For much of Oconto County, the decline of the lumber industry was to a
great extent offset by the rise in farming. As lumber companies and
other large landowners accumulated more and more cutover land, the,
massive influx of immigrants arriving in Oconto County provided an ideal
market for unloading these properties. In general, most of the
immigrants who arrived in Oconto County came from areas of Europe with a
strong farming tradition. Many came specifically to buy their own farms.
The history of agriculture in the county, however, is made up two
different stories: one of relative prosperity and stability, and the
other of tough times.

In order to understand why farming became so important to Oconto County,
and why so many struggled to establish farms on less than ideal lands,
it is important to know a little about the circumstances that many early
Oconto County farmers had left. The county's farming immigrants came
from a wide variety of places, including the eastern United States,
Great Britain, Scandinavia, and northwestern and northeastern Europe.
Although political and social situations varied greatly among these
regions, they did have one factor in common: farmland, in all of these
places tended to be poor and over-worked through years of cultivation.
Due to the population pressures in these older farming areas, farmland
was also expensive to purchase, if it were available at all. As a
result, small farm owners who wished to expand their incomes by growing
more crops could find few ways of increasing their farms yields. In many
places, farms also tended to get smaller with every passing generation,
as some or all of the family's adult children received a portion of the
family farm. It often took only a few decades before farms had become so
small and over-worked that they could not support a family. In some of
the European nations, feudal land traditions also made buying or owning
land nearly impossible since much of the available farmland might be
owned by local nobility, leaving farmers  with few options other than to
make rental arrangements with the landed gentry. Farmers responded to
such pressures in a variety of ways, but in many cases the situation
forced residents to immigrate to the American frontier. Although many
future Oconto County farmers, including those from the eastern U.S.,
moved simply because they thought they could do, better than they had in
their home areas, some immigrants were forced to immigrate by serious
crises back home. Immigrants, from Ireland and much of northern Europe,
for example, were often spurred to make the dangerous and difficult
journey because of famines caused by crop destruction, such as the well
known Irish Potato Blight of 1848, which also affected most of the crop
in Europe. Other immigrants, including those from many of the German
states in the 1850s and from Finland and Poland around the turn of the
century, emigrated in sudden waves because political restrictions that
had prevented them from leaving desperate situations were suddenly
relaxed. As a result of these factors, many of those who arrived in
Oconto County had little money but an enormous amount of determination
to create a secure life for themselves and their families in the New
World.

The extreme southern portion of the county south of the Oconto River,
already had numerous farms by the early 1870s. Many of these farm
families in the eastern and central portion of the region had purchased
their lands from the early lumber operators in Little Suamico and
Pensaukee. Some had also purchased lands directly from the federal
government. Since logging prior to the 1880s had focused on pines that
were within hauling distance of a driving stream, much of the available
land in this area was actually untouched by logging or had extensive
stands of everything other than white pine. Additionally, most of the
soils underlying this forest were heavy loams, excellent soil for
growing a variety of crops. Similar conditions were later found as far
north as the Suring and Lena areas, which became heavily settled
following the arrival of railroad connections in the 1880S. As a result
of these conditions; farming flourished in southern Oconto County. First
generation farms strived for self-sufficiency, generally growing small
amounts of  a variety of crops and raising a variety of animals, with
most of the production being consumed by the farm family. This
arrangement stemmed from several factors. First, most of the farmland
purchased was still mostly wooded. In order to farm, this land had to be
cleared of timber, a long and labor intensive process since most
nineteenth-century farmers had no machinery for doing such work. Trees
were felled by hand, but often enormous amounts of wood had to be burned
because the farmers had no way to use or sell so much. The remaining
stumps were often then left in the fields for years, with the farmers
plowing around them, until they had rotted to such an extent that they
could be pulled out with a horse or oxen-drawn winch. As a result,
clearing forty acres of farmland could take decades. Second, many early
farmers found themselves in such isolated locations that, even if they
could raise crops for sale, it was extremely difficult to transport
their goods to a place where they could be sold. Despite such problems,
however, most early farmers did occasionally take some of their excess
goods, such as eggs or produce, to the nearest settlement in order to
sell or trade them for necessities, such as flour. As farmlands were
gradually cleared and transportation systems improved, southern Oconto
County farmers began to turn their attention to cash crops, which were
raised in the largest quantities possible and sold for cash to local
middlemen or to large food processing operations elsewhere. As in much
of Wisconsin, wheat and other grains made up most farms' first cash
crops. Wheat was in high demand during, the mid-to late 1800's with
Wisconsin one of the nation's leading wheat producers for much of that
time. Wheat required little equipment and once planted, needed little
attention until harvest which allowed pioneer farmers to continue to
spend most of their time on crops to be consumed by the family. The
growth of wheat and other grains as cash crops led to the construction
of grain warehouses and silos in many southern Wisconsin settlements
prior to 1900. Whenever possible these structures were built next to the
railroad tracks for easy shipment to the large grist mills and other
grain purchasers in the South.

