Interview with Nodji Van Wychen, February 19, 2018

Interviewee: Nodji Van Wychen Interviewer: Madeline Abbatacola Date: February 19, 2018

My name is Madeline Abbatacola and today is Monday February 19, 2018. I am interviewing Nodji Van Wychen at the Wisconsin Cranberry Discovery Center at 204 Main Street in Warrens, WI. Sarah Scripps is operating the recording equipment. This interview is part of a research project for the Wisconsin State Cranberry Growers Association in consultation with the Wisconsin Historical Society.

MA: Nodji, do you mind if I ask you a few questions?

NVW: I would be most delighted.

MA: So we're just going to start with some basic biographical information. What's your name, your date of birth, where are you from?

NVW: Okay, my name is Nodji Van Wychen and um my date of birth is July 2, 1948. 00:01:00So in a few months I will be 70 years old. And um, I have lived, I was born and raised here in um the Warrens cranberry marsh and I've lived here my entire life. And uh, basically my whole family has has lived here their entire lives as well.

MA: What is the name of your marsh?

NVW: It, uh the name of the marsh is Wetherby Cranberry Company. Which uh I am real happy that a few years ago uh when we were building this Wisconsin Cranberry Discovery Center that we decided to include a library in it. And uh it was our family and cranberry marsh that actually uh donated the money for the library and so I am really overjoyed that this is an additional project that is going to be founded in the library.

MA: What a wonderful contribution. So who are your immediate family members?

NVW: Okay my husband is Jim and he is not from the area so he had to marry into the marsh so to speak. So when I met him he was with UW Extension and at the 00:02:00time that I met him I was also teaching um and we both decided that we were going to quit our jobs and come back to the marsh and um so basically then we started to raise a family also. So we have a total of 4 children they are all now grown and married with children of their own. So our oldest daughter Tonya married Mike Gnewikow he is full time on our marsh, they have four boys: Damon, Trey, Kale, and Kade. At this point in their lives uh one is in college, one is a senior in high school, and Kale and Kade are twins are they are freshmen. And then we have a second daughter Kyra who married Randy Neumann they also live close by but both of them are teachers in 00:03:00the Tomah School District. They have two children Brin and Hunter. Hunter is a freshmen in high school and Brin is in 7th grade. Then we have a third daughter Shana(??) she married Ryan Steele and he is uh she is in charge of the cardiac rehab unit at Tomah Memorial Hospital locally in Tomah and her husband is a pharmacist at the VA hospital. Their two children are Sierra and Ashton. Sierra is in 8th grade and Ashton is in 6th grade. Then we have one son, Henry, and he is full time on the marsh. He married Jenna Nichols and they have one daughter who is just over one year old now, Danica. And so we have, I am third generation on the Wetherby Marsh so the two full time employees, uh Henry and my son in law Mike they're fourth generation. The 9 00:04:00grandchildren who all live close by are fifth generation. And its grandma's dream that that fifth generation will come on the marsh and be full time in some capacity.

MA: Can you explain and describe how family hierarchy and generations have impacted the transfer of business and your cranberry growing experience?

