(gentle music) (serene music) - Thanks for watching another episode of "My Wisconsin Backyard."

Hi, I'm Traci Neuman.

- And I'm Brian Ewig.

Today on the show we take you out to Burlington to visit the oldest mushroom farm in the Midwest, and learn how they make mushrooms without chemicals or pesticides.

- Plus, we head to the steelhead facility in Racine to see how the DNR are helping to keep the rainbow trout population in Wisconsin healthy.

All right, we're gonna start at Red Arrow Park today.

We're with the MSOE Unicycle Club.

- Yeah, and it says right here they offer free lessons to anyone who's interested.

- You shouldn't need your script.

You should have this all memorized.

- You're right.

- All right, we'll just go right to this story.

(playful music) - Unicycling is a wonderful activity.

It requires a great deal of balance, but we find that just about anyone could learn how to do it.

Unicycles are simple, they have one wheel.

There's no gyroscopic stability.

It's all controlling the wheel, you ride upon it.

Today we're here with the Milwaukee School of Engineering Unicycling Club.

This is a learn-to-unicycle event, which the students organize to teach people in the community how to ride unicycles.

- Perfect, and before we go, first straighten up.

- We give 'em a few tips.

- Straighten way up.

- People get a unicycle, and they slowly work their way around the whole loop a few times.

After about the fifth or sixth time, people usually start venturing out into the center.

We've had people learn to unicycle in as short as 45 minutes.

Sometimes it takes several days, but it's something that so far, if people stay with it, we've had people from five year olds to 73 year olds learn to unicycle here.

After that, people come out, many of them get their own unicycles.

They learn different tricks and techniques, and we have some people who are quite accomplished here, both from the Milwaukee School of Engineering, the students, and alumni, and the community.

- I've been riding for about 10 years now, and I can do a good handful of tricks.

Pretty much anything you can think of in like an extreme sport fashion you can pretty much do on a unicycle.

- I thought it would be something cool to try, and maybe a skill to add (laughing) to my resume.

It's a fun way to spend time.

It's difficult, (laughing) very sore, and a very scared and yeah, it's a good leg workout.

- When you're first starting to learn, it feels like you're constantly falling.

How I explain it to people is you wanna fall forward and then pedal, pedal fast enough that you don't hit the ground.

- Unicycles are surprisingly safe.

Most people just step off of them.

Helmets are always a good idea.

We encourage people to bring their own if they have them.

It's been said that you have to fall a thousand times before you become a great unicyclist, so you get used to that.

The trick is when you do fall, you try not to put your wrist out, or your hand out, or your elbow out.

You just try to roll, and once you get good at it, there's really no issue.

It's a surprisingly safe activity, much more safe, I would say than bicycling, because the speeds are generally lower.

- It's very intuitive.

You know how you have to think to ride a bicycle, you have to steer and go where you wanna go.

This, you just let your mind do the work, and you think about whatever you wanna think about.

You think about your dinner plans as you ride, and you can just go, there's no thought behind it.

It's really a kind of a relaxing activity.

- [Aaron] You need to keep yourself upright by keeping the wheel underneath you.

And it's a great dynamics problem.

But once you learn to do it, it's all instinctive.

There's really no thought that goes into it.

We tell people, especially a lot of the engineering students, that they need to stop thinking so hard, and just try to stay on top of it, and all of a sudden it'll click, and they're able to unicycle.

- There ya go, there ya go.

You got it, you got it.

- Unicycles come in a variety of shapes and sizes.

This is a 20 inch, this is what people usually learn on.

This is a Trials model, which is a little heavy, it's heavier duty, made to jump off large, some people take six foot drops on these, that sort of thing.

This is a 36er, this is seen as a long-range unicycle.

People can commute to work on them occasionally, and you also see people occasionally do a century, or 100 mile unicycle ride.

The bigger the unicycle wheel, the better gearing you have, where on a bicycle you shift into a higher gear or sprocket, which allows you to go further with each pedal.

On a unicycle, it's direct drive, so you actually need a bigger wheel to do the same thing.

