In celebration of June Dairy Month, we will have a cheese tasting and Corey will talk about his books celebrating Wisconsin agriculture and immigrant life.

On A Wisconsin Family Farm

2022 National Indie Excellence Award Winner.

On a Wisconsin Family Farm flings the barn doors wide open to a cast of characters that built America’s Dairyland. A maternal maverick, Anna Satorie, went against cultural norms and became the sole owner of her family’s homestead in 1905. The next year, Anna married John Burich, and the couple went about building a thrifty family farm. Pioneer life was fraught with trials and tribulations as polio and tuberculosis claimed loved ones and the fabricated death of a bootlegging brother turned gangsters away from the farm. Neighbors pitched in as members of the immigrant class aided one another to construct farmsteads and support one another through unsanctioned bank loans, daring dynamite work and barn raisings. Leaving work aside, this community also threw parties met by the rooster’s early-dawn crow. Corey Geiger, international agricultural journalist, pairs his rural roots and lively storytelling talents to capture six generations of local tales.

The Wisconsin Farm They Built

Foreword by Jerry Apps

A Family, a Farm and a Tractor

After his mother, Anna, was killed by a train, Elmer Pritzl was thrown into adulthood at the tender age of sixteen. A clever and crafty fellow, Elmer quickly found work at the local foundry. Promoted to foreman by age eighteen, he began supervising men double and even triple his age during the depths of the Great Depression. However, that professional career track ended abruptly five years later when Elmer fell in love with a farmer’s daughter, Julia Burich. Six months after their wedding, Julia’s father passed away, and with no living male relatives left in her life, Julia’s mother, Anna Burich, asked, “Elmer, will you run my farm?” So, Elmer, born a city boy, transformed his life and began a love affair with a Wisconsin family farm. Corey Geiger, international agricultural journalist, pairs his rural roots and lively storytelling talents to capture six generations of life in America’s Dairyland.

Books Between Bites

Hear a Book Review On Your Lunch Break! Bring a sack lunch; beverages and cookies will be available.

For our 33rd season we present…The Wisconsin Farm They Built: Tales of Family and Fortitude by Corey Geiger

Fascinating, informative, inspiring, The Wisconsin Farm They Built is the extraordinary, unique, exceptional, and informative history of a family farm - as well as an unreservedly recommended pick for personal, community, college, and university library, Wisconsin History and Mid-West American Agricultural History collections and supplemental curriculum studies lists. Growing up on his family dairy farm, and known to friends as the Dancing Dairyman, our reviewer and author, Corey Geiger danced his way onto Family Feud hosted by Steve Harvey, Two-Stepped on the colored shavings during the Supreme Champion ceremonies at the 2018 World Dairy Expo and competed at the Fred Astaire National Finals where he and his wife Krista Knigge won top amateur couple honors.

5:30 p.m. Hoard’s Dairyman Creamery cheese tasting, dessert, and beverages

6 p.m. presentation by Corey Geiger about his book, On a Wisconsin Family Farm - Historic Tales of Character, Community and Culture.