And a road ran through it

Farmers pay the price of progress

By Dustin Block

Photos by Brian Ebner/Optic Nerve

Highway KR near Kenosha and Racine counties

In 1963, Dean Volenberg’s family farm in southern Wisconsin was split by the new Interstate 90.

There wasn’t much choice for members of the family. They were paid for the land, but had little input in a process that would lead to one of the most heavily traveled corridors in the state.

“What can you do?” said Volenberg, who is now the agriculture agent for the University of Wisconsin-Extension in Door County.

That’s the attitude of many farmers in the way of the Wisconsin Department of Transportation and a wider highway. There’s nothing new about state and federal authorities seizing land for new and bigger roads, but it’s only been in the past few decades that government officials became more responsive to the concerns of farmers losing their land.

Today, Volenberg works near the expansion of Highway 57 from Green Bay to Door County. The $72.5 million project, scheduled for completion next year, will make a curvy, treacherous road safer and faster for an estimated 2 million visitors to the popular tourist destination.

Farmers are impacted by the project — the new road takes up 768 acres of farmland — but opposition was light to the expansion. A combination of WisDOT planning and farmers’ acceptance paved the way for the project, Volenberg said.

Throughout Wisconsin’s history, the state’s powerful agriculture industry has been reliant on quality transportation to get inputs in and crops, livestock and produce to market, said Paul Zimmerman, a lobbyist for the Wisconsin Farm Bureau.

The farmers’ need for roads led the state to invest heavily in county and state highways for decades, using tar instead of gravel to support dairy trucks and farm equipment. The result is an intricate network of roads that stretch throughout the state’s rural lands.

Road construction on Highway 53 near Bloomer

“In a general sense we’re supportive of a good road system,” Zimmerman said.

The conflicts between farmers and WisDOT appear around individual projects. New or wider highways eat into farmland, sometimes splitting farms into sections or eliminating them. New roads also lead to development pressure on rural communities, letting some farmers sell their land for retirement while forcing others to coexist with sprawl.

More and more, farmers are losing out to the development. Wisconsin loses about 40,000 acres of farmland to development or recreational use per year, according to the state Department of Agriculture and Consumer Protection. As this trend continues, the effect on the state’s economy could be significant.

The $51 billion agriculture industry is one of the three or four driving forces in the state economy, with one in nine jobs in Wisconsin somehow tied to farming, Zimmerman said.

While farmers lose land, WisDOT planners cast the issue in terms of safety, arguing overcrowded or poorly designed roads lead to fatal accidents.

“I don’t think it’s too hard of a call to say, ‘We’re sorry we’re doing this to you, but we’re going to do it,’” said Jon Novick, environmental analyst and review specialist for WisDOT. “We look at ourselves as the taxpayer. We want to benefit all taxpayers.”

Balance between farmers and roads — a relatively modern concept — is negotiated through the planning process. WisDOT can work out the needs
for new roads through long-term studies, but planners have learned to get into the field — sometimes literally — to deal with concerns.

“A farmer knows every square inch of his property — his trees, his birds, his squirrels … he knows what’s going on out there,” Novick said. “If something isn’t working, he’ll say, ‘Let’s fix it.’ If he feels we’re taking too much, he’ll let us know.”

Clay Jensen of Central Concrete Cutting Inc., Eau Claire and Edgar, works a road construction job in April on Highway 53 south of Highway 40 near Bloomer.

Bill Kuckuck studied farming around the world. A native of Monroe who grew up in Fond du Lac, Kuckuck was raised around farms, studied the industry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and worked in commercial agriculture for years, traveling extensively for multinational companies.

After years in foreign countries, Kuckuck returned to the United States to work for the American Farmland Trust, a nonprofit organization that works to protect working lands. He didn’t have to look far to see the need for farmland preservation.

Returning home about once a year for the last 20 years, he’s seen roads and development eating away working lands in the eastern part of Wisconsin. Based on his work around the world, his concern is more than nostalgia.

“I understand the importance of farmland in the global economy, and, in Wisconsin, I was quite concerned,” said Kuckuck, the AFT’s executive vice president and chief operating officer.

It’s the perceived lack of value in farmland that makes it expendable to many planners. Working lands are seen as readily available, inexpensive and easily developed, which makes them vulnerable.

“It’s not the type of dialogue that produces good decisions on what is truly important,” Kuckuck said. “We see that all of the time with highways and sprawl.”

Part of AFT’s mission, Kuckuck said, is to educate the public on the costs of developing farmland. In many cases, he said, a community would be better off financially collecting taxes on farmlands than building new roads and subdivisions.

Nationally, road planners have not made preserving farmland a priority.

“With a few exceptions, every interstate highway in the United States has been poorly planned,” said Bob Wagner, the managing director for field projects for the AFT. “It’s natural for designers to see the easiest routes.”

Wagner and others at AFT are working to change the least-resistance approach to road planning — for example, routing a road across a river ridge rather than through fertile working lands.

Farmland advocates also hope to strengthen the federal Farmland Protection Policy Act, which requires road planners to take farmland into account when they consider new projects. Current legislation requires road projects to be reviewed against their impact on farmland but lacks teeth to force changes in poorly designed projects.

Other solutions for improving farmland include improving existing roads rather than building new roads and looking at mass transit options to slow the growth of highway traffic.

But new roads are attractive to communities — and even farmers — looking to cash in on new development. Farmland between Milwaukee and Madison is among the most threatened in the nation, while the rural areas in urban counties like Racine and Kenosha are giving way to subdivisions and business parks.

For farmers, there’s a resigned practicality to new roads. Like his family knowing it couldn’t stop the interstate, Volenberg said most farmers he talked to about Door County’s Highway 57 had little opinion about the road.

Even those who lost land understood they weren’t going to deter plans to make a dangerous road safer for big-time tourist dollars.

“It’s an inconvenience more than anything,” Volenberg said. “How do you stop progress?”