The type of tire, the size, the width, all of those are very important when you only have one.

Bicycling actually in some ways is more difficult.

You can only turn in one axis, and you can only go forward.

With a unicycle, you can go forward, backwards, you can hop sideways.

There's all sorts of different things you can do.

- I'll spin the unicycle 90 degrees and land on the tire.

- [Aaron] It's a different skill set entirely, but once someone learns to unicycle, it's there for life.

The college students here are all very dedicated and very focused on their futures, but they like to have fun too.

And the Unicycling Club has been around for over 10 years now.

It has students from all over the campus, and it's just a great activity, where the students let loose, and really enjoy the outdoors and being together.

Once someone learns how to unicycle, they can pretty much do it the rest of their lives.

It also helps people with balance, and a number of other issues in their lives.

It's a great wholesome activity, in a time where more and more children and adults are spending time on computer screens.

It's nice, it's outdoors, it's fun to do, and just a great social activity.

(playful music) (gentle music) - We're at River Valley Ranch, and we're a commercial mushroom farm.

We've been in business since 1976.

Something more like this makes a nice burger.

Business was started by my father.

He was in the restaurant business, and couldn't get fresh mushrooms of the quality and that he wanted, and decided he was gonna learn how to grow mushrooms.

And he got started, and he asked me to help him out, and I wandered in the mushroom house, and I've been trying to find my way out ever since.

We're going into a house here that is just starting production.

Today's the first day of harvest, come on in.

Take a look over this way a little bit, so.

This is our white mushroom.

So in this house, we grow three varieties of mushroom white buttons, baby bellas and portobellas.

The baby bella, or cremini, is our mainstay mushroom these days.

We started working on this crop about eight weeks ago.

At any given time, we have 10 crops in rotation on the farm.

And here is this tray, he has about 600 pounds of specially prepared mushroom compost that we produce.

And that compost becomes a food supply for the mushroom crop.

Mushrooms don't produce their own food, unlike green plants, which you know, produce chlorophyll using sunlight.

We provide the food source for the mushrooms in the compost we produce.

So compost is really the art of mushroom growing for us.

The basic raw material we're using is wheat straw-bedded horse manure we get from a few stables within 50 miles or so.

The first stage of the composting process happens here, free heating.

We manage it in a way that it starts to heat up through the growth of microorganisms.

The next seven days, the temperature will start to climb.

Usually about 36 hours after we fill, they have temperatures of around 140 degrees in there.

And that pasteurizes the material, so it kills any pathogens, any pests.

The carbohydrates in the straw begin to actually caramelize, so the material starts to smell actually very sweet, 'cause the sugars are burning off.

All of the darkening that goes on is a result of that caramelization process that happens at the high temperatures.

It's now going into what we call phase two.

We'll have a crew of eight guys on that, and we'll be planting, or inoculating this batch of compost.

So we plant mushroom spawn.

This is millet grain, and it's been sterilized.

And we put, this bag is 20 pounds, and we put about 3 1/2 to four pounds of spawn into each of those trays.

There's 150 trays in the growing house, so it looks like a seed.

What we do when we're planting is basically try to mix that grain spawn, which you can see some pieces of here throughout, as uniformly as possible throughout the compost.

And that gives us a pretty well-colonized tray.

And the compost becomes fully colonized at about 14 days.

(gentle music) We grow about 15,000 pounds a week of certified organic mushrooms.

It's been an evolution of growing process over the years to be able to grow food as cleanly as we do these days.

There's no chemicals or pesticides used on the farm at all.

Keeping a consistent environment's critical to the health of the crop.

And really every day, the crop has very specific needs that we're managing.

During the production and harvesting stage, we're keeping the air temperature at around 62 degrees.

Relative humidity about 88%.

We have a lot of circulation to keep air moving across the bed.

Earlier in the growing process, after planting, the crop stays very quiet, and the temperatures are warmer during the incubation phase.

We're taking a waste product, kind of complete the cycle of life, my mushrooms are nature's natural recyclers.