NVW: Okay the marsh is actually on uh my mother's side. My grandfather, Henry Kissinger who married Cecelia Kissinger was the first general manager on the marsh back in the early 1900s. And uh um he, he worked there and when times were hard on the marsh, uh it actually Wetherby was a company marsh. So it 00:05:00started with stockholders from the Chicago area. They were here in the area to do lumbering because that was prominent in this area. And then they discovered that there were wild cranberries growing in the area and people were interested in hand picking the wild cranberries, putting them on the railroad which is right in Warrens, and sending them to Chicago to where they had originally come from and they were very well received. So they got to thinking this would be an additional income for them if they got involved with the cranberry industry. So my father like I said built the Wetherby cranberry marsh with teams of horses and so forth back in that day and age. And uh when times were hard and they could not uh give him a salary at the end of a year, they would give him shares of stock in this Wetherby cranberry company. There were a total of 500 shares in 00:06:00Wetherby and at the time of his retirement when I was about 9 years old back in 1957 he had accumulated 40 shares of stock which is not a lot but whatever he did transferred those, willed those stocks to my mother Leona Olson and her brother Glen Kissinger who was not really involved with the marsh at all. Um then as time went on back in the early 40s, mid 40s I would say uh my mom and dad were married and he was teaching at the time and also a principal of a school in the New Lisbon area. He decided he would quit his teaching/principal job to come to the marsh uh with my mom who was also a one room rural school 00:07:00teacher at the time and um they uh decided to settle on the marsh and uh he become a foreman on the marsh when my grandfather was still there. And uh then we uh in 1948 of course I was born. Now I'm an only child so I have no other siblings at all and uh so uh I was really kind of a tomboy when I was young because I enjoyed the outdoors I loved what they were doing with the cranberry business and many times I would say that I followed by grandpa's footsteps so close that if he turned around he was probably stepping on me. And I learned a lot of the things about growing cranberries from him. Which I still utilize 00:08:00today although technology has changed the way we operate completely but you know there are certain things that I still go back to my grandfather's time. One example is we have high technology soil moisturizer devices to put into the ground to say how moist the ground is, well my grandfather he would say poke your finger in the ground and if it feels just moist to the touch you're fine and you know that really is true. You know so there's a lot of things that you know even though we can with technology we can determine things much more fine-tuned but principles like that you can still use. You know uh determination of crop size, now we have higher tech ways of determining the quantity of cranberries that you're going to grow in the fall but well my grandfather would 00:09:00say well just look at it upright, where the berries come off of. If you have three berries you're gonna have a very good crop, two berries um just a kind of a fair, medium sized crop, one berry probably a poorer crop. Now the only change that has happened now a days is we have hybrid variety of vines. And because of their development his theory is kind of gone out the window unless you got some of the older varieties which would still hold true. But now you can have as many as 5, 6, maybe even 7 berries per upright uh to have a really highly productive crop and so forth. So um I guess I'm straying a little bit from things.

MA: No, that's fine.

NVW: So as we go on my grandfather decided that he was going to retire like I 00:10:00said when I was about 9 years old and that was in 1957 so my father moved up to be the general manager of the marsh. But you know he had that love his whole life for producing cranberries, so even though he retired and moved about 15, 16 miles away to Tomah he would come back every fall and still help with harvest until he was in his 80s, probably mid 80s or so and could no longer come back and help. But one thing you learn is with cranberry growers it literally gets in your blood and you just love it and that's the only thing you really want to do in your life and it's hard to give it up. Right now uh my husband and I are really truly of the age that you know we should retire but boy it's hard to give it up. And like my husband says as long as the boys let me work I'll be out 00:11:00there helping them all the time and I always say well I think he's gonna die with his hip boots on. You know because you just are always going to be out here until you physically you know can no longer help because that's part of your life.

MA: How have the harvest methods changed in your lifetime?

