The Wire Plant Dumped Spool Ends at Her Line for 16 Years — She Built a $325,000 Trellis Brand

The Wire Plant Dumped Spool Ends at Her Line for 16 Years — She Built a $325,000 Trellis Brand

On a Tuesday morning in March of 2009, Linnea Dykstra stood at the edge of her family’s back 40 in Sauk County, Wisconsin, and watched a flatbed truck from the Wausau Wire Manufacturing Plant back down her gravel lane for the first time. The driver didn’t knock on the door. He didn’t call ahead.

 He pulled to the edge of the field, unlatched the chain on the back, and rolled three enormous steel spools off the truck bed like they weighed nothing. Each one was 4 ft tall, wrapped in the last few hundred feet of wire that the plant couldn’t use. Too little left to fill a commercial order, too much to throw away without someone complaining about the waste.

The driver handed her a slip of paper with a number on it. $42 for the lot. She paid him in cash from her coat pocket, signed the slip, and watched him drive away. The spools sat at the edge of the field for 3 days before she figured out what to do with them. That was the beginning. Let me tell you about Sauk County in 2009, because you need to understand the place before you can understand what Linnea did with it.

Sauk County sits in the south-central part of Wisconsin, a landscape of rolling hills and river bottoms and dairy farms that have been in the same families for four and five generations. The county seat is Baraboo, which most people know only because of the Ringling Brothers Circus, but the farmers who live there know it as the place where the feed store is, and where the county extension office holds its spring meetings, and where the grain elevator sits at the edge of town with its paint peeling and its scale

worn smooth from 100,000 truckloads of corn. The land in Sauk County is not the flat black prairie of central Iowa. It is hilly and irregular and beautiful in a way that makes it difficult to farm efficiently, which is why the farmers who stayed there learned, over generations, to be creative with what they had.

 Linnea’s family had been in Sauk County since her great-grandfather arrived from the Netherlands in 1921 with $60 and a letter of introduction to a Dutch Reformed congregation in Reedsburg. He bought 40 acres on a south-facing hillside and planted potatoes and hay and kept three dairy cows. His son expanded to 120 acres and added a small apple orchard on the slope where the soil drained well.

Linnea’s father, Gerrit Dijkstra, had farmed the same land for 31 years by the time Linnea came back from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2007 with a degree in agricultural economics and a headful of ideas that Gerrit was not entirely sure what to do with. He was a methodical man, Gerrit. He planted what the county had always planted.

 He kept his equipment maintained and his fences tight and his books balanced to within a few dollars every year. He was not a man who experimented. He was a man who survived, which in Sauk County in the early 2000s amounted to roughly the same thing. Let me tell you about Linnea Dijkstra because she’s the reason this story exists and she’s different from nearly every character this channel has ever told you about.

She was 24 years old when she came back to the farm. She was not a farmer in the way her father was a farmer. She had not grown up driving tractors before school or pulling calves at 2:00 in the morning or reading the sky for weather the way her father read a newspaper. She had grown up on the farm, yes, but she had spent 4 years reading studies.

She had spent 4 years in a university library pulling agricultural economics journals and extension service reports and USDA data sets and asking the kind of questions that people who grow up in libraries ask, which are the questions that people who grow up on farms sometimes forget to ask because they already know the answers or think they do.

 She came back to Sauk County in the summer of 2007 carrying a canvas tote full of photocopied research papers and a notebook she had been filling since her junior year. And she sat down at the kitchen table with her father and said she wanted to try something different with the back 40. Garrett set down his fork. Her mother, Anke, kept eating, but her eyes moved sideways toward her husband in a way that meant she was paying close attention.

The back 40 was the hillside parcel, the one with the irregular terrain that made row cropping difficult and had been in hay production for 11 years because nobody could figure out a better use for it. Linnea had a better use for it. She wanted to put in a trellis system and grow wine grapes. Garrett picked his fork back up.

