THE DRIFTLESS, WISCONSIN
A Story of a Cooperative Economy
REGENERATIVE QUALITIES OF THE DRIFTLESS
Honors Community & Place/Innovative, Adaptive, Responsive / Empowered Participation /Robust Circulation
Honors Community & Place/Innovative, Adaptive, Responsive / Empowered Participation /Robust Circulation
“Each human community consists of a mosaic of peoples, traditions, beliefs, and institutions uniquely shaped by long-term pressures of geography, human history, culture, local environment, and changing
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LISTEN!
"Capay," music and lyrics by Megan Saunders and Blair McLaughlin, performed by Megan Saunders and The Driftless. Permission to use audio courtesy Megan Sanders.
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Note: This story is meant to be read and viewed to musical accompaniment! The cultural economy of The Driftless — extending from the southwest corner of Wisconsin, to southeast Minnesota, northeast Iowa and northeast Illinois—cannot be properly understood apart from its geological history. Its deeply carved river valleys, bluffs, and intriguing rock formations are attributable to its having escaped the glacial drift of the last Ice Age, and the accompanying flattening and infilling effect of rocks, silt, and sand deposits. Its incredibly rich biodiversity includes rare species dating back prior to the Ice Age that left it untouched. Many have described the Driftless as a sheltering landscape in which to take refuge, but also a place where renewal happens often spontaneously. Out of this Driftless terroir has emerged a unique community of small, hardscrabble farmers, gifted creatives, and an assortment of doggedly independent alternative lifestylers. It has at the same time nurtured one of the most diverse co-operative economies in the country. Bjorn Bergman, Outreach Coordinator for the Viroqua Food Co-op, moved to the town of Viroqua, population 4300, in southwest Wisconsin pretty much by accident, after graduating from the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, about 35 miles to the northwest on the Mississippi River. “After school it was the recession and I took whatever job was offered me, which happened to be an AmeriCorps position working with the Vernon County Farm to School Program,” he relates. “After two years working as an AmeriCorp member, I then ended up getting the job at the Viroqua Food Co-op. Viroqua is a pretty crazy, amazing enigma of a place in the middle of nowhere. I feel lucky to live and work here.”
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LISTEN!
Greg Brown sings "Driftless," from If I Had Known: Essential Recordings. Permission to use audio courtesy Greg Brown.
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The Cooperative Driftless
Bjorn Bergman (right)
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What makes Viroqua such an amazing enigma of a place where people feel lucky to live and work has a lot to do with the way the contours of the Driftless have shaped its economic destiny. “Since we have such an up and down topography here it is not very conducive to large-scale agriculture,” Bjorn explains. “You can’t just take a section of land—say, one square mile—and plant it in corn and soybeans. You can essentially only farm on the ridges and valleys, which are more conducive to smaller, family-scale agriculture. So a lot of things have serendipitously gone right to allow co-ops and the local food movement to flourish here.” |
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Bjorn reports that Scandinavian, mostly Norwegian, farmers originally settled in the Wisconsin Driftless, attracted to the familiar topography. Later, in the 1970s, a group of back-to-the-landers began arriving, also drawn to the beauty of the landscape. “There was an influx of people who were interested in organic farming and alternative lifestyles,” Bjorn explains. One of the areas largest employers is now the farmer-owned cooperative Organic Valley, whose national headquarters is located in La Farge, Wisconsin. Organic Valley was founded in 1988 in response to the continuing legacy of former Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz’s “get big or get out” movement, which championed corporate farming in America. To combat the onslaught of Big Dairy, local farmers got together and created Organic Valley hoping to find a way to make their small family farms competitive. “Organic Valley has been the savior to the small family dairy farm in our region,” says Bjorn. “There are tons of them all around because they are able to make a decent living out of having less cows with less land.”
Cooperatives have also flourished in the Driftless utilities sector, as low population densities make it unprofitable for big utilities to invest in the infrastructure to bring in telephone and electric lines over challenging terrain. Not surprisingly the Driftless regions of Minnesota and Wisconsin are the heart of co-op country—the state of Wisconsin was the second in the nation after Michigan to approve cooperative legislation. “We have a history of building co-ops to solve our local problems,” Bjorn explains. “There are 15 or more cooperatives in Vernon County because we had to come together out of necessity to create ways to make business viable—from farming, to creameries, to milk aggregation, or electric utilities. We have Vernon Communications Cooperative (telephone, TV, and internet services), Vernon Electric Cooperative, Westby Co-op Creamery, Fifth Season Cooperative, Center Point Counseling Service Cooperative—the first mental health worker-owned co-op in the U.S.—and more. The cooperative culture is infused in our fabric here. Everyone sees co-ops in their daily life so we say, ‘oh we have this problem and we have a need in our community, how will we meet it? We will start a co-op.’ It is the logical direction we go from our experiences and how we respond to challenges in our daily life.” |
A "Conversation in the Field" with Bjorn Bergman.