NVW: Harvest methods have really change over the years. Um first of all it was in the 1950s when the first mechanical raking machine was developed and actually it was developed in the Warrens area. There was a machinist John Felton who had a machine shop in this area and during the winter months the cranberry growers would come into his shop and you know talk to him. So it was a combination of his machinist ability and the uh recommendations of the cranberry growers to how 00:12:00best make and design and create this raking machine that would make life easier for everybody because up until this time it was all hand raking. And um so in the 50s then the first raking machine was developed in this area and of course then and it had stationary teeth on it that would with the forward motion of the machine it would comb the fruit off the vines and it would go up to picker head to the top traversed across on a conveyer and drop into harvest boats that were attached to the side of the raking machine. And that method to be honest for fresh fruit is still used. We are a fresh fruit grower with a small portion of our marsh today and we still use that uh Felton raking machine and the 00:13:00principles it was made with. Now then there were refinements and more developments on that raking machine and up in the Wisconsin Rapids area they developed a round drum where there were four sets of teeth that would be curved more like the curved uh teeth on the hand rake that we have today so that machine as the drum would rotate round and round the teeth would come out of the drum, pluck the fruit off, come up into the drum, retract into the drum, so it was out of the way of the conveyor belt that carried the berries up the conveyer belt onto the conveyor that would shift them over to the boat. And we had that 00:14:00type of machine on our marsh as well. We did find that it was a little slower than what the stationary teeth was but it was more gentle on the fruit because it was more adapted to the old fashioned hand rake style of teeth. And uh we also have that type of machine on our marsh as well today. So we have several varieties of raking machines that we utilize today. Now if you remember all the fruit in the early days was fresh fruit and it stayed that way until after 1959. And if some of you may remember 1959 was called the cranberry scare and it was a real blow to the cranberry industry because our whole season revolved around Thanksgiving with fresh fruit which it still does for fresh fruit um so 00:15:00Thanksgiving is the large market for our fresh fruit market. And a few weeks prior to uh Thanksgiving in 1959 it was discovered in a lab in Madison that there was some residue left on some cranberries that was from a weed killer called aminotriazole. And it was a red flag and the industry or the FDA said we had to actually dump the whole crop and they weren't tested differently, the whole crop everybody's whole fresh fruit crop had to be dumped and so that actually what happened, we got zero dollars for our cranberries that year. Well fortunately Oceanspray which is the larger grower own co-op had to resolve that 00:16:00problem because it was in the minds of people that cranberries caused cancer you know so we had to change that in people's minds and so they started developing cranberry juice as a product. Well it was amazing you could change people's mind because it was not the same product as fresh. And then the cranberry juice business evolved as the big business of the cranberry industry. Now the largest growing product of the cranberry industry is the sweetened dried cranberry which Oceanspray's brand is craisin and for those of us who are independence, independent grower which Wetherby is an independent grower, um we can only refer to them as sweet dried cranberries because they have a trade name for craisins but they're a very similar product. There's a few distinctions that you know we 00:17:00make a little bit differently than what Oceanspray but generally speaking they're the same type of product. And so um from the cranberries then going into a product such as juice, these berries did not have to be, if they were slightly bruised during the harvest process it really didn't matter because they were processed so quickly and frozen so quickly it didn't matter so and there was more product being used than just in the fresh fruit market. Still today there is less than 3% of the nation's cranberry crop goes into fresh fruit that's not much at all. So all the rest of it is a processed type product. And um so the acreage started to increase from cranberry growers. We needed a harvest method 00:18:00that uh we could use that was faster and less time consuming and so forth. So a few, well, several years back a harvester called the beater was developed. It was a water reel device, which was placed on a hay raking machine but it would turn and churn and agitate the water so much that it literally shook the berries off the vine and they would float to the surface of the water. Now the reason why a cranberry floats is because if you cut it in two, it has four little air pockets inside and that gives it buoyancy for the fruit to float to the surface of water. So