 He said he needed to think about it. Anke said quietly, without looking up from her plate, that she thought Linnea was right. Let me tell you about the science because you need to understand what Linnea had actually been reading before you can understand why she was so certain. Wisconsin is not Napa Valley. Nobody needs to tell you that.

But, what Linnea had found in the university research was that the south-facing slopes of Sauk County, the same hillside terrain that made conventional row cropping difficult, were producing microclimates with enough heat accumulation to ripen cold-hardy grape varieties that had been developed at the University of Minnesota specifically for northern climates.

The Marquette variety, the Frontenac, the La Crescent, these were not wine grapes that anyone in Sauk County was growing. They were grapes that had been bred to survive minus 30° winters and still produce fruit with enough sugar content to make commercially viable wine. The research from the University of Minnesota’s Horticultural Research Center showed consistent yields of 4 to 6 tons per acre on properly managed trellises with revenue potential of $800 to $1,200 per ton at regional winery prices.

The hay production on that same back 40 was generating, in a good year, roughly $140 per acre after input costs. The math was not complicated, but it required a trellis system, and a trellis system required wire, and wire cost money that the Dijkstra farm did not have in surplus. That was the problem Linnea was sitting with when the first truck from the Wausau plant came down the lane.

Let me tell you about the Wausau plant because it matters more than it seems like it should. The plant manufactured commercial wire products. Fencing, baling wire, agricultural wire in bulk spools, and had been operating on the north side of Wausau since 1963. Like most manufacturing operations of its kind, it generated spool ends.

These were the remnants left on the large production spools when a commercial order had been filled. Anywhere from 50 to 400 ft of wire that couldn’t be sold as a full spool, but couldn’t simply be discarded without generating waste disposal costs. For decades, the plant had been paying a hauling service to take the spool ends away.

In 2008, the plant manager, a methodical engineer named Denton Krueger, decided that paying to haul away usable wire was a form of institutional stupidity that he was no longer willing to tolerate. He asked his floor supervisor to find farmers or operations within a 50-mi radius who might take the spool ends at a nominal cost.

The floor supervisor made some calls. One of those calls reached a cousin of Garrett Dijkstra’s who mentioned that his niece had just come back from college and was doing something unusual with the back 40. Denton Krueger’s office called Linnea on a Wednesday afternoon in January of 2009. He explained what the spool ends were, what wire gauges he typically had available, and what he was proposing.

She would pay a nominal handling fee, somewhere between 30 and $60 per load, and the plant would deliver whatever spool ends had accumulated since the last pickup. The wire was not junk. It was the same wire the plant sold commercially, in the same gauges, with the same tensile strength ratings.

 It just came in irregular lengths. For a commercial fence builder, irregular lengths were a problem. For someone building a trellis system on a hillside back 40, irregular lengths were not a problem at all. Linnea said yes before Krueger finished the sentence. She spent the winter of 2009 designing the trellis system on graph paper at the kitchen table.

 She used the university extension service publications on high wire cordon training systems and modified the design for the slope grade and the irregular spacing of the hillside terrain. She calculated wire quantities by gauge and tension requirement for each trellis wire position, the bottom catch wire, the cordon wire, the upper training wires, and she worked backward from those calculations to figure out what she needed from the spool ends.

She kept a running inventory in her notebook of every spool that arrived, every gauge, every approximate length. By April of 2009, she had received seven deliveries from the Wausau plant and had accumulated enough wire to begin installation on the first two acres of the back 40. Now, let me pause here and ask you something.

 Have you ever tried to explain to a room full of experienced farmers why you’re doing something that none of them have ever done using materials that everyone else considers waste on land that everyone else has written off as unsuitable? Because Linnea had to do exactly that in the spring of 2009, and the room she had to do it in was the Sauk County Farm Bureau spring meeting at the Reedsburg VFW Hall, and the man she had to do it in front of was Dale Sievert.

Let me tell you about Dale Sievert because you need to understand who he was before you can understand what he said. Dale Sievert had been selling agricultural supplies and fencing products in Sauk County for 26 years. He was 61 years old, broad-shouldered with a handshake that he deployed like a tool and a voice that carried across a room without effort.

