From the winner of the 2014 Regional Emmy Award for A Farm Winter with Jerry Apps Jerry Apps, renowned author and veteran storyteller, believes that storytelling is the key to maintaining our humanity, fostering connection, and preserving our common history. In Telling Your Story, he offers tips for people who are interested in telling their own stories. Readers will learn how to choose stories from their memories, how to journal, and find tips for writing and oral storytelling as well as Jerry's seasoned tips on speaking to a live radio or TV audience. Telling Your Story reveals how Jerry weaves together his stories and teaches how to transform experiences into cherished tales. Along the way, readers will learn about the value of storytelling and how this skill ties generations together, preserves local history, and much more.

Fans of Jerry Apps will delight in his latest novel, "Blue Shadows Farm," which follows the intriguing family story of three generations on a Wisconsin farm.
Silas Starkweather, a Civil War veteran, is drawn to Wisconsin and homesteads 160 acres in Ames County, where he is known as the mysterious farmer forever digging holes. After years of hardship and toil, however, Silas develops a commitment to farming his land and respect for his new community. When Silas's son Abe inherits Blue Shadows Farm he chooses to keep the land out of reluctant necessity, distilling and distributing "purified corn water" throughout Prohibition and the Great Depression in order to stay solvent. Abe's daughter, Emma, willingly takes over the farm after her mother's death. Emma's love for this place inspires her to open the farm to school-children and families who share her respect for it. As she considers selling the land, Emma is confronted with a difficult question--who, through thick and thin, will care for Blue Shadows Farm as her family has done for over a century? In the midst of a controversy that disrupts the entire community, Emma looks into her family's past to help her make crucial decisions about the future of its land.
Through the story of the Starkweather family's changing fortunes, and each generation's very different relationship with the farm and the land, "Blue Shadows Farm" is in some ways the narrative of all farmers and the increasingly difficult challenges they face as committed stewards of the land. Finalist, General Fiction, Midwest Book Awards

Wisconsin licence plates hail the state as ""America's Dairyland"". It would be equally appropriate if the plates read ""America's Beer Garden"", because Wisconsin and beer-brewing are virtually synonymous. The state has given the USA more of its most prominent national brands - Miller, Blatz, Schiltz and Pabst, to name but a few - than any other region. But within Wisconsin , beer-making has been a thriving industry as well, from cottage size to colossus, and it would be a brave person who would start a tavern argument in favour of, say, Garten Brau, knowing that loyal defenders of Point or Huber, Leinenkugels or Chippewa Pride, Rhinelander or Miller, were all around. Indeed there have probably been more beers born in Wisconsin than whiskies in Scotland. This book is their story. It is the story first of the European immigrants who brought master brewing skills to the frontier in the early 19th century and of the origin and growth of the modern industrial giants. Between 1840 and 1960, Wisconsin saw a rich history of growth (and decline), of technological innovation, of the emergence of the parallel industries from agriculture to advertising, of movements such as Prohibition and the Anti-Saloon league, of the struggle between the independents and the conglomerates and of colourful personalities in Wisconsin's history who enlivened the scene: Joseph Huber, Valentine Blatz, the Miller and Pabst families and all the others. All are brought vividly to life in these pages. Foremost, however, this is a Wisconsin story: tiny rural communities that became brewing metropolises, pioneers who built fortunes and traditions that are part of Wisconsin culture to this day, the evolution of the taverns, the brewery buildings themselves as period artifact and art form, and the consumers whose thirst for beer made the whole history possible. ""Breweries of Wisconsin"" also includes a list of every brewery and beer in the state's history and quiz items.

The year is 1955. The H. H. Harlow Pickle Company has appeared in the small town of Link Lake, using heavy-handed tactics to force family farmers to either farm the Harlow way or lose their biggest customer - and, possibly, their land. Andy Meyer, the owner of a half-acre pickle patch, works part-time for the Harlow Company, a conflict that places him between the family farm and the big corporation. As he sees how Harlow begins to change the rural community and the lives of its people, Andy must make personal, ethical, and life-changing decisions.

In this eminently readable story, Jerry Apps delves into the heart of small-town America. Reckoning with timely problems and opinions that divide us, he shows us the power in restoring our relationships with nature and our communities.

When journalist Josh Wittmore moves from the Illinois bureau of Farm Country News to the newspaper's national office in Wisconsin, he encounters the biggest story of his young career-just as the paper's finances may lead to its closure. Josh's big story is that a corporation that plans to establish an enormous hog farm has bought a lot of land along the Tamarack River in bucolic Ames County. Some of the local residents and officials are excited about the jobs and tax revenues that the big farm will bring, while others worry about truck traffic, porcine aromas, and manure runoff polluting the river. And how would the arrival of a large agribusiness affect life and traditions in this tightly knit rural community of family farmers? Josh strives to provide impartial agricultural reporting, even as his newspaper is replaced by a new Internet-only version owned by a former New York investment banker. And it seems that there may be another force in play: the vengeful ghost of a drowned logger who locals say haunts the valley of the Tamarack River.