after all the berries were removed and are floating in a bed, then 00:19:00we take, in the early years we took 2 by 4s and kinda hooked them together and we could corral or fence them in and contain them into an area where we would elevate them up out of the bed onto a waiting dump truck on the dyke. Well 2 by 4s once they got saturated with water became very heavy and it was very hard for the men to pull all those uh wet 2 by 4s with the berries within them. In those days, I tell you, I went through a lot of tubes of bengay. (laughs). My husband was sore from doing all that manual work. Well then one day, I kinda give him credit I don't know if he was actually the first one but I really don't know of 00:20:00anyone else in the area that thought of it. It was in the day and age where they had the oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico and he saw this on television and they had those yellow colored um kinda floating devices that contained the oil spills. And so he got to thinking, you know if it could contain oil spills, I wonder if that would work for containing cranberries. So he ordered several hundred feet of it to experiment with. He tried it that first year and oh man the men on the marsh they were just you know it was light weight cause it's like foam inside of it and then it has a little lip on the bottom that uh so the berries wouldn't sneak out from underneath it. And it worked so well that the whole crew said if you get enough next year to contain everything in these beds 00:21:00we'll surely come back and work for you. So then we started, uh growers started buying it by the semi loads mainly it started out down in Texas area and uh now of course there are companies that make it and whatever and corral booms and that sort of thing but that was a real innovative step and a time saver and physically you know uh labor you know wise for the men to do that part of the thing so. And then instead of having elevators take them up and put em immediately into your dump trucks and you haul the dump trucks to your own degrasser. Of course some people still do that, it kinda depends upon the size of your marsh cause if you have a very small marsh sometimes you cannot afford 00:22:00to get all of this equipment that some of the larger growers can afford and do. But if you're a larger grower, most of them stopped doing the elevator and they started making their own berry pumps. Now I know my husband made one of the first berry pumps in this area and where we got to this idea was we went to a summer field day for growers out in Massachusetts and they were using one and they would use this pump that would transfer live fish form one tank to another tank. And he said well if a live fish can be transferred through this pump it can't be damaging to them so you know it probably would not damage a cranberry to be transferred in this manner. And so we went and bought one of the first 00:23:00pumps and they sent it from Massachusetts out here and my son uh who is between my husband and my son they're both pretty darn mechanical and they love to create and design their own equipment and that is another trait of cranberry growers. They just have that mechanical instinct in them that they love to do that type of thing. And um so during the winter out in the shops they were you know building this berry pump. And the first season that we used it there were there was in this warrens area there were several machine shops in this area and they all came out to see if this device was going to work. And it didn't look the most refine and for some reason my son painted it blue and when I give um 00:24:00lots of school group tours out in the fall and the kids would draw pictures and send me back pictures with thank you notes on the bottom, that was one for the most popular drawings they had and they'd call it the big blue monster. You know and uh so we kinda nicknamed it that after that. Well now of course the machine companies in the area and in the Rapids area and other machine shops up in the northern Wisconsin, they all you know make commercial berry pumps although they're still some growers that, we personally are going to make another berry pump and we're going to build it ourselves again. But there are commercial shops that build them now a day. So the majority of the growers that are large grower 00:25:00now all use that method and the harvest equipment went from a beater to what we call a harrow. Now I can't take credit at all for the harrow because we purchased a harrow and we did not even make a harrow. But um it's a harvest, piece of harvest equipment that has tines in the front and the back of the machine. And the tines resemble uh rods like uh rods that you put down in cement, rebar rods to hold things together, but we bend them into a 90 degree angle so the rebar rods actually go through and with that forward motion they 00:26:00slip the fruit off, so it's not turned and churned and shaken off in that way they merely slip the fruit off the vine. Now the beaters were only 8 feet wide and these harrows are like 24 feet wide and the beater would go probably maybe about at top speed 3 miles an hour and the harrow would go about 7 miles an hour so it