 He had served on the Farm Bureau board for 9 years and on the county agricultural committee for six. And he knew the name of every farmer in the county and the approximate acreage of every parcel and the credit situation of most of them. He was not a cruel man. He was a certain man, which is sometimes more dangerous. He had watched young people come back to Sauk County farms with university degrees and ambitious plans and leave again within 3 years when the plans didn’t survive contact with a Wisconsin winter. And he had developed over the

years a particular tone of voice for those situations. It was not contemptuous, exactly. It was the tone of a man who has seen this movie before and knows how it ends. Linnea stood up at the spring meeting and explained what she was doing with the back 40. She explained the cold hardy varieties, the university research, the revenue projections, the trellis system she was building with wire from the Wausau plant.

 She was precise and organized and she had brought photocopies of the Minnesota research data that she distributed to the three people sitting near her. Dale Sievert waited until she finished. Then he leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms and said, with the particular patience of a man who is being generous with his time, that he appreciated her enthusiasm.

He said that wine grapes in Sauk County had been tried before. He named a farm near Plain that had put in a small vineyard in 1998 and pulled the vines out by 2003. And that the winters had a way of settling these arguments faster than any university study could. He said that trellis wire needed to be installed to commercial specifications with proper anchor posts and tensioning hardware, and that building a trellis system out of spool ends from a wire plant was, and he chose the word carefully, improvised in a way that

suggested improvised was a polite substitute for something less flattering. He said he hoped it worked out for her. The silence lasted about 3 seconds. Then, a few people near Dale chuckled, not unkindly, and the meeting moved on to the next item on the agenda. Linnea drove home on a county road in the dark with the windows down despite the cold, which was something she did when she needed to think without the noise of her own thoughts getting in the way.

She did not cry. She did not call anyone. She went home, sat at the kitchen table, and opened her notebook to the page where she had written the per acre revenue projections. And she read them again. Then, she went to bed. Garrett, who had been at the meeting and had said nothing, came into the kitchen the next morning and poured two cups of coffee and set one in front of her and said that she could plant her 100 acres, meaning the back 40 plus the two adjacent hillside parcels that had also been in hay, if she still wanted to. He

said it the way he said most things, which was without ceremony, looking at the window rather than at her. She said she still wanted to. He said, “All right, then.” He drank his coffee and went out to the barn. She planted the first two acres in the spring of 2009. The trellis system went in that April and May, built from the spool ends she had been accumulating since January, anchored with treated posts she had cut from the wood lot on the north edge of the property.

The wire was not uniform in length. No two runs were exactly the same. And she had to plan the layout of each row to match the wire she had available, working from her inventory notebook the way a carpenter works from a cut list. It took longer than a standard installation would have. It looked to anyone passing on the road like something put together by a person who was making it up as they went, which was not entirely wrong.

 But, the tension was right, the spacing was right, and the anchor posts were set at the correct depth for the soil conditions on that slope. And when she planted the first Marquette vines in May of 2009, they went into ground that was properly prepared and properly supported. Dale Seaver drove past the property twice that summer.

 Linnea noticed because she was working on the trellis installation both times, and she saw his truck slow at the road. He did not stop. Let me tell you about the first 3 years, because they were not a vindication. They were a test, and the test was harder than the projections had suggested. The first winter killed about 12% of the first-year vines, not catastrophic but enough to require replanting in the spring of 2010, which she did, adjusting the variety mix slightly based on which plants had survived and which had not. The

Frontenac survived better than the Marquette on the upper slope where the cold air pooled, and she noted that in the notebook and shifted the variety distribution on the replacement planting. The second winter was milder and the survival rate was better. By the summer of 2011, the first two acres were producing their first commercial harvest.

 Small, as first harvest from young vines always are, but real. She sold the fruit to a winery in Spring Green for $920 per ton. The yield that first year was 2.4 tons per acre, which was below the projection but not by enough to change the math in any fundamental way. The hay production on the same acreage had been generating, net of input costs, $138 per acre per year.