But we take, you know, what is essentially a waste product, and put it through our process, and it becomes a food supply for what is a really good healthy food.

(gentle music) (students cheering) - Feel good winning it all, going through all the ups and downs we went through as a team, coming together for the common goal, putting all our differences and personal goals aside, coming together and winning the national championship.

Feel great doing it as a team.

- Everybody bought in, everybody just found that we all wanted that one goal, and just made it happen.

We was outside working out in the sand all summer, ran seven laps around the whole school.

folk can't breathe, that's three miles.

I drove the car around to see how many miles it took to get around.

It was one mile for one lap.

We ran like 12 laps full.

(drums thumping) - Man, this is something they can look back on for the rest of their life, right?

An accomplishment of hard work, dedication, you know, that they can look back and go, "It was all worth it," and it shows, and it can never be taken away.

(students clapping) - Pushing each other hard on and off the court.

Great coach, the coaching staff is amazing.

Great program.

- I'm just so proud of them.

I'm proud of what this institution is doing on an everyday basis, and I'm hoping that we can run it back and bring home another championship.

But when we can talk about what is happening right here in our own backyard, with academic institutions and with our athletics, I think it helps us to tell the story of who we are, and who we can become.

- To strive for something high, to go for the top of that mountain, and knowing that hard work, you know, it's gonna take to get there, and showing that hard work does pay off.

- To see more of our short stories, you can check us out on Facebook and Instagram or milwaukeepbs.org.

- Hey, these only have one wheel.

- You need to focus more on the show.

- That one's blue, look it.

Ho hoo ho hoo!

(gentle music) - I go out to the schools and I talk to 'em about the importance and the mission of the War Memorial Center.

- You guys have any questions?

- And so after that, students and classes, and teachers are invited to come to the War Memorial Center for a field trip.

And today is a little bit different, because we have all the equipment, all the actual, we have veterans, we have current military, and they're bringing all their gear.

So those students in those schools that I've visited, they get to come back and they get to meet these people, and realize that they're the moms, they're the dads, the brothers, the sisters, aunts, uncles.

- There you go, there you go.

- These are real people.

- Hi, I'm Lieutenant Pinson.

I'm one of the pilots for this aircraft.

- [Sean] Kids dig it.

I think they get an appreciation for just how big, like the helicopter is, the LMTV, the dump truck, the Coast Guard 35-foot rescue boat that they have out there, the kayaks, and they realize there's some real world, you know, jobs that mean a lot to people.

- Ready?

Okay, three good ones.

There you go.

- The 1% of the population serves in the military, and you know, the reason why people serve is they wanna do something bigger than themselves.

- You might wanna be careful up there.

(person laughing) - What's great about this country is that we have that one thing called freedom.

Because of all those choices that we have, you know, there was a sacrifice made for those.

And that's one of the things through our educational outreach programs we're trying to remind people that hey, be grateful for what we have, and that price that was paid, that freedom, you know, some people gave their lives for it.

(gentle music) - Your finger hurt, right?

Just go stand right there for now.

Go go to gully, go to gully.

Actually this is originated by England.

It's English game, it's England started.

You know, when they were ruling the whole world in 19 early 40s, they brought that game to Asia.

So it was played in, at that time, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka.

It was just a one country, whole big one country.

It's used to call gentleman's game.

When the English people left, that was the only sports were available, and even in today, even though there's a lot of money, but it's the cheapest sports.

All you need is a one stick, one ball, and you can play on streets.

See, right now, if you see this, these right here, this is the stump.

This is the one stump, and there's that two, another stump's over there.

So the pitcher, which called bowler right now, he comes and he balls.

And the batsman, he plays with the bat.

Now these lines right here, that called crease itself.

Bowler, when he is pitching, he cannot cross that line.

Batsman can come up and play, but bowler cannot cross that line.

(ball and bat thudding) This is the cricket ball.

It's almost like a baseball, but this is the leather ball.

It's a kinda like a baseball, little bit of smaller size, but it's 5.8 ounces usually.