literally you know cuts the amount of time that your harvesting fruit in a bed by, idk how many time but whatever, it just really goes cause a bed is usually 160 feet wide that's what we make beds no so uh anyways. So that has been a big time and labor saving device and now these harrows are so technically 00:27:00adapt that they have GPS systems in them so you know you get that set and you hardly have to even you know to put your hands on the steering wheel. In fact it's funny because when I'm giving my school tours again you know my son he does all the harrowing on our marsh and he'll go like this to the kids [holds up hands] and let it go for a while and they get a big charge out of that you know he's not even driving it and I say no its all GPS. You know so it's all pretty interesting. So the harvest method has probably changed one of the most as far as uh you know adaptations that we have, also I would say sanding, winter sanding has had a lot of changes, going back to my grandfather's time um of 00:28:00course I'll say how we get the ice up first maybe. In about mid-December a cranberry grower will watch the temperatures very carefully and once we get about two to three consecutive nights where its bitter cold like below zero that's the prime time to bring our water level up in the bed completely covering the tips of the vines and we will try to create between 8 and 12 solid inches of solid ice on the beds so it provides for a blanket for all the vines to be encompassed in and that protects them from all the winter cold temperatures and the wind chill factors and so forth. It also provides for a great opportunity for a winter cultural practice called sanding and sanding is taking this uh 00:29:00kinda fine sand that we have in this area and that sand has become very popular lately because it's also the same type of sand that's used for fracking in the oil industry. So we have that same type of sand on cranberry marshes. So we will take that sand and put in our dump trucks with a sand spreader attachment onto tailgates and today as we speak most of the cranberry growers are busy today spreading a half inch layer of sand on top of the ice. And then in late march when the ice melts and the sand goes down to the base of the bed uh we uh do that for four main purposes. One is to keep the bed firm during the harvest time 00:30:00so our machines would create ruts or get stuck. Second of all it covers up piles of dead levels that might have dropped off during the harvest process and of course harvest is wet harvest in Wisconsin, we have the water up, but as soon as the berries are removed from that bed we drain the water back down. We try to skim off a lot of the dead leaves that are floating with the cranberries and that berry pump will separate out the berries from the dead leaves, that's one of the purposes of the berry pump but you can't get 100 percent. So there will always be some dead leaves that drain to the bottom of your bed, well if you have too many piles of dead leaves on the bottom of your bed, you will have um that is conditions for insect infestation the next spring but with the half inch 00:31:00layer of sand that we put in it and it goes down to the base of the bed that will be a natural biological way of getting rid of insects without the use of so much chemicals. And that's a win-win for everybody cause growers don't like to put on chemicals cause its expensive for them. The general public certainly does not want us to use many chemicals for food safety issues. So winter culture practice of sanding is ideal for that type of event. And then the third reason for sanding is good stimulation for the root system and the fourth reason for sanding in the winter is because the fruit only comes off from the short uprights but the plant also has a long vegetative runner that grows. Well this long vegetative runner does not produce fruit but if we can punch that long 00:32:00vegetative runner into the ground during the sanding process up will come a new short upright that produces more fruit therefore you're increasing your productivity on your bed. It's something like a strawberry plant does that is the same type of principle there. So those are good reasons for sanding and if you have new young beds from like 1 year to 5 year you like to sand every single year. If you got beds that are 6 years up to 30 years old or so you can kinda get away with sanding every once every three years. Because sometimes with weather conditions it's hard to get your entire marsh sanded in especially if you have a large marsh. And so uh those are things that we, so that, that's what we'd now a days you know high tech with you know excavators pulling the sand up loading the trucks, the trucks do all the work and so forth but in my 00:33:00grandfather's day they had like wooden sleds that they actually hand shoveled sand onto and pulled it with their teams of horses so obvious-, but that didn't have the acreages that we do today so you have to think of everything in proportion. When I first came to the marsh uh my grandfather when he left the marsh when I was 9 years old only had 35 acres on the marsh, now we have 200 so it's everything is proportionally advanced.