The grape production in 2011, even at the reduced first-year yield, generated $412 per acre net. She wrote both numbers in the notebook and showed them to her father at dinner. He looked at them for a long time. He said he’d like to see what year three looked like. She said she thought year three would look better.

 He said he expected she was right. Year three looked better. By 2013, the first two acres were producing 4.1 tons per acre at a price of $960 per ton, and she had expanded the planting to an additional eight acres using wire from 31 Spool and deliveries from the Wausau plant over 4 years. The per acre net revenue on the mature planting was running just over $2,000 per acre against the hay baseline of 138.

She brought the numbers to the kitchen table and Garrett looked at them and set down his fork. Not in the way he had set it down in 2007, which was the way of a man who needs to think, but in the way of a man who has been thinking for 6 years and has arrived at a conclusion. He said, “You decide the rotation from here.” She said she’d need more wire.

 He said he figured she would. Let me tell you about the summer of 2012 because it is the year this story turns, even though the turning was invisible to almost everyone watching. The summer of 2012 was the worst drought in the Midwest in more than 50 years. You may remember it. It stretched from the southern plains up through the corn belt and into Wisconsin and it arrived in June and did not break until September.

 And by August, the corn in Sauk County was rolling its leaves in the heat and the pastures had gone the color of straw and the farmers who had been through the 1988 drought were saying this was worse. The county extension office issued three separate advisory bulletins. The Farm Bureau held an emergency meeting.

 The grain elevator in Baraboo was running at half capacity because there was not enough grain coming in to fill it. Garrett’s corn on the flat bottom ground yielded 41 bushels per acre that year. The county average was 44. Both numbers were less than half of what a normal year produced. The financial damage across Sauk County was significant and in some cases severe.

There were farms that had been carrying operating loans against projected corn revenue that were now in conversations with their lenders that nobody wanted to be having. Linnea’s grapes yielded 3.8 tons per acre. Not her best year. But grapes, unlike corn, do not depend on summer rainfall in the same way.

 The root systems on a mature grapevine in her hillside soil were running 6 to 8 feet deep, reaching moisture that the surface drought could not touch. The trellis system she had built from the spool end wire held the canopy up through the heat, managing the leaf exposure in a way that reduced heat stress on the fruit.

 She harvested in September and sold to three wineries. The Spring Green operation had been joined by two others who had found her through a regional agricultural cooperative. And her net revenue per acre that year was $1,840 against the county’s corn disaster, against the hay that her neighbors were selling at distressed prices because the pastures had failed and everyone needed feed and nobody could afford to pay for it.

Dale Sievert was at the co-op in Reedsburg in October of 2012 when Linnea came in to settle an account. She had heard from her father that Dale had been having a difficult fall. Three of his largest fencing supply customers had deferred their orders because of the drought losses and his fourth quarter numbers were going to be painful.

She did not bring this up. She settled her account and was turning to leave when Dale said her name. She turned around. He was standing at the counter with his hands in his pockets, and his voice had lost some of the particular certainty that had characterized it at the 2009 Farm Bureau meeting. He said it looked like her grapes had come through the summer all right.

She said they had. He said that was good. She said it was. There was a pause, and then he said he supposed the trellis wire had held up. She said it had held up fine. He nodded. She left. She told her mother about the conversation that night, and her mother said that for Dale Seevert, that was practically a written apology.

Linnea said she supposed it was. Let me tell you about what happened after 2012, because the story doesn’t end with one good drought year. The drought of 2012 had done something to the conversation in Sauk County that no amount of research papers or Farm Bureau presentations could have done, which was to provide a visible, undeniable, side-by-side comparison of what the hillside ground could do when it was planted to grapes on a trellis system versus what it did when it was planted to anything else.

The farmers who had driven past Linnea’s back 40 for 4 years without stopping began stopping. They stopped to look at the trellis system. They stopped to ask about the varieties. They stopped to ask about the wire. That last question was the one Linnea had not anticipated, and it was the one that changed everything.