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The Restorative Driftless
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The Driftless has not only fostered human collaborativeness. It has also been a very private place of refuge for many from the general vicissitudes of life. For others it has been a source of renewal after often tragic loss. David Rhodes, a novelist whose early works, including The Rock Island Line, have been compared to Sherwood Anderson’s, struggled with his craft for 30 years after a motorcycle accident left him paralyzed from the chest down. In 2008, he reclaimed his stature as one of America’s greatest writers with his tribute to The Driftless in the eponymous novel and its sequel Jewelweed. In his lyrical paean to the region, Going Driftless: Life Lessons From the Heartland for Unraveling Times, Stephen Lyons quotes Rhodes as saying “I do credit this area with helping to heal me.” That healing was about gaining the ability to experience his infirmity as a way to connect in a universal sense with the parts of others that were unhealed. “He realized,” says Lyons, “that everyone is damaged in some way. He began to view his experience as our experience.” In the same book, Lyons relates how birder and musician Jon Hawks reconstructs his life after the death of his son and grandson in a car accident. He returns to his home in the Driftless and finds a piece of paper on which his son had written: “The measure of spiritual health is to find a raptor anywhere.” It reconnects Hawks with his lifelong passions: playing the flute and studying the nesting habits of red-shouldered hawks along the Upper Mississippi Driftless. |
GREG BROWN, Musician and Songwriter
Greg Brown sings "Driftless," from If I Had Known: Essential Recordings.
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Greg Brown grew up on a farm in southwestern Iowa in an area contiguous to The Driftless. In the liner notes to Going Driftless, an all-star, all-female vocalist tribute album to Brown, Eric Peltoniemi speaks of “the strong thread of compassion and enduring humanity, not to mention simple, effective melody, running through his work.”
Greg is a long-time supporter of Seed Savers Exchange, whose non-profit mission it is to protect and promote America’s garden and food heritage. |
Have I done enough, Father,
Can I rest now? Have I learned enough, Mother, Can we talk now? Will you visit me In my place of peace? I'm going driftless. Let's cry all our tears Cry them all out now. Let them flow down And clean all the rivers. And the evening sky Is the reason why I'm going driftless. —lyrics from Greg Brown’s Driftless
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TORIL FISHER, Artist & Co-Owner Second Cloud on the Left Farm
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Toril Fisher, co-owner of Second Cloud on the Left organic farm in Viroqua, describes her Driftless farm life and artistic life as inextricably intertwined. “Our journey on this planet is brief and the beauty around us is limitless,” she notes. “Capturing a few fleeting moments of beauty on canvases is what motivates me to paint. In the fields, I spend hours as a witness to nature’s elements—her gift of light, birth, death, color, and moods. As an artist, I'm challenged to translate those moments to a canvas….spending hours contemplating light, shadow, smells, temperature and energy and how that translates to an artistic composition. I'm schooled everyday by nature and grateful for the wealth of knowledge and primitive beauty she brings to me daily.” Toril's artwork will be on view at the Driftless Area Art Festival in September 2015.
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Listen to Toril and Drew Fisher reflecting after a day on the farm about how they fell in love with the Driftless and became a part of its remarkable collaborative community.
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TONY MACASAET, Photographer and physician
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Dr. Macasaet is an emergency room doctor, photographer, filmmaker, and local entrepreneur who returned to Viroqua, WI, where he was raised, “after a 20-year right of passage.” “Here finally," he reports, “I seek and I provide, I heal and I breathe.” He describes himself as: “passionate about engaging in the moment by moment evolution of our impermanence. Key outlook on life: healing is not a destination, but daily practice.” |
MEGAN SAUNDERS, Ecologist, Evolutionary Biologist, Musician
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Megan Saunders, a singer, songwriter, banjo- and mandolin-player explains why she chose the name The Driftless for her acoustic string band: “For me music is a refuge from the often heartbreaking highs and lows in life. Music is my Driftless - it has helped preserve the parts of myself that might have otherwise been lost to the forces that changed the landscape of my world.” Although she does not call The Driftless home, Megan feels an intense connection to the spirit of the region that transcends its earthly coordinates. Her great-grandparents were Finnish immigrants who settled in Ludlow, VT, where the terrain in many places resembles that of the Driftless. There, as subsistence farmers, they worked a 25-acre mountaintop settlement, that, Megan says, “took some finesse to nurture.” “There is a respect and reverence for the land that develops with this way of living,” she explains, “a high esteem that I feel to my core. I tend to connect easily with others who share these values, regardless of the particular geographical area they are from.” Find out more about Megan Saunders and The Driftless Ban at their website and on Facebook. |
"Capay," music and lyrics by Megan Saunders and Blair McLaughlin, performed by Megan Saunders and The Driftless
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Acknowledgements:
Thank you to Bjorn Bergman, Greg Brown, Toril Fisher, Dr. Tony Macasaet, and Megan Saunders & The Driftless Band, all of whom so generously shared their insights and creative work to help us tell the story of The Driftless.
Well Worth Watching, Reading & Listening to:
Interview with Stephen J. Lyons, the author of Going Driftless on Wisconsin Public Radio
David Rhodes's novel, Driftless (published 2008)
Mysteries of the Driftless, a fascinating short documentary about the geology, mysterious artifacts, and biodiversity of the Driftless
Vernon County, WI Community Food Assessment Report. A five-year progress report on the county’s goal to increase the amount of local food available and accessible to the local population across the socioeconomic spectrum, and to increase support and build infrastructure for those interested in and already engaged in food production and distribution for local markets.
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