When the Alstage Mining Company proposes a frac sand mine in the small Ames County village of Link Lake, events quickly escalate to a crisis. Business leader Marilyn Jones of the Link Lake Economic Development Council heads the pro-mine forces, citing needed jobs and income for the county. Octogenarian Emily Higgins and other Link Lake Historical Society members are aghast at the proposed mine location in the community park, where a huge and ancient bur oak - the historic Trail Marker Oak - has stood since it pointed the way along an old Menominee trail. Reluctantly caught in the middle of the fray is Ambrose Adler, a reclusive, retired farmer with a secret. Soon the fracas over frac sand attracts some national attention, including that of Stony Field, the pen name of a nationally syndicated columnist. Will the village board vote to solve their budget problems with a cut of the mining profits? Will the mine create real jobs for local folks? Will Stony Field come to the village to lead protests against the mine? And will defenders of the Trail Marker Oak literally draw a battle line in the sand?

Wisconsin has not always been the dairy state, but cheese is a notable part of its heritage. Capturing the voices of farmers, milk haulers, makers, and graders, Jerry Apps provides a rich view into the history of cheese in the state, beginning with its humble origins in farmhouse kitchens. As he explores the extraordinary diversity of cheese products, he peppers his lively narrative with obscure lore. In this updated edition of a classic, Apps examines tumultuous changes in the business over the past twenty years, including the impacts of corporate megafarms and the rise of artisanal producers. Vivid historical photographs and striking portraits of modern family-operated factories reveal the delicate balance between art and science that goes into the process of turning ordinary milk into a wide variety of flavors, from the ubiquitous cheddar to sublime delicacies. Through these stories, we can come to better appreciate the remarkable farmers and producers that shaped cheesemaking into the thriving industry it is today.

In 1910, when Olaf F. Larson was born to tenant livestock and tobacco farmers in Rock County, Wisconsin, the original barn still stood on the property. It was filled with artifacts of an earlier time--an ox yoke, a grain cradle, a scythe used to cut hay by hand. But Larson came of age in a brave new world of modern inventions--tractors, trucks, combines, airplanes--that would change farming and rural life forever. "When Horses Pulled the Plow" is Larson's account of that rural life in the early twentieth century. He weaves invaluable historical details--including descriptions of farm equipment, crops, and livestock--with wry tales about his family, neighbors, and the one-room schoolhouse he attended, revealing the texture of everyday life in the rural Midwest almost a century ago. This memoir, written by Larson in his ninth decade, provides a wealth of details recalled from an earlier era and an illuminating read for anyone with their own memories of growing up on a farm.

The year is 1955. Andy Meyer, a young farmer, manages the pickle factory in Link Lake, a rural town where the farms are small, the conversation is meandering, and the feeling is distinctly Midwestern. Workers sort, weigh, and dump cucumbers into huge vats where the pickles cure, providing a livelihood to local farmers. But the H. H. Harlow Pickle Company has appeared in town, using heavy-handed tactics to force family farmers to either farm the Harlow way or lose their biggest customer--and, possibly, their land. Andy, himself the owner of a half-acre pickle patch, works part-time for the Harlow Company, a conflict that places him between the family farm and the big corporation. As he sees how Harlow begins to change the rural community and the lives of its people, Andy must make personal, ethical, and life-changing decisions. Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the American Association of School Librarians, and Outstanding Book, selected by the Public Library Association

The fourth novel in Jerry Apps's Ames County series, "Cranberry Red" brings the story into the present, portraying the challenges of agriculture in the twenty-first century.
As the novel opens, Ben Wesley has lost his job as agricultural agent for Ames County. He is soon hired as a research application specialist for Osborne University, a for-profit institution that has developed "Cranberry Red," a new chemical that promises not only to improve cranberry crop yields but also to endow the fruits with the power to prevent heart disease, reduce brain damage from strokes, and ward off Alzheimer's disease. Ben must promote the new product to cranberry growers in Ames County and beyond, but he worries whether the promised results are credible. Was Cranberry Red rushed to market?
When the chemical does all that the university claims it will do, Ben is relieved . . . until disturbing side effects emerge. Can he criticize Cranberry Red and safeguard farmers and consumers without losing his job, or will Ben's honesty get him fired while his community continues to get sicker?

Finalist, General Fiction, Midwest Book Awards

Since the Eagle Party took power in the United States, all schools and public utilities have been privatized, churches and libraries closed, and independent news media shut down. Drones buzz overhead in constant surveillance of the populace, and the open internet has been replaced by the network of the New Society Corporation. Environmental degradation and unchecked climate change have brought raging wildfires to the Western states and disastrous flooding to Eastern coastal regions. In the Midwest, a massive storm sends Lake Michigan surging over the Door County peninsula, and thousands of refugees flee inland. In the midst of this apocalypse, a resourceful band of Wisconsin sixty-somethings calling themselves the Oldsters lays secret plans to fight the ruling regime's propaganda and show people how to think for themselves.