MA: So harvest time seems to be a very important part of the growing season, what is one of your favorite family memories of harvest?

NVW: Okay I'm gonna go back to when I was a child cause I still think of that all the time. And that is uh when we did hand raking and on our marsh we would 00:34:00have probably between 40 and 50 Native Americans, that's what we call them now when I was a kid we called them Indians, so and as you remember I was an only child so out on the cranberry marsh I didn't have a whole lot of friends well was I excited when the uh Indians came because they came with their entire families to harvest and we would harvest probably oh 6 or 8 weeks or so we had what we called Indian shanties they were a few houses you know that the seniority uh men and their families would be able to live in but we didn't have enough houses for all of the crew so the rest of them would come and they would actually pitch their teepees and spend their time in the teepees and they came 00:35:00with all their families. Well then I had all my friends you know the Indian children to play with and so forth and my mom always remembers that when I went to Sunday school on Sunday and I would come back with all my little papers and so forth and I would stand up on top of the front steps of the house and all the little Indian children would sit seated below and I would give them the Sunday school lesson and she said they were all just amazed at how you were talking about you know and she says I think your calling in life should have been a preacher but no I stayed with the cranberry business. (laughs) but see I did become a teacher for a while so that was my form of teaching and to this day I love teaching because I continue to do all the public tours um I think I'm about 00:36:00one of the very few growers, if not the only grower in the area, that promotes giving tours to school groups, to adult groups, we have a public blossom day the last Saturday in June to show the public was the blossoms look like and then our most popular event is our public harvest day which is always the first Saturday in October in the morning where we invite the public to come out and myself and my three daughters, I hire some school buses and we're the tour guides and they hop on the bus and they go down and the rest of our family members um are harvesting. The grandchildren have to help park cars. Uh we do charge for it now when we first started it was all free but when I started getting so big that I 00:37:00had to hire four buses I had to recoup that cost somehow I just couldn't do it for free anymore so there's just a nominal fee to see this, nobody ever objects to this. And the rest of the family members are harvesting, the kids are like I say parking cars and selling tickets and of course selling cranberries and the other products that we sell in our warehouse because our warehouse does lend itself to roadside traffic coming in. So we sell our fresh fruit, we sell our sweeten dried cranberries from the cran grow that makes our product for us and then we uh sell our own zesty seeds out of there and then our family all probably oh I time flies so fast I don't know its probably 15 plus years ago or 00:38:00so we started making our own cranberry wine, just one flavor a straight cranberry wine and we um got all the licensing and so forth so we actually commercially sell cranberry wine but just out of our warehouse and so forth and we do sell it at the Warrens Cranberry Festival because we own property here in Warrens and you can sell it off your own property. But we don't go through a distributor or anything, we're not that big time but it's, it's a very good value added product for our marsh and you know and so forth. Then also on uh public harvest day now that I'm on that subject, a few years back we started one additional new activity that became very popular and that was when the Justin and Henry from the Oceanspray commercial was out there with their chest waders 00:39:00on in the floating cranberries everybody knew that commercial which is just great for the industry and so we one day I decided I think we could somehow duplicate that at our harvest day because people I think would really enjoy you know doing that so we started renting our hip boots for anyone who wanted to once they got down on the marsh and saw harvest and so forth, if they wanted to stay they could rent the hip boots, put the hip boots and go out and stand in the floating cranberries on a bed that we weren't harvesting so it was adjacent to the one where the harvesting activity was going on, plus it was a bed that did not have a ditch to jump over cause that could be tricky so it was just uh there were gradually went into the bed and so we did that and last year I think 00:40:00because of social media, you know everybody has a Facebook page and they share and whatever and I think because we really do not do a lot of advertising with it, a little bit locally and through on our personal website we do but through you know Facebook and so forth this year we were bombarded with people that wanted to do that activity and I felt bad because I did not have nearly enough hip boots to rent I mean I had probably you know I should of had 100 pairs of hip boots and I had maybe 50 or so. It was like Disney World I mean they were standing in line waiting to do this and it was like an hour and a half wait for 00:41:00some of them to be able to do this and we had people there trying to limit their time you know be respectful of one another, and we had, I'm also in charge of the Warrens Cranberry Festival Royalty, so I had them out here that day taking their picture, they bring their own camera so they use their camera and take their picture and so forth like that and so uh anyway that was very, very popular.

