The Capital Times

A few hours before sunset, chef and artist Jim Denevan gathered diners in front of a picturesque red barn overlooking the hills of the Wisconsin Driftless region. “Welcome to Outstanding in the Field, the most-perfect-weather-in-the-country version,” said Denevan, who founded this traveling farm dinner series 25 years ago. “My sidekick tonight, Lily (Schroeder), is from here” — he turned to a young woman in a cowboy hat. “These are your people.” For the Wisconsin entry on this year’s culinary tour, the Outstanding in the Field crew set up its iconic long curving table between a field of flowering buckwheat and a pasture with grazing cows. A few of them mooed at the 150 diners who’d popped up on their land. The farm highlighted in this farm-to-table meal was Meadowlark Organics and Meadowlark Community Mill in Ridgeway 35 miles southwest of Madison, owned by Halee and John Wepking. Meadowlark farms 1,000 acres of rye, wheat, spelt and beans, and the site for dinner was John’s family’s homestead. Founded in 1999, Outstanding in the Field has made a stop in Wisconsin for at least 16 years. This year the chef at Birch in Milwaukee, Kyle Knall, manned an open-air kitchen with members of his team. Read more from Lindsay Christians and see photos from Beck Henreckson: https://lnkd.in/gTtaUK8n.

Keisha Harrison understands why Madisonians are excited to meet her. The new director of the future Madison Public Market moved from Indiana to Madison in early July, and the reception from the city has been as warm as the weather. By her presence, she embodies the momentum behind an ambitious project. “The outpouring of people who have reached out, I mean, even on day one,” Harrison said. “It’s like, ‘Oh, my god, we’re moving ahead.’ That has to feel good.” Nearly two decades in the making, the Madison Public Market is now under construction in a 50,000-square-foot warehouse at 202 N. First St. When construction bids came in over budget last fall, the city threw a $1.64 million life preserver. In November, it broke ground. If construction remains on schedule, Harrison hopes she’ll get the keys to the building by the end of January, with an opening later that spring. The multi-phase project is slated to have 30 permanent booths, space for temporary vendors and food carts, event space and a commercial kitchen. Harrison was most recently the executive director of the Indianapolis City Market. She sat down with the Cap Times during her first week on the job to talk about her immediate priorities, her professional background and why the market is a public good — not a money-maker.

A sink full of dishes. Clothes strewn on the floor. Piles of laundry waiting to be folded. You know you’ll feel better when the mess is all sorted, but just getting started can feel overwhelming. Now, imagine you’re prone to depression or anxiety. Maybe you have trouble focusing, or a chronic illness that saps your energy. Jo E. Fernandez doesn’t have to imagine. The 22-year-old Madison native has been dealing with depression since she was around 14. She also has cystic fibrosis, a lifelong genetic condition that causes breathing trouble and recurring bouts of pneumonia and bronchitis. Earlier this year, she was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) too. “Most of my adolescent life I’ve been very messy and disorganized, and then, boom, I get into a depressive episode and it just gets to a concerning level,” Fernandez said. As a teen, she’d sometimes ask friends to come help her clean her room. Then, last year, the tables turned. A friend was experiencing depression. Fernandez knew from experience how helpful it would be to have someone come tidy up. “I'm just going to come here every two weeks and clean your house,” Fernandez told her. “I'm not really asking, I'm telling you.” Soon, Fernandez was trying to figure out how to get paid to do that work. She enrolled in the Social Good Accelerator, designed to help Madison-area entrepreneurs start businesses or organizations with a social purpose. In December, she opened Mindful Cleaning Co., offering a combination of housecleaning and coaching designed to help people with mental health issues or neurodivergence get organized and develop cleaning routines they can stick to. 

On a recent cool Sunday morning, about 25 curious Wisconsinites and one dog gathered at Parisi Family Farm in Stoughton. Terry Parisi, 68, owns this regenerative agriculture farm overlooking Lake Kegonsa. She’s tended to the land for the last 20 years. Parisi farms using what’s known as regenerative agriculture. When shoppers ask what that means at her booth at the Saturday morning Stoughton Community Farmers’ Market, she responds: “It’s a more responsible way to grow food while taking care of regenerating the soil.” This type of farming “honors the soil,” she says, “by inputting as much or more than what I take out.” For organic farmers like Parisi, regenerative agriculture means rejecting harmful fertilizers and instead controlling pests with organic manure. It means using compost to improve the soil’s microbiology. It means planting diverse crops as opposed to the monoculture cornfields surrounding her Stoughton farm. In addition to Parisi’s traditional organic practices, she is proud to say that she does not plant using what she calls “organic’s white elephant in the room”: plastic. She wants to see other organic farmers make the switch. As the initial rain blew over and the day grew heated, so did Parisi as she explained to visitors how frustrating it is to watch her organic peers continue to cover their crops with plastic, whether it be film from giant rolls intended to block weed growth or plastic mulch to conserve water. “If you’re growing on a large scale, I totally understand the benefit of laying down plastic,” Parisi said, “but I also understand the threat to the environment.”