And like I said, it's handmade.

All the cricket balls are handmade.

This is how the cricket bat looks like.

It's all total wood.

It's usually weight from two pound eight ounces is usually the lightest, is go up to four pound and six ounces, depend on the batsman, how he likes it.

When he sees when the bowler is running, that's call a fastball.

So now this guy, this is call a fastballing, because running and now he ball, that's a fastball.

Sharday, good ball.

Good ball, Lala.

And this is call a spin bowler.

Spin bowler is where he can spin the ball, is gonna be very slow, but he spins the ball.

That's called spinner right there.

(ball and bat thudding) The ball needs to be within the range of a batsman.

If the ball is far away from the batsman, he have to redo that pitch.

He need to reball that ball, because umpire's gonna make that decision, hey, it's too far from the batsman, it's not playable, it's not a legal ball.

So opposite team get one run.

But he needs to pitch the ball again.

So that ball won't count, but opposite team get one run.

Same thing goes when the pitcher come in, when he is bowling, he's supposed to be behind this line.

If he cross this line like this, if he cross the line, it's called no ball.

With the no ball, opposite team get one run.

Plus he needs to repitch that ball, and that when he do the ball again, the batsman would not get out.

That's called free hit.

He can hit however he wants.

Somebody can catch the ball, anything, but he won't get out, because it's a free hit ball, because bowler made not a legal ball, because he crossed that line.

When the bowler come and pitches, his objective is to hit the stumps.

I'll tell you, I'll tell you, I'll show you.

Bowling, see ball hit the stumps?

Gone.

Batsman objective is he don't want to get ball hit the stump, so he tried to play the ball so he won't get hit.

(ball and bat thudding) There's another way.

Batsman is batting, and the bowler pitches, and he tried to play the ball, but ball hit his leg.

(bat thudding) (ball and bat thudding) (person laughing) And it's front of the stumps, umpire can judge that, that hey, this ball's gonna hit the stump, but it hit your leg.

That's called LBW, that's another way batsman can get out.

That's called leg before wicket, so LBW, that's the second way to get out.

Third, batsman hit the ball, it's up in the air, somebody catches it, he's gone.

Now the fourth way to getting out for the batsman, when he played the shot, ball is going, the batsman are running.

Another team objective is before he, the batsman, reached this white line, if ball hit the stumps, or another player, whoever hit the stumps, if the bat's behind the line, he's out.

So batsman needs to hurry up and try to cross this line, because if he didn't cross the line, and ball hit the stumps from the fielders, that's another way to get out.

(ball and bat thudding) There's 11 players in the team, and 20 overs.

When I say overs, one over have a six pitches.

Six pitches, when the bowler come and ball to the batsman, that's called one over.

After one over, six pitches, one over, he's done, then the new guy come in.

So they have to have 20 overs.

So 20 overs mean they have six times, 120 pitches.

This bowler's gonna come and pitch 120 times.

(ball and bat thudding) It's kinda like a baseball, but in this, it's a one circle.

So within a circle, the batsman can hit anywhere they want.

(ball and bat thudding) If the ball go outside the circle, that's a six, or that's the most you get, you know, on one ball, that's the most you can get.

If batsman hit the ball, and it's touched the ground and rolled out from that circle, the fielder started to stop the ball.

If they cannot stop it, the ball rolls out, that's a four runs.

That's the second highest you can get.

But now see, if batsman play the shot, and ball is inside the circle, and fielder field the ball, then the batsman have to run between the two stumps.

And that's every time the batsman cross each other, that's a one run.

So if they can run up to four, in one shot, they can run up to four.

It's like bases in baseball, like it's a base one and base two.

So he needs to make that run, but he can run up to four runs.

(ball and bat thudding) - Yes!

(people shouting) - Good shot, keep running, keep running!

When the batsman are running, fielder's objective is to get the ball, try to hit the stumps to get him out.

Every team have 11 players.

out of 11, the bowling team, the pitcher in baseball, our language bowling team, make sure they get the 10 out.