MA: What advice would you give to your children or grandchildren about harvesting or anything in the industry?

NVW: Well lets see, advice. Well I certainly want them to continue in the business because I think it is a wonderful way of life. You know my children were so blessed I think to be able to live where they did and raise their 00:42:00children where they are because you have such a quality of life on a cranberry marsh, uh its hard work but yet you can have wonderful time to play and such clean type of living because you can have activities such as fishing which is very inexpensive, it's a lifelong sport. When my, as soon as my grandkids were old enough to hold a fish pole believe me, grandma went down and started fishing with them because that's something you can do the rest of your life. The boys enjoy hunting and uh you have all this wildlife that you can just enjoy and watch. I can sit on my deck and our pond, reservoir pond is right there, have a cup of coffee and you can see the geese and ducks and uh you know everything is right there, you know people travel miles and miles and miles to go to a resort 00:43:00to get a quick glimpse of that and I'm so fortunately you know it's right at my home so you um can't beat it.

MA: And earlier you touched on the days you have with the community and how you involve them in the process and neighbors are a big component of cranberries, can you explain your relationships with your neighbors.

NVW: Oh yeah, the neighborhood is a very close knit group of people. Well on both sides of me I have cranberry growers so you know most of the time we don't share a lot of equipment typically cranberry growers each have their own equipment. But I'll tell you if there is ever a disaster or someone needs help, they're all there to help you. There's no problem. A few years back we had a huge fire in our shop and lost 7 major pieces of equipment in our shop and 00:44:00everything and everybody was right there, supportive helping us uh clean up the mess and everything so you can't ask for a better group of people. Um as far as water management on a cranberry marsh is very important and so the grower that is above us will always call us and say hey I am releasing some water to you so be aware you're gonna get a little bit more water coming down into your reservoir than normal and then we do the same for the grower below us. So we always have good communicated between all the growers.

MA: It's amazing the community you have here, um so have you been involved in any cranberry research?

NVW: Well I've been a member of the Wisconsin Cranberry Board for probably 20 00:45:00plus years, uh I am no longer on it. My son in law is on the board now and I keep trying to pass that on to the next generation because I feel it is very, very important for research obviously and the cranberry industry. And we are involved with uh putting a brand new Wisconsin Cranberry Research Station in the area and I am on that board helping to organize that um I'm on kinda the building committee and then there's one for the vines and so forth that will be put on and the management of the marsh. So my husbands on the management part and I'm on the building part so it's kinda fun because we separate at meetings and then when we get home I say what did you talk about and then I say this is what we talked about you know and so forth. So uh yeah that's going to be a real 00:46:00bonus for our industry as a whole.

MA: That's amazing. So just any other last add ins you wanted to give?

NVW: Well going back to the community part I told you kinda how were involved with just the neighbors in the community but this whole Warrens community, most people are aware of it, there are very few people that do not, that have never heard of the warrens cranberry festival but we have experienced 45 years of successful festivals already, next fall will be the 46th festival. And I am very proud to say that I was one of the ladies that sat around the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and created that festival. And we had no clue that that festival would develop to be what it is today. But it's so good for the community and the whole area around us because the community of Warrens itself would never have 00:47:00the amenities that they have now. The fire department has a huge you know state of the art fire truck, they have a first responders, um the grade school got computers, they got an outdoor amphitheater area, playground equipment, um the uh log building which is the community building in Warrens is utilized by the community and of course Warren's Cranberry Festival everyone asks for donations to us. And we try to you know donate to all the organizations as much as we can. But we have donated over 3 million dollars in that 45 years to the community and so forth and that does not even include all the clubs, school groups, service 00:48:00organizations, that work at Cranfest and get their yearly fundraiser all paid for with outside money. So they don't have to knock at our door and say hey will you buy this or that or the other thing. Which is wonderful. If there is a group that doesn't know what they want to do for their fundraiser they come to Cranfest and well figure out a service that Cranfest needs that they can do that we can donate to their group. Like the football team in Tomah they do all the parking, their called the grid-iron club so they get a donation for doing that. Garbage pickup is done by church groups and you know all types of things, sometimes changes with groups over the years but like I said any group that wants to work and help out, we'll, we'll find something to do.

MA: Thank you for taking the time to share your knowledge. I had no idea before this how big the cranberry industry was so it was a very eye opening experience, so thank you.

NVW: Well good, you're welcome, my pleasure.