For the first time, Wisconsin Women in Conservation is offering Bus Tours as part of our summer field day season. (We started offering on-farm potlucks this year, too, but that's for another blog post...) We've had one so far, and we're loving it! It's just one more way to get out onto land with like-minded women while chatting about conservation. We still have THREE tours coming up in July, one this Saturday, one next Wednesday, and one the following week, so scroll down to find a tour near you!
Our first tour was in North East/Central Wisconsin on the Merry Green Marvel Lines bus called "Further Along" June 30. The tour started and ended at the Midwest Renewable Energy Association in Custer and then toured Liberation Farms and Adelante Cafe in Almond and Generation Native Plant Nursery in Amherst. Twenty-six people hopped on the bus, including conservation professionals Sherrie Zenkreed,USDA-NRCS Resource Conservationist and Tribal Liaison, Golden Sands RC&D Urban Conservationist Maria LeFevre-Knusta, and Golden Sands Executive Director Jennifer Glad. It was an extra special day as four different mother-daughter pairs were on the trip, sharing multi-generational wisdom and aspirations! Regional Coordinator Allison Crook was the tour organizer and host. Nice job, Allison!
The North West tour will feature trips to Blackbrook Farm and Cultivating the Commons, as well as a tour of the DNR's Star Prairie Seed Farm facility. Lunch will be locally sourced from Fiddlehead Kitchen. This is a great tour to see organic veggie production, Highland cattle, heritage hogs, chickens, turkeys, and prairie, Plus, there will be lots of valuable information about seed saving!
"Each living thing on our farm has a purpose, whether it’s a plant start, a tiny chick, a clover bud or an earthworm," says Ayla Graden-Dodge at Blackbrook Farm. "We believe in the cycle of life and use natural animal manures to fertilize, rotate our animals on fallow fields, plant fields to cover crops to give them a rest from vegetable and have been establishing perennial pastures on our farm now for 5 years. The increase in wildlife, bugs and worms we have seen is amazing in the time we have settled onto this land." REGISTER HERE>
The South East Tour will feature visits to Michael Fields Agricultural Institute and Beulah Family Homestead in East Troy, as well as to LarryVille Gardens in Burlington. Participants will see crop research fields, small-scale diversified animal husbandry, and vegetable high-tunnel hoop houses and the farmstand at LarryVille. Lunch will feature sandwiches from Willy Street Coop.
"We use every resource we can to save our soils from washing away, blowing away or leaving our farm in other ways," says WiWiC Conservation Coach Michelle Cannon at LarryVille Gardens. "We compost, we even save our wash water soils to return them to our fields. We began with almost dead soils from chemical treatments over the past few decades. We allowed them to rebirth and come to life again. They are living breathing eco systems. You can taste the difference our nutrient filled soils make." REGISTER HERE>
The West Central Bus tour will travel between Ellsworth and Hager City, starting at the pavilion in Summit Hill Park. From the bus, participants will see and discuss various cropping practices, erosion control techniques, pollinator habitat and more. Then the bus will stop at Twin Folk Farms and Oxheart Farm, both located near Hager City, showcasing rotational grazing of grassfed beef and sheep, hog and poultry production, a CSA operation with grass-fed milk and yogurt farmstand. Twin Folk Farms also has an agritourism farm-stay component, and does educational programming with children. So this will be a great tour to bring kids on! REGISTER HERE>
"There's a season to everything, and to the woman, it is usually many things at the same time. I'm excited to share my current country mix of homestead life, farm life, personal fulfillment life, and entrepreneur life," Darla Lester, WiWiC Conservation Coach at Twin Folk Farms.
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