 Let me tell you about the wire question, because it is the center of this story, and it took Linnea three separate conversations before she understood what she was actually being asked. The first farmer who asked about the wire was a man named Elmer Borgman who had 40 acres of south-facing hillside in the next township and had been watching Linnea’s operation for 2 years.

He came down the lane in November of 2012 and walked the vineyard with her and asked at the end of the walk where she had gotten her trellis wire. She told him about the Wausau plant and the spool ends and the arrangement with Denton Kruger. He asked if Kruger would do the same for him. She said she didn’t know, but she could ask.

She asked. Kruger said, yes, he’d be happy to add another customer to the delivery route. Elmer Borgman started receiving spool end deliveries in January of 2013. The second farmer was a woman named Harriet Gallagher who had a different question. She didn’t want to deal with the Wausau plant directly. She asked if Linnea could source the wire for her and sell it to her at a fair price.

Linnea said she would think about it. She thought about it for 2 weeks sitting with a notebook open to a fresh page running numbers. The Wausau plant was delivering spool ends to her at an average cost of $47 per load. Each load contained on average somewhere between 800 and 1200 feet of wire across two or three gauges.

Commercial trellis wire sold through agricultural supply dealers, through dealers like Dale Seavert in fact, was running between 14 and 18 cents per foot for the gauges she was using. If she was receiving wire at an effective cost of roughly 4 cents per foot and commercial wire was selling at 16 cents per foot, there was a margin in that gap that she had never thought about because she had never needed to.

She had just been building her own trellis. But, Harriet Gallagher was asking her to think about it now. The third farmer was a man from Richland County who had heard about her operation from a cousin in Reedsburg and drove 45 minutes to ask if she could supply trellis wire for a 12-acre planting he was planning for the following spring.

He wanted to know if she could get him enough wire and whether she could help him figure out how to install it correctly for his slope grade. He was willing to pay for both. Linnea sat at the kitchen table that night with three pages of fresh notebook calculations and told her parents what she was thinking. Garrett listened without interrupting, which was how she knew he was taking it seriously.

Anke refilled everyone’s coffee twice. When Linnea finished, Garrett asked one question. Did she think Denton Krueger could scale up the delivery volume if she needed more wire than the current arrangement was producing? She said she thought he could and that she intended to ask. Garrett nodded.

 He said she should ask then. Let me tell you about the conversation with Denton Krueger in January of 2013 because it was shorter than it should have been and more consequential than either of them realized at the time. Linnea drove to the Wausau plant on a Thursday morning and sat in Krueger’s office, which smelled like machine oil and old coffee, and explained what she was thinking.

She wanted to formalize the arrangement. She wanted to become, in effect, a distribution point for the plant’s spool ends, taking larger volumes, sorting them by gauge and approximate length, and reselling them to farmers and small vineyard operations in a four-county area at a price that was below commercial wire rates, but above her acquisition cost.

Krueger would solve his spool end disposal problem at a larger scale. She would have a supply of wire that cost her a fraction of commercial rates and a margin on every foot she resold. Krueger looked at her for a moment and then said, “That sounded like it would work fine for the plant.” and asked when she wanted to start.

She said she wanted to start in February. He said he’d tell the floor supervisor to start setting aside larger accumulations. She drove home on Highway 12 with the windows down, despite the January cold, and the notebook open on the passenger seat to a page of numbers that she had been running in her head since October.

The first year of the wire operation, she did not call it a business yet, she called it the wire arrangement, she sourced and resold approximately 42,000 ft of spool end wire to seven farmers in Sauk, Richland, and Vernon counties. Her net margin, after the Wausau plant handling fees and her own delivery costs using the farm’s flatbed trailer, was a little under $3,000.