As soon as the 10 out, they're finished.

They don't have to bat the whole 20 overs, or 50 overs.

Let's see them make 130 runs, and they get out.

10 people get out in 17th over.

The other team, they still get 20 overs, but they have to make 121 to win the game.

And again, the bowling team objective is get them out.

Keeping the game alive and keeping the game growing, especially in the United States of America, we have to have kids involved.

So once we get old, if the kids don't get involved, the game's gonna die.

So I think it's very, very important for kids and school, colleges get behind, so those kids can grow and, you know, play for the national team one day.

- Marcus, ready?

(ball and bat thudding) - [Cheryl] We are down here in Racine, at the Root River Steelhead Facility, where we will be spawning rainbow trout.

- Wow.

- Rainbow trout are not lake native to Lake Michigan.

We sustain them in Wisconsin through stocking.

Part of it is water temperatures, our rivers get pretty warm, so the eggs don't incubate.

And there's also a high sediment load in our rivers as well.

So the eggs sometimes will be suffocated, and they don't survive.

They run up river to spawn in the spring.

We have a dam in the river that we place seasonally to stop their upstream migration, so that the fish come in through this fish ladder, into our spawning facility.

(crane whirring) (fish splashing) - Male, left vent, adipose, 4 6 8.

- [Cheryl] Then once the crew gets started, we will collect length and weight data, and take them to the spawning crew, where they'll collect the eggs, fertilize the eggs, and eventually end of the day today, they'll go back to the hatchery.

And then we send them down this tube to go back to the river.

- We got the fish divided.

We got Chambers Creek females, and Ganaraska females, and then Ganaraska boys, and Chambers boys.

So we wanna keep the strains specific.

We don't want to mix the strains.

So we'll grab a Chambers girl here.

I'm gonna squeeze a few eggs in this cup for Brandon to look at, and take OV fluids.

So we take the fish, make sure we don't hook the gill, put 'em up on this hook here, and we inject some air into the body cavity to expel the eggs.

(eggs sloshing) We're gonna give it a squeeze, remove any extra air out of it.

And then once the fish is done being spawned, we can put it in the recovery tank.

And then we pass the eggs on down the line.

So they'll come into a bucket, and we'll grab a male, and give it a squeeze, get some milt in there to fertilize the eggs.

And then we send the eggs down over here, where we'll add a cup of water, and this will activate the milt and the sperm, and then it'll open up so the eggs can be fertilized.

We'll let it sit for two minutes to let fertilization take place.

And then after that, we'll rinse the eggs, and put 'em in buckets to take back to the hatchery.

Steelheads, they spawn in late March to middle of April, and we basically have our one time a year to get our eggs.

So we gotta get all our eggs we can when they're here.

And then we take them back and raise them for a full year.

When we take the eggs back, we'll get about 70, 75% eye up, so good eggs.

We'll have about 25% bad that die through the fertilization process.

But then after that, majority of the fish are good then, and the eggs will be good, and we'll be able to raise those into yearlings.

We stock 'em back in the river at one year old.

We do 26 total rivers throughout the state, all tributaries to Lake Michigan.

So once we stock 'em, they'll hang out in the river for a little bit, then they'll smelt to the lake.

They'll hang out for a couple years, and usually about three years old, they start coming back to the rivers for their spawning runs.

- Rainbow trout will spawn multiple times in their lifetime.

So sometimes we see them at our spawning weirs as early as year two, age two, but more typically it's age three and four.

There's a multi-million dollar recreational fishery for these fish in Lake Michigan.

And so part of this process is just to sustain the fishery year after year.

(gentle music) - To see more of our short stories, you can check us out on Facebook and Instagram, or milwaukeepbs.org.

- That's right, we'd like to thank the MSOE Unicycle Club, and MKE Unicycle Club for hanging out with us today at Red Arrow Park, and showing us all their cool tricks.

- Are you gonna try it?

- I don't think this time - I'm not dressed for it, so I think we should say goodbye.

- All right, see you next time.

- Bye.

(serene music)