There wasn't a pair of bib overalls in the bunch. Maybe the wives hid the grease-stained farm uniforms until the bags were packed. Or maybe those OshKosh B'Gosh working clothes
went the way of the two-stroke John Deere.
But there was no mistaking the fact that the tourists who got off the bus on Outer Springer Loop outside Palmer were farmers. Ben VanderWeele's crew was harvesting lettuce when the crowd of Wisconsin folks got out to stretch their legs. A couple of visitors noticed heads of lettuce that had been cast aside by the harvest crew. One question led to another about why these heads were left and others were picked and boxed for shipping. Pretty soon the traveling farmers were tearing the heads apart and eating the interior leaves.
Ken Landwer of Junction City pointed out, "This is good, crunchy stuff."
Then Marge Schad of Stevens Point said it was the best lettuce she'd tasted since she arrived in Alaska a couple of days ago.
Next thing you know, there are a dozen Packers-loving cheeseheads chomping on VanderWeele's leftovers and wondering out loud why the lettuce they were eating was not going to market.
So goes the latest in tourism for Alaska -- agri-visitors. More than 200 Midwest farmers are expected to arrive in groups f 40 to 60 on Holiday Tours through Aug. 20 to see farms in the Valley and north to Delta Junction and Fairbanks.
It's unlikely farmers and ranchers in Alaska are going to teach farmers and ranchers Outside much about agriculture. But there's this common curiosity people of any trade have to examine the way things are done elsewhere. And there's a bond of sorts that was evident when the Wisconsin people heard Alaskans talk about their successes and failures, the difficulties of lives devoted to the land, no matter its place on the map.
"I think they felt at home," said Jean Havemeister, who guided the group on a tour of her family's dairy farm on Bogard Road between Palmer and Wasilla. "I couldn't bellieve
thhey stood in the milking parlor as long as they did."
The heavy air in a milking facility can be overpowering, but many of these folks weren't strangers to the sound of cow flop smacking concrete. As one of the women said when she started to walk into a barn at the University of Alaska Fairbanks farm on Trunk Road, "This isn't the first time these shoes have been in a barn." That attitude was further proof of the agriculture background of the tourists. When they walked among animals, nobody looked at the ground.
Joe Tryba of Junction City scuffed some feed in front of him at the Havemeister place, one of the few remaining active farms from Roosevelt's grand agriculture experiment of 1935.
"My cows wouldn't eat this." The grass was more stem than leaf. It was brown and dry. "They'd die. If it isn't the greenest of the green, they won't eat it. They're spoiled."
Bob Havemeister, though, said Tryba was looking at bedding grass, not their best. Nonetheless, as Havemeister notes, there is no alfalfa for his cows here. No corn grown locally that his counterparts in Wisconsin take for granted.
More astounding to Tryba, though, was that Jean Havemeister told the group her family's cows were averaging 22,000 pounds of milk each, per year.
"Mine average 20,000," he said. "The Wisconsin state average is 16,000."
That figure drew an argument from a traveling companion over whether Wisconsin averages 16,000 pounds or 14,000 pounds per cow each year. (According to a Wisconsin state agriculture statistician, it was 15,397 pounds in 1995.)
Oh well, the debate soon passed when they started talking about the Havemeisters' herd bull. "Angus, huh?"
"Oh, sure," said Jean Havemeister, herself a Wisconsin native who grew up in farm country and still has that distinctive northern Midwest lilt, despite having been an Alaskan since 1960. "We love the Angus."
From the crowd came a comment that sometimes an Angus bull can be a little rowdy..
"Nah, he's a gent
...
shade as the sun moves, he said. But like any other farming operation, it's got its drawbacks.
Jim Pagel, also of Wausau, said ginseng seed costs as much as a $150 a pound, and for an acre you might use 100 to 120 pounds. That's about $15,000 an acre. Plus the cost of
building what Dehnel called a roof over the crop, and chemicals. It's also very labor intensive at harvest time.
Then the ginseng have to be dried on racks in a building for 10 or 12 days in circulating air at 100 degrees. Pagel said 100 pounds of ginseng typically will dry down to about 26 to
28 pounds.
But it can offer a big payoff. Pagel said an acre can produce a ton or more of ginseng . Four years ago, he said, the price was about $60 a pound. That was a big hit -- $120,000 gross or more off an acre. Since then, however, the prices have dropped to $15 to $20 per pound. Demand remains pretty steady, but supply increased as more farmers went to the alternative crop.
The kicker, though, is that ginseng , for reasons the Wisconsin farmers can't explain, will only grow in one spot for three to four years, five at the most. Then it will never
grow in that same soil again, although other crops will. So ginseng farmers are continually looking for virgin soil.
It could be, then, with Alaska's abundance of land and cool weather, that ginseng might have agriculturists here scratching their heads and wondering what if.
And that's really the purpose of a tour like the one the Wisconsin farmers were on. Visiting with distant neighbors, talking dirt, complaining about the weather and having some
fun along the way.
Gail Tryba was standing in a light rain under gray skies and said, with her arms out, "This is just like home," back in Junction City. Then for some inexplicable reason, she confessed in a whisper that she didn't mind leaving her kids at home, "but I sure miss my cows."
- BY : T.C. Mitchell - Daily News Reporter
- SOUURCE : Anchorage Daily News1996.08.02
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