Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Linda grew up on a 200 acre farm in Grant County Wisconsin, not far from Prairie du Chien, where her family raised pigs, chickens, and two dozen Guernsey milking cows. The story of her family’s farm is emblematic of family farming in general. As Linda and her siblings grew up and went off to college it became less and less economically viable to to operate a small farm without farmhands. As the years went by her father auctioned off the animals until finally it was time to say goodbye to the cows. “I can count on two fingers the number of times I saw my dad cry and that was one,” she says. He spent the last 20 years of his life selling cars. The land now belongs to a woman from Kansas who uses it as a hobby farm.
Kessenich grew up in Madison and starting working at the tender age of 13 as an assistant in the university’s labs, doing work with DNA recombination and extraction, the sort of work that has led to the development of genetically modified organisms, technology he now abhors. By the time he was 20 he was managing his own lab, but became disillusioned with his work in the midst of the social unrest of 60s and 70s.