Not transformative, but it was $3,000 that had not existed before, generated from material that the Wausau plant had been paying to have hauled away, and it was $3,000 that proved the model worked. By 2015, the wire arrangement had become quietly and without any particular announcement a wire business. She had formalized the relationship with the Wausau plant into a written agreement that gave her right of first refusal on all spool ends from the facility in exchange for a slightly higher per load fee that still left her

well below commercial wire costs. She had added two additional wire plants. One in Oshkosh, one across the border in Rockford, Illinois, after making calls to their plant managers and explaining the arrangement she had with Wausau. Both plants said yes within a week. She had, by that point, a reliable supply of somewhere between 150 and 200,000 ft of wire per year across multiple gauges, and she had a customer base of 31 vineyard operations, small farms, and hobby orchards in six counties who were buying from her at prices that were, on

average, 38% below what they would pay at an agricultural supply dealer. Below what they would pay at Dale Sievert’s counter, in other words. She had also hired her first employee, a young man from Reedsburg named Caleb Johansen, who had grown up on a dairy farm and understood wire and posts and slope grades, and who could drive the flatbed and do installations when customers needed help with that, too.

She paid him $18 an hour and gave him 2 weeks of paid vacation, which was more than most farm operations in the county paid for comparable work, and he stayed. Let me tell you about Dale Sievert’s visit to the Dijkstra farm in the spring of 2016, because it is the scene that the rest of this story has been building toward.

 And it deserves to be told slowly. It was a Thursday afternoon in April. Linnea was in the equipment shed sorting a new delivery of wire from the Oshkosh plant. Coiling lengths by gauge, tagging them with approximate footage, stacking them on the shelving she had built along the east wall. Caleb was out on a delivery in Vernon County.

She heard a truck come down the lane and looked out the shed door and saw Dale Seavert’s pickup. The same truck she had seen slow at the road in 2009 and 2010. Park in the yard. He got out and walked toward the shed with his hands in his jacket pockets and his hat pulled down against the April wind.

 He stood at the shed door for a moment looking at the shelving along the east wall, at the organized coils of wire sorted by gauge and tagged with handwritten labels, at the delivery manifest clipped to the board above the sorting table. He had the look of a man who has driven somewhere knowing what he was going to find and is still surprised to find it.

He said her name. She said, “Hello, Dale.” He said he’d been hearing things about her wire operation. She said she supposed he had. He said he was having some trouble sourcing trellis wire for a customer. A larger vineyard operation over in Iowa County that was putting in 20 acres and needed a specific gauge and quantity.

And that his usual supplier was back ordered 4 to 6 weeks. He said he’d heard she might be able to help. She looked at him for a moment without saying anything. Then she said, “I thought trellis wire built from spool ends was improvised, Dale.” She said it the way you say something that you have been waiting 7 years to say without heat, without satisfaction, just as a statement of fact that the room needed to hear before the conversation could continue.

Dale Sievert’s jaw tightened slightly. He said he supposed he had spoken before he knew what he was talking about. It was as close to an apology as he was capable of, and they both understood that. She said she thought she could help with the Iowa County order. She pulled the notebook from the shelf, a newer one, the fourth in the series that had started at the University of Wisconsin, and found the inventory page for the gauge he was describing and told him what she had available.

She quoted him a price that was fair and below what his back-ordered supplier would have charged. He said that would work. She wrote up the order and handed him the carbon copy. He folded it and put it in his jacket pocket and turned to go. At the door, he stopped and said, without turning around, that he thought what she had built here was something.

She said, “Thank you, Dale.” He walked back to his truck and drove away. She stood in the shed for a moment after he left, looking at the shelving along the east wall. Then, she went back to sorting wire. Let me tell you about what the Dijkstra wire operation had become by 2019 because the numbers are the story, and the numbers need to be said plainly.

By 2019, Linnea was sourcing spool end wire from six manufacturing facilities in Wisconsin, Illinois, and Minnesota. She had a written agreement with each facility, a delivery schedule, and a sorting and inventory system that she had refined over 6 years into something that a logistics consultant from Madison, who had visited the operation as part of a university extension service case study, described as more efficient than most small-scale distribution operations he had seen.

