Albert and Violet Lincoln purchased this farm and moved here in November 1948. They operated it as a dairy farm but stopped selling milk in the 1960s. They continued to raise Holstein cattle and milk enough for the house. Albert started working at Rollohome in Marshfield in 1952 and retired in 1976. In the spring of 1982 he had knee replacement surgery and the doctors told him the physical labor of farming would wear out the knee joint. He planned to keep the cows in the pasture until that fall. The cows made him change his mind. After he came home from the hospital and still needed a walker to get around, the cows took down the electric fence and got out. One of his favorite foods in the spring was leaf lettuce. The cows got into his garden and ate his leaf lettuce. When the cows were back and the fence was repaired, he went to the house and called the auction barn to have them picked up and sold.
I, Gerald, started talking to my dad back in the 1970s about eventually buying the farm. They cleared this with my brother and sisters in about 2002. We started the process in 2003 at about the same time as they moved to an apartment in Neillsville. My mother died in February of 2004 and we completed the purchase that June. My father lived in the apartment for a couple of months and then moved to Minneapolis and lived with my sisters until January 2006. He then entered a nursing home in Minneapolis but chose to come down to the nursing home in Neillsville in February. He died in June of 2006 at 94 years of age. When my mother died they had been married just short of 68 years.
I have always loved blueberries. Wild blueberries grow well on the farm. After much research for a product that could be grown during our retirement years, I chose blueberries. The next decision was to choose the kind of blueberries to grow. The better commercial choice is highbush blueberries. Blueberries have a fine and inefficient root system. It would be a high risk proposition to plant blueberries and depend upon natural rain to keep them alive. In preparation for planting blueberries, we built a two acre pond July and August of 2008 to supply irrigation water. I drove a bulldozer and our son-in-law operated the excavator for a month.
We planted 2000 highbush blueberry plants in 2010 and another 12,000 in 2011. We placed irrigation drip lines in the raised bed rows. They probably would not have survived without this system in the first couple of years. It can take five years for the plants to come into production. In both 2015 and 2016 we had temperatures in the 20s while they were in bloom. This wiped out most of the blossoms both years. We are in the process of installing an overhead sprinkler system for frost protection in future years. Our varieties will ripen continuously from early July to the end of August.
I have not forgotten wild blueberries. We have made several trips to Maine to collect berries from seed from different regions. We have collected berries in the eastern region and from the Rangely Lakes area. We even climbed Blueberry Mountain to pick berries at 2,890′ elevation trying to maximize winter hardiness. Wild blueberries in Maine ripen in August whereas ours in central Wisconsin ripen in early July. I am interested to discover if this is a difference in growing conditions or whether they would be a “later” variety in Wisconsin. I hope to collect berries from Wisconsin, Minnesota, and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan this year or next. We will need a greenhouse to grow enough to plant at the density of one plant per square foot for commercial field. Wild blueberry growers mow the fields after harvest to push all new growth during the next year. Flower buds are only produced on new growth. As a result, fields are normally harvested every other year.