The autumn
of his career
Retiring
Supreme Court justice will return to his 192-acre tree farm
By
David Ziemer
david.ziemer@wislawjournal.com
Oct.
11, 2006
If
you were a tree, what kind of tree would you like to be?
Personally,
I would choose the oak, but spending a day during the final weekend
of September on state Supreme Court Justice Jon P. Wilcox’s
192-acre tree farm of near Wautoma, it’s easy to understand
why he would choose the maple.
The
evergreens are green, of course, and the oaks are still mostly
green, but the maples are at their peak fall color — glorious
burning red.
It
is here that Wilcox will spend his retirement after the court
finishes its current term. He will have spent 15 years on the
high court, 13 years as a circuit court judge, six years in the
state Assembly and 14 years practicing law, but he will still
have plenty to keep him busy managing the farm.
Wilcox
and his family have been in agriculture since his great-great-grandfather
settled here in the 19th century. Originally, the family raised
cows and traditional agricultural crops. The sandy soil, however,
was not the best for such a venture, and when Wilcox was a boy
following World War II, his father began to start planting evergreens
for use as Christmas trees.
Future
Christmas trees can still be found on the farm, as well as trees
destined to become pulp, lumber, furniture, firewood, woodchips,
and someday, Wilcox speculates, bio-fuel.
Wilcox
is quick to point out that the farm is a fully renewable resource,
and must be. The pine trees that will eventually be converted
to lumber for sale at Home Depots must be part of sustainable
forestry; Home Depot won’t purchase any lumber from clear-cutting.
 |
| Justice
Jon P. Wilcox will retire from the state Supreme Court next
August and focus on his 192-acre tree farm near Watoma. |
Like
most Supreme Court justices, Wilcox has spent most of each year
in Madison since joining the court. After commuting for about
five weeks during his first term, he and his wife bought a house
in Madison where they have resided when the court is in session.
After retiring from the court, he will return to the Wautoma area.
While
Wilcox has been in law for a long time, his experience in Wisconsin
agriculture goes back to his childhood.
It
was only when he took the bench as a Waushara County circuit court
judge that he fully abandoned traditional agriculture, and limited
his farming to trees.
Until
then, he had worked as a lawyer and farmer. It was a good combination
in a rural community. He knew the other local farmers, and his
practice involved real estate, litigation, forming corporations
for the farmers, even criminal and homicide (at least until he
joined the state Legislature, and that aspect of the practice
became a political liability).
His
time on the circuit court bench exposed him to a wide variety
of experiences as well. Waushara County only has one judgeship,
so, just as a justice on the Supreme Court, the judge hears everything
and must be a generalist — as though combining any law practice
or judgeship with a working farm wasn’t enough to qualify
a man as well-rounded.
Wilcox
estimates that he has planted 500,000 trees in his life. Even
on a farm this vast, he can identify which rows of trees were
planted by him, his wife, his father, or his children, and when.
These
days, however, he says most of the new trees are planted by the
ubiquitous squirrels on the property (who don’t charge anything
for the service). This spring his wife planted an additional 24,000
trees to replace those lost in a forest fire that ravaged Waushara
County last year. It was the third forest fire in the 50 years
that Wilcox has been farming that has damaged the property.
Besides
fire, insects and hail storms provide the major threats to the
trees. A hail storm in 2000 damaged approximately 100,000 trees,
besides breaking every window in the house. It took seven foresters
two weeks to decide which trees would live and which would have
to be cut down.
In
sporadic areas around the property, patches of oak trees stand
lifeless due to oak wilt. It’s a disease spread by beetles
that is particularly difficult to destroy because the trees can
only be removed during a short period of the year, lest the disease
spread to other trees.
So,
after Wilcox leaves the court, he will no longer face the usual
nemeses of the legal profession — ambiguous statutes, inconsistent
precedents, and multi-factor balancing tests. Instead, his battle
against the nemeses of the tree farmer — fire, insects and
hail — will continue.