 She employed four people full-time and two part-time, all from Sauk County, all paid above the county median wage for agricultural work. She had a customer base of 112 operations in 11 counties across Wisconsin and into the western edge of Minnesota, ranging from small hobby vineyards with two or three acres to commercial operations with 40 or 50 acres of trellised planting.

The vineyard on the back 40, now expanded to 18 acres across three parcels, was producing an average of 4.3 tons per acre at an average price of just over $1,000 per ton, generating gross revenue of approximately $78,000 per year from the grape operation alone against the hay baseline of $138 per acre that the same ground had been producing in 2007.

But, the vineyard was no longer the main event. The wire operation was the main event. Annual revenue from wire sourcing and resale in 2019 was $247,000. Net margin after facility fees, labor, delivery, and operating costs was running at approximately 31%. She had incorporated the business as Dijkstra Trellis Supply LLC in 2017, and opened a dedicated sorting facility in a leased building on the edge of Reedsburg, which meant the equipment shed was no longer the center of operations, which meant the farm felt like a farm again,

rather than a warehouse, which Garrett said he appreciated. She had also, by 2019, begun doing something that she had not planned and had not seen coming when she started sorting wire in the equipment shed six years earlier. She had begun consulting. Farmers and small vineyard operators who were planning trellis installations were calling her, not just for wire, but for advice on system design, variety selection, spacing, and slope management.

 She had, without intending to, accumulated more practical knowledge about trellis installation on difficult terrain in Wisconsin’s climate than almost anyone in the state, because she had been doing it longer and at larger scale than almost anyone else, and she had been doing it with irregular materials that required her to think carefully about every installation, rather than following a standard template.

The improvisation that Dale Sievert had dismissed in 2009 had turned out to be an education. Every irregular wire length had been a problem she had to solve. Every hillside with a different grade had been a puzzle she had to figure out. By 2019, she had solved enough of those puzzles that other people were paying her to help them solve theirs.

The consulting rate was $200 per hour. She billed approximately 300 hours of consulting in 2019. She noted the number in the notebook, the fifth notebook now, a green hard cover she had bought at the university bookstore on a visit back to Madison for an agricultural economics alumni event where she had been invited to speak.

She had been invited to speak because the agricultural economics department had heard about Dickstra trellis supply and wanted to use it as a case study in their graduate seminar on rural enterprise development. She stood at the front of a seminar room in the same building where she had sat in the back row 11 years earlier reading studies about cold hardy grape varieties and writing numbers in a notebook and she told 32 graduate students about the wire plant and the spool ends and the $42 and the flatbed truck that came down the

lane without calling ahead. She told them about the 2012 drought and about Elmer Borgman’s question and about Harriet Gallagher’s different question and about the conversation with Denton Krueger in January of 2013. She told them about Dale Sieverts visit to the equipment shed in April of 2016. She told them about the notebooks.

 She had brought the first one, the one from her junior year at Wisconsin with the grape revenue projections and the trellis wire calculations and she passed it around the room. The graduate students looked at it the way people look at something that turns out to have been the beginning of something larger than it appeared at the time.

After the talk, a professor named Dr. Annika Sorensen who taught agricultural supply chain economics and who had been the one to invite Linnea to speak told her that what she had built was a textbook example of what economists called supply chain arbitrage in a niche agricultural context, which was a way of saying that she had found a gap between what something cost to produce and what it cost to acquire and had built a business in that gap.

Linnea said she supposed that was one way to describe it. She said another way to describe it was that she had needed wire and hadn’t had money and had found a place that had wire and didn’t want it. Dr. Sorenson said that was a better description. She wrote it down. Let me tell you about the summer of 2023 because it is where this story arrives, not ends, and the distinction matters.

