One could almost predict how farmers thus trained would react to the new environment of the Wisconsin wilderness. Taking up a tract of forested land or buying a farm with a small clearing upon it, their impulse would be, with the least possible delay, to get a few acres thoroughly cleared, subdued to the plow, and in a high state of tilth. Exceptions there were, to be sure, but on the whole the German pioneers were not content to slash and burn their timber. After the timber was off, the stumps must come out, forthwith, to make the tract fit for decent cultivation. Was it the Germans who introduced in land clearing the custom of “grubbing” instead of “slashing”? This meant felling the tree by undermining it, chopping off roots underground at a safe depth, taking out grub and all, instead of cutting it off above ground. In timber of moderate growth this practice proved fairly expeditious and highly successful, for once a tract was grubbed, the breaking plow encountered no serious obstruction. A good “grubber” among later immigrants could always count on getting jobs from established German farmers.[20]
To the American, who was content to plow around his stumps every year for a decade, to cultivate around them, cradle or reap around them, it seemed that his German neighbor was using some kind of magic to exorcise his stumps. The magic was merely human muscle, motivated by a psychology which inhibited rest so long as a single stump remained in the field.
The German not only used the heaps of farm yard fertilizer which, on buying out the original entryman, he commonly found on the premises, but he conserved all that his livestock produced, and frequently, if not too distant from town or village, became a purchaser of the commodity of which liverymen, stock yard keepers, and private owners of cow or horse were anxious to be relieved. The manufacture of fertilizer was a prime reason for stabling his livestock. The other was his fixed habit of affording animals such care. Not all Germans built barns at once, but the majority always tried to provide warm sheds, at least, whereas Yankee and Southwesterner alike were very prone to allow their animals to huddle, humped and shivering, all winter on the leeward side of house or granary, or in clumps of sheltering brush or trees.[21] The German was willing to occupy his log house longer, if necessary, in order to gain the means for constructing adequate barns and sheds.
Germans were not one-crop farmers. The lands they occupied, usually forested, could not be cleared fast enough at best to enable them to raise wheat on a grand scale, as the Yankees did in the open lands of the southeast and west. Their arable was extended only a few acres per year, and while that was being done the German farmers grew a little of everything—wheat, rye, corn, oats, barley, potatoes, roots. Clover was to them a favorite forage, hay, and green manure crop. In growing it, they used gypsum freely. This policy of clover growing, adopted gradually by all farmers, was one of the means finally relied on by the wheat farmers to restore the productivity of their abused soils.
In ways such as the above, German farmers helped to save Wisconsin agriculture in the period of stress when wheat growing failed and before coöperative dairying entered. They were not the chief influence in popularizing improved livestock. Credit for that innovation must be awarded to the Yankees. They had resumed in the eastern states the English tradition of breeding, and brought it into Wisconsin where, by means of state and county fairs and an active agricultural press, it was ultimately borne in upon the minds of all farmers, Germans among the rest.[22]
Neither did the Germans lead in developing the new agriculture, of which coöperative dairying was the keystone. Yankee leadership therein, too, was the dominant influence. Yet, it was the Germans, Scandinavians, and other foreigners—and numerically Germans were in the majority—who, by virtue of their agricultural morale, their steadiness in carrying out plans, their patience and perseverance, have made the dairy business of Wisconsin the great industry it has become.
Above all, the Germans persisted as farmers. They prospered not dramatically, like some of the more successful of the Yankee farmers, but by little and little they saved money, bought more land, better stock, and built better homes. When Yankee farmers, discouraged or impoverished by the failure of wheat, offered their farms for sale preparatory to “going west,” Germans who had managed their smaller farms more carefully stood ready to buy; when Yankees who were tired of being “tied to a cow” wanted to go to Montana, Oregon, or Wyoming to raise steers by wholesale, on the ranching plan, they sold out to Germans who made the dairy farms pay larger dividends year by year. When Yankee farmers retired to the city, or went into business, which in recent decades they have done by thousands, Germans were among those who were the keenest bidders for their farm properties. In a word, the German has succeeded agriculturally through the more and more perfect functioning, in this new land, of qualities imparted by the training and inheritance which he brought with him from the old world. On the whole, Germans have kept clear of speculation, preferring to invest their savings in neighboring lands with which they were intimately familiar, or to lend to neighboring farmers on farm mortgage security. In the aggregate, German farmers in Wisconsin have long had vast sums at interest. The Institute for Research in Land Economics (University of Wisconsin) has completed investigations which show that the nation’s area of lowest farm mortgage interest rates (5.2 per cent or less) coincides very closely with the great maple forest of eastern Wisconsin, which has been held, from the first, predominantly by German farmers.
We have no desire to minimize the factor contributed to Wisconsin’s agriculture by the Yankees. They were the prophets and the organizers of the farmers’ movement. Their inherent optimism, their speculative bent, their genius for organization were indispensable to its success. “Anything is possible to the American people,” shouted the mid-century American orator from a thousand Fourth of July rostrums, therein merely reflecting what the mass of his hearers religiously believed. When agriculture had to be remade in Wisconsin, the Yankee’s intelligence told him in what ways it must be improved, and his tact, courage, and address enabled him to enlist and organize the means for remaking it. When the Yankee was convinced, by his farm paper or by the exhibitions, that a purebred animal was a good investment, his speculative spirit sent him to his banker to borrow a thousand dollars, and to a distant breeder to make what his more timid German neighbor would call a “mighty risky investment”—for the animal might die! Finally, when local organization was required to secure a cheese factory, a creamery, or a dairy board of trade, the Yankee by virtue of his community leadership was usually able to effect the desired result.
Wisconsin’s almost unique success in agriculture is due to no single or even dual factor. But among the human elements which have been most potent in producing the result, none is of more significance than the fortunate blend in her population of the Yankee and the Teuton.