On a Wisconsin Family Farm: Historic Tales of Character, Community and Culture

Based on Corey Geiger's popular Homesteader's Hope column, On a Wisconsin Family Farm flings the barn doors wide open to a cast of characters who built America's Dairyland.

In 1905, twenty-eight-year-old Anna Satorie, granddaughter of Bohemian immigrants, went against cultural norms and became the sole owner of her family's homestead when she purchased the farm from her father. The next year, Anna married neighboring farmer John Burich, also of Bohemian extraction, and the couple went about building a thrifty family farm. But pioneer life was fraught with trials and tribulations. Polio and tuberculosis claimed loved ones, and the difficulties of Prohibition forced the family to fabricate the death of John's bootlegging brother to keep gangsters away from the farm. Neighbors pitched in as fellow immigrant families helped construct farmsteads and support one another through unsanctioned bank loans, daring dynamite work, and barn raisings. Leaving work aside, this vibrant community also threw parties met by the rooster's early-dawn crow.

Pairing his rural roots with lively storytelling, Geiger captures six generations of farming, family, and faith.

Known to friends as the "Dancing Dairyman," Corey Geiger danced his way onto the Family Feud television show, Texas Two-Stepped on the colored shavings during the Supreme Champion ceremonies in front of a crowd of 4,500 at the World Dairy Expo and competed at the Fred Astaire Cross Country Dance Competition national finals, where he and his wife, Krista Knigge, won top amateur couple honors in their division. In 1995, this University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate joined the Hoard's Dairyman. In 2013, Geiger was tapped as the publication's fifth lead editor, and in 2019, he was elected the sixty-fifth president of Holstein USA. He was co-editor of World Dairy Expo's 50th Anniversary Book, We Need a Show, and served as fundraising co-chair for the Farm Wisconsin Discovery Center. He remains true to his farming roots, managing the cropland and facility maintenance on his family's farm, which dates back to 1867.