Grain production in Wisconsin as a whole declined markedly following the
Civil War, as grain diseases and competition from western states drove
farmers out of the grain business.     Southern Oconto County, however,
appears to have been little affected by the grain diseases that stuck
farms to the south.

Grain remained a major local cash crop until beyond the turn of the
century. In the first two   decades of the twentieth century, however,
many of the former wheat farms were converted to dairy operations,
raising crops only to provide inexpensive feed for cows whose milk was
sold to creameries and cheese factories.

Dairy farming required numerous specialized buildings, including large
barns, silos, and milkhouses, as well as large investments in milking
and milk, storing equipment, all of which made dairy farming an
expensive business requiring a great deal of money or a large debt
simply to get started. The incentive for making these sacrifices,
however, stemmed from the expectation of larger profits, expectations
fed in part by state agricultural experts who avidly promoted dairy
farming across the state beginning in the 1890s. One of the innovations
promoted was the silo, which first became available commercially in the
1900s making it possible to operate a dairy farm year-round. By the
1930s most of the southern portion of Oconto County, had converted
almost completely to dairy farming. The new industry would continue to
dominate southern Oconto County's economy and lifestyle for most of the
twentieth century.

While southern Oconto County's farms prospered, potential farmers in the
northern section of the county faced more difficult struggles. As in the
southern region, lumber companies that had worked in northern Oconto
County found a willing market for their cutover lands among those
seeking to establish family farms. Since these areas were logged for
pine later than in the south, and were often re-logged and clearcut, for
hardwoods after the close of the pine era, much of northern Oconto
County did not become available for sale until the 1890s, 1900's and
1910's. Because of the decline already evident in the lumber industry by
this point, and because enormous amounts of land were being given up by
the lumber firms at the same time, the state and local governments also
began to promote northern Wisconsin as ideal territory for potential
farmers. Much of this promotion was targeted at newly-arriving
immigrants, many of whom were from Scandinavia and northeastern Europe.
Many of these earned the money needed for the land and its. improvement
by working in the lumber camps while wives and other female relatives
struggled to provide for themselves and their families through the long
winter. Since most of these farms were established latter than those in
the south, many progressed directly from subsistence to dairy farming.
Some individuals pursued cash crops as varied as ginseng, potatoes and
orchard crops.

Like their counterparts to the south pioneer farmers in northern Oconto
County faced severe difficulties in establishing their farms, including
fields full of trees and stumps, impassable roads and limited markets
for the small amounts of crops they could spare for sale or barter. Due
to the later time period, however, these regions progressed more quickly
through the frontier stage, as railroads were laid and roads were
improved. Equipment and information about dairy farming, encouraged many
to take the plunge into daring only a few years after a farm's
establishment.

Northern Oconto County's farmers, however, faced at least two major
roadblocks that had relatively little impact on farmers to the south. As
many discovered too late, much of the soil in northern Oconto County was
not well suited to farming. Although some sections had acceptable soil,
much of the land in this region was too sandy or too acidic to support
most crops. According to later state-sponsored studies, only about one
fifth of the soil in northern Oconto County had the proper
characteristics for good farming.

By the 1930s, most, of these farmers were finding that, regardless of
how hard they worked, their farms were not yielding as much as anyone
thought they should. The 1930's, of course, also, saw the onset of the
Great Depression, an economic reversal that caused hardship across the
United States. Although the Depression did impact the dairy farmers in
the southern part of the county by lowering the prices they could get
for their milk, few of these farmers were put out of business by the
hard times. In northern Oconto County, however, the combination of poor
farming conditions, poor market conditions, and heavy debt loads forced
hundreds of families to lose the farms they had struggled so hard to
create. By this point, however, new land uses and a new economy for the
north woods were beginning to take shape.