JORDAN TOWNSHIP - Breakfast on the Farm hasn't always been on the farm. From the early 1960s until 1979, the Green County Ag Chest's annual event was held in various churches and schools that couldn't fit more than 200 people.
Dave Kamholz of Juda remembers when the Ag Chest moved the breakfast to the source of the industry it celebrates, hosted at a different dairy farm each year. The first was in 1980 at Monty and Dorothy Chesebro's farm in Monticello.
Thirty-three years later, over eggs, brats and chocolate milk at the 34th Annual Breakfast on the Farm early Saturday, May 25, Kamholz reminisced about the event's early years.
In 1980, "we had no guess as to how many people" would show up, he said. Thousands did. They ran out of brats halfway through breakfast. He and the sheriff raced in a squad to New Glarus, lights on, to buy more.
"People were waiting. It was an emergency. We had to have brats," he said.
Busloads of people turned out Saturday to this year's Breakfast at Jeff and Katie Falk's Southern Ridge Cow Palace.
The mechanics of the enormous feast were put in place 30-plus years ago by Kamholz and other early organizers, including former Ag Chest president Augie Burgi.
A couple of years after the brat emergency, Kamholz upgraded the system for making coffee. Until 1982, the Ag Chest brewed coffee in an assortment of electric pots on loan from area church kitchens - a cumbersome setup when thousands of cups are needed. That year the pots finally blew a fuse, burning up the transformer, Kamholz recalled.
So, with help of a welding company in Monroe, he jerry-rigged a new system: four 10-gallon milk cans over burners. Add one jar of Taster's Choice per can, swish with an old milk stirrer, boil.
Kamholz also designed the 4-foot-by-4-foot egg cookers, capable of scrambling 30 dozen eggs every 5 minutes, and helped build the long tables people sit at to eat.
"We built 42 of those tables," he said.
Herbert Demanouske said he used to wake up at 4:30 a.m. to help crack eggs for the Breakfast on the Farm, 33 eggs per bucket. He's since retired from those duties. Saturday morning, the 81-year-old was eating ice cream and listening to the Greg Anderson Band perform. It was his first time at Breakfast on the Farm in about a decade, he said.
There's a trick to cracking that many eggs without getting shell in the bucket.
"You split them tenderly," he said.
Now it's hard to imagine Breakfast on the Farm held anywhere but on a farm.
"They've talked about having it out at the fairgrounds," said Alice Ladwig, Sylvester Township. That wouldn't work, she added. "Breakfast on the Farm is breakfast on the farm."
She's been coming to the event since 1986. To her, it's about "seeing all your friends and neighbors and people you only see once a year."
Dave Kamholz of Juda remembers when the Ag Chest moved the breakfast to the source of the industry it celebrates, hosted at a different dairy farm each year. The first was in 1980 at Monty and Dorothy Chesebro's farm in Monticello.
Thirty-three years later, over eggs, brats and chocolate milk at the 34th Annual Breakfast on the Farm early Saturday, May 25, Kamholz reminisced about the event's early years.
In 1980, "we had no guess as to how many people" would show up, he said. Thousands did. They ran out of brats halfway through breakfast. He and the sheriff raced in a squad to New Glarus, lights on, to buy more.
"People were waiting. It was an emergency. We had to have brats," he said.
Busloads of people turned out Saturday to this year's Breakfast at Jeff and Katie Falk's Southern Ridge Cow Palace.
The mechanics of the enormous feast were put in place 30-plus years ago by Kamholz and other early organizers, including former Ag Chest president Augie Burgi.
A couple of years after the brat emergency, Kamholz upgraded the system for making coffee. Until 1982, the Ag Chest brewed coffee in an assortment of electric pots on loan from area church kitchens - a cumbersome setup when thousands of cups are needed. That year the pots finally blew a fuse, burning up the transformer, Kamholz recalled.
So, with help of a welding company in Monroe, he jerry-rigged a new system: four 10-gallon milk cans over burners. Add one jar of Taster's Choice per can, swish with an old milk stirrer, boil.
Kamholz also designed the 4-foot-by-4-foot egg cookers, capable of scrambling 30 dozen eggs every 5 minutes, and helped build the long tables people sit at to eat.
"We built 42 of those tables," he said.
Herbert Demanouske said he used to wake up at 4:30 a.m. to help crack eggs for the Breakfast on the Farm, 33 eggs per bucket. He's since retired from those duties. Saturday morning, the 81-year-old was eating ice cream and listening to the Greg Anderson Band perform. It was his first time at Breakfast on the Farm in about a decade, he said.
There's a trick to cracking that many eggs without getting shell in the bucket.
"You split them tenderly," he said.
Now it's hard to imagine Breakfast on the Farm held anywhere but on a farm.
"They've talked about having it out at the fairgrounds," said Alice Ladwig, Sylvester Township. That wouldn't work, she added. "Breakfast on the Farm is breakfast on the farm."
She's been coming to the event since 1986. To her, it's about "seeing all your friends and neighbors and people you only see once a year."