By the summer of 2023, Dykstra Trellis Supply LLC had generated cumulative revenue of just over $325,000 in its most recent fiscal year. The number that the agricultural cooperative newsletter in Reedsburg printed in a brief profile of the business in July, which was the first time the number had appeared in print anywhere, and which caused Garrett Dykstra, who was 71 years old and still farming the flat-bottom ground, to cut the article out of the newsletter and put it on the refrigerator with a magnet shaped like the state of Wisconsin.

He did not say anything about it. He didn’t need to. Linnea was 39 years old that summer. She had 18 acres of vineyard, six wire supply agreements, four full-time employees, a leased sorting facility, and a consulting practice that was booked eight weeks out. She had a waiting list of 17 farms for wire supply agreements, which she was working through as fast as the sourcing capacity from her plant network could support.

She had been contacted by two wire manufacturing facilities in Michigan and one in Minnesota who had heard about the arrangement and wanted to discuss becoming suppliers, which would expand her network significantly and which she was evaluating carefully because growth that outpaced her sorting and distribution capacity would create problems that no amount of good wire could solve.

She was also that summer having a conversation with her daughter, Mika, who was 9 years old and had been helping sort wire in the Reedsburg facility after school since she was old enough to read the gauge labels on the coils. Mika had been reading about hemp production. She had found an article in a farming magazine, one of the ones that Linnea subscribed to and left on the kitchen table, about industrial hemp as a rotation crop on hillside terrain.

And she had come to her mother with the magazine open to the relevant page and a series of questions that were organized and specific in a way that Linnea recognized immediately because she had been that age once, sitting at a different kitchen table with a different set of photocopied research papers and a notebook full of numbers that nobody had asked her to run.

Mika asked if they could try it on the 2 acres at the top of the north slope, which had never been suitable for grapes because the cold air pooled there and the winter survival rate was too low. Linnea looked at the magazine article. She looked at the 2 acres on the north slope, which had been in grass for 4 years because she hadn’t found a better use for them.

 She looked at her daughter, who was 9 years old and had organized her questions on a piece of notebook paper in two columns. One for what she knew and one for what she needed to find out. Linnea said, “Yes.” Just like that. She said, “Yes.” before she finished reading the article because she recognized the notebook and she recognized the questions and she understood in the way that you understand something that has been true your whole life but that you only see clearly at certain moments, that the lesson she had learned from the wire plant and the spool ends

and the $42 and the flatbed truck that came down the lane without calling ahead was not a lesson about wire. It was a lesson about what you do when you find a gap between what something is worth and what someone else thinks it’s worth. It was a lesson about looking at waste and seeing material. It was a lesson about looking at difficult ground and seeing possibility.

It was a lesson about looking at a 9-year-old with a notebook and saying, “Yes.” Garrett Dijkstra is still farming the bottom ground. The first notebook is on the shelf in the Reedsburg sorting facility in a plastic sleeve next to the framed copy of the first wire delivery receipt $42 signed by a driver whose name Linnea never learned dated March of 2009.

The Wausau plant is still running. Denton Krueger retired in 2021 and the new plant manager, a younger woman who had heard the story from Krueger at his retirement party called Linnea the week she started and said she wanted to make sure the arrangement continued. Linnea said she was glad to hear it. Dale Seavert retired from the agricultural supply business in 2020.

 He sold his inventory and his customer list to a regional chain. He still farms a small parcel outside of Reedsburg. Linnea sees him at the co-op occasionally. They are cordial. He once told her, standing at the counter waiting for his receipt, that he had started recommending her wire operation to farmers who asked him about trellis supply.

She thanked him. He said it was the least he could do. And she thought that was probably exactly right. And she said nothing more about it. The six-wire plants are still delivering. The sorting facility is still running. The vineyard is still producing. Mika Dikstra is still reading. She planted grapes on a hillside that everyone said was wrong for it.

She built a trellis from wire that a factory was paying to throw away. The drought came. The corn died. The grapes lived. The wire business grew. The laughing stopped. And the notebook on the shelf in Reedsburg has $42 written on the first line in pencil in the handwriting of a 24-year-old who looked at a flatbed truck full of spool ends and saw something that nobody else in Sauk County could see yet.