester’s management of human waste, reduce its water needs, increase the amount of energy it produces and generate cheap fertilizer to boost food crop yields.

“Our overall goal is to create a closed-loop and low-cost sustainability package that addresses multiple local user needs,” Larson says.

The beauty of the project is that all these needs can be met by simply adding two new components to the existing systems: heating elements and a solid-liquid separator.

To help visualize the impact of the fertilizer, Larson set up demonstration plots that compare crop yields with and without it. Down the road, a generator could be added to the system to provide electricity in a country where only 9 percent of the population currently has access.

As a next step, Larson hopes to replicate the project’s success in Bolivia. She is finalizing local design plans with Horacio Aguirre-Villegas, her postdoctoral fellow in biological systems engineering, and their collaborators at the Universidad Amazonica de Pando in Cobija.

Terry Lensmire

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(Earned his first Wisconsin Master Cheesemaker certificate in 1997)

Terry Lensmire is a third-generation cheesemaker whose passion for the craft was instilled at an early age. He started making cheese as a child and continued throughout high school. In 1974 he earned his cheesemaker license and in 1982 became a licensed cheese grader. His knowledge and experience have expanded in a career that has included work for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Land O’Lakes—and, currently, serving as product development manager at Agropur, a dairy cooperative based in Canada. Lensmire has been active in his craft outside the plant as well, serving as a cheese judge at the Wisconsin State Fair, at the Wisconsin Cheesemakers Association U.S. and World Cheese Contest, and at the World Dairy Expo Championship Dairy Product Contest. Lensmire was in the first wave of Wisconsin Master Cheesemakers, receiving his certification in 1997 (the program started in 1994)—and he’s been a presenter at the Cheese Grading Short Course since it started at around the same time. He has since been certified in cheddar, Monterey Jack, mozzarella and provolone.