The owners of Bunky’s were faced with a choice: knock out a wall, or move. Rachid Ouabel and Teresa Pullara-ouabel own Bunky’s, a popular hummus-maker on Madison’s east side. Rachid, once a civil engineer in Morocco, designed a custom machine for the business, collaborating with a Chinese company for two years to get it made. “It will fill our hummus containers way faster than what we’re doing now,” Pullara-Ouabel said, estimating that it will allow Bunky’s to fill 800 containers per hour instead of 250. Everything was looking great, except for one sticky problem. “This fabulous machine that my husband ordered didn’t fit in our building,” Pullara-Ouabel said. “We tried to have a window taken out, but (contractors said) ‘You’re going to have to take a wall out.’” Pullara-Ouabel closed Bunky’s Café in 2015 after 11 years on Atwood Avenue and moved exclusively to catering and wholesale food sales. By 2023, it had outgrown its Atwood space. Fortunately for Bunky’s, another local food company had recently outpaced its space too. Nearby at Main Street Industries, jam and preserves maker Quince & Apple was ready to vacate its suites. Soon, both made moves — Bunky’s took over some of Quince & Apple’s space at the business incubator at 931 E. Main St., while the latter business moved to Garver Feed Mill. For a wholesale food business like Bunky’s, the opportunity to move without taking out massive loans can feel like a stroke of luck. Small food businesses in Madison — bakers, food carts, vegan caterers, spice makers and microbrewers with tight margins and small staffs — can find themselves with an increasing customer base and no place to grow. Rents are up across Madison, and inflation has taken a toll.  “That’s the part that’s missing in this city,” Pullara-Ouabel said. For small-scale manufacturers, food carts and catering companies “who want to get to that next step … rents are so high right now.” Main Street Industries, where tenants find lower rent and support from Common Wealth Development, fills a gap in what entrepreneurs say is an increasingly untenable real estate market.

More than a dozen local girls will take part in a construction skills camp this week at the McKenzie Regional Workforce Center in Fitchburg. The free camp aims to teach girls ages 14 to 18 skills for careers in carpentry, electrical, interior design, architecture, siding, roofing and heavy machinery operation. The girls also will be connected with potential employment opportunities or mentoring. The camp is part of a partnership between Boys & Girls Clubs of Dane County and the Madison Area Builders Associationn, an anchor tenant at the Fitchburg center that opened nearly a year ago to support girls learning skills for construction jobs and other trades. The association is providing volunteers to help staff the new camp. “Ninety percent of the volunteers are female so not only can girls see that there’s females working in construction, but they are also able to start mentorship relationships,” said Stephanie Johnston, assistant vice president of workforce development at Boys & Girls Club of Dane County. “There will be a lot of great connections with employers."

It’s been raining cats and dogs this summer in Madison, which means residents will probably see more pesky bugs soon. The Madison area recorded 8.82 inches of rain in June, marking the city’s wettest June since 2014, when the area received 9.55 inches, according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration figures. By comparison, a little over 1 inch fell in June last year. All that rain will “certainly” affect how many mosquitoes are buzzing around, said Lyric Bartholomay, a medical entomologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “People are saying to me, 'Seems like the mosquitoes are a lot worse this year. What's going on?'” she said. Bartholomay, a professor in the university’s School of Veterinary Medicine and a director at the Midwest Center of Excellence for Vector-Borne Disease, spoke with the Cap Times on Thursday about mosquitoes and ticks, and shared tips on how to avoid them.

In the last week of June, back-to-back U.S. Supreme Court rulings curtailed the power of federal agencies and restricted the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s regulations of air and water pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions. That’s the view of Steph Tai, an environmental law professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who says Wisconsin will feel the rulings’ effects on issues like drinking water quality differently than other states because some policies make Wisconsin an “unusual state.” The first ruling, Ohio v. EPA, halted enforcement of a “good neighbor” rule, which protected downwind states like Wisconsin from pollution in surrounding upwind states. The day after, the Supreme Court dealt another blow to federal agencies in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, which overturned the landmark 1984 case Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council. Tai said the new rulings were “not surprising, but given the trends of the court, very disturbing.”

How can a person in Wisconsin, a state where weed is outlawed, walk into a legal dispensary and buy an array of cannabis to smoke, eat and massage on the skin? Entrepreneurs, seizing on imprecise wording in hemp laws, have squeezed new products — some mind bending and some not — out of the complex cannabis flora, which comprises more than 400 chemicals. What products are actually available here and how they compare to those purchased over the border in Michigan or Illinois is a winding story, with lots of ins and outs. Read all about it in this week's cover story from Mark Griffin.

In a lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Katy Jinkins, PhD typically starts her day at a filing cabinet full of thin, purple silicon disks that reflect green in the light. She breaks the disks, about the size of a CD, into smaller pieces for her research team’s efforts to ensure computer chips can keep up with technological innovations happening faster than ever before and the increasing need for energy sustainability. Jinkins is specifically focused on improving semiconductors, the base of chips, which are essential to wireless communication like Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and 5G. Semiconductors are used in a wide variety of other ways, such as artificial intelligence and medicine, too. They are the foundation of electronics in an era where everything is an e-something: e-watch, e-washing machine, EV. Most semiconductors are made with silicon. Jinkins is exploring whether alternative materials could replace silicon, “revolutionizing electronics” globally and expanding Madison's economic footprint in the tech industry. “I’ve always been really passionate about this type of work because I see the large potential for impact in computing and in electronics,” said Jinkins, cofounder and CEO of SixLine Semiconductor.