(gentle music) (upbeat music) Dogs all over the world get custom made leg braces from a small business in rural Nebraska.

New life for old paintings.

How SpiderCam helps crop researchers.

Finding new ways to teach when COVID empties classrooms.

"What If..." (upbeat music) Greetings from History Nebraska's Ford Conservation Center.

The talented folks here creatively give new life to old items, making this a great place for this episode of "What If...", our series on innovation and creativity in Nebraska.

We'll show you some of Kenneth Be's work on a real painting here in a little bit.

But first - injured dogs might say Ben Blecha is a hero.

So might his rural community.

-[Vet Tech]Can you take her over to the surgery table?

- [Mike] Casey has a problem.

A torn ACL ligament.

- [Vet Tech] You're okay.

(dog whining,panting) - [Vet] There's not supposed to be that much movement in the knee.

Probably something like stepping in a hole.

Something happened that causes the leg to snap down.

And that's when it usually gets torn.

(melancholy music) - [Mike] They're casting Casey's leg for the solution.

A custom made brace.

Kinda like this football player's brace.

(whistle blows) - [Mike] So you're the stat apprentice?

- Stat apprentice.

Supposedly.

One day I get to step up to the big league.

- [Mike] Ben Blecha moonlights as stat keeper in training for the Dundy County Stratton football team.

(whistle blows) His day job is just blocks away.

Making those braces for dogs like Casey.

(filing plaster) Blecha started Hero Braces in 2005.

Now his small business builds custom braces for five pound chihuahuas, 250 pound mastiffs, and everything in between.

Mostly dogs, even a flamingo once.

Made in rural Benkelman for customers near and far.

- We've gone to South Africa, Australia, Lithuania, like.

We do a lot in Canada.

It's just the internet makes the world so small.

- [Mike] Blecha has his own wide ranging personal journey.

(filing plaster) - [Ben] I grew up in this small town in Nebraska, and when I was in high school, I actually had bone cancer.

And so I spent about eight or nine years trying to save my leg.

The tumor was right in my knee here, and they had replaced my knee actually twice.

We're at this point that I was gonna have this really high above the knee amputation.

They said, hey, you know, from your knee down, that's still good.

We can pull it up and we can turn it around.

We can make it your knee.

- [Mike] Make your foot, your knee?

- [Blecha] Make my foot, my knee.

- But Blecha, then an engineering student at UNL, struggled to find a prosthetic that fit right.

- So I grew up on a farm, pretty innovative, and I would take ideas to them like, 'This, fix this,' and they're like, 'Oh, you can't do that.'

So I said, 'Where do I go to school?'

(water splashing) - [Mike] Dallas, it turns out.

Then he worked in South Carolina, Kansas City and Denver before the pace of Benkelman brought him home to start his own business.

Which was fine, except... - [Ben] I represent 50 percent of the amputee population in Dundy County.

So it doesn't, it doesn't... -[Mike] So the clientele locally is not very strong?

- Right, right.

They forget that there can be an expert in our small town, right?

- [Mike] Blecha was already dabbling with dog braces.

That became his focus.

Less competition.

Blecha says, there's just a handful of dog brace makers worldwide.

But... Talk about the challenge of the process of doing what you do with dogs.

- [Ben] The biggest challenge with the dogs is fur.

Fur makes it really slippery, so it wants to slide off.

So we have to figure out all these different ways to hold it onto the leg.

The other big challenge is, this wasn't taught in veterinary school, right?

Everything that we're doing, we're just completely making up.

I mean it's through iterations.

There's science behind it, but it's completely made up.

(hammering) This is kind of been a process over 15 years of figuring out how to sculpt and change these.

(melodious instrumental music) (melodious instrumental music) - I'm kind of a finisher.

I like to finish things and see things done.

That's where my OCD comes in, too, I guess.

(melodious instrumental music) (tires on pavement) - Benkelman's a town of a thousand.

Walking distance to Kansas.

A little further to Colorado.

The kind of place where it's no problem shooting an undisturbed interview on a main street.

To be fair, things were shutting down early because of the football playoff game that night.

Talk about the pros and cons of being an entrepreneur, being a startup guy in a place the size of Benkelman.

- [Ben] I mean the nice thing is, like, all of these different buildings, I know who's in each of them and I can walk in and I can talk to them.

Like the bank, I can go like right away and talk to them in 15 minutes.

The other side is, the bank's used to lending for ag lending.

It's not commercial.

- Not for dog braces.

- [Ben] No, not for dog braces.

- [Mike] Yeah.

What would you tell other small town entrepreneurs?

What have you learned?

- [Ben] Just because somebody says no, doesn't mean that they don't want to help.

So it's really learning about communicating better what you're trying to do.

- [Mike] How important is what he's doing to Benkelman?

- [Megan] I think it's hugely important.

I mean number one, a lot of our industry is ag and he's one of the one I think businesses that really isn't ag dependent.

And so when the economy is kind of up and down, it's kind of something that's just different.

And also having a global business in a place where nobody would think could be.

It's an example of what's possible for small communities.

- [Mike] Back to Casey.

That brace has her running around again.

She's thriving.

So is Blecha's business.

Interest in Hero Braces has steadily grown over the years.

Rural Nebraska invigorates Ben Blecha.

Fuels his passionate curiosity.

- [Ben] I always look at how something can be better or how I can solve something, or I'll wake up in the middle of the night and have an idea and I'll Google for two hours so I can go back to sleep.

I mean, that's just the fun part for me.

- [Megan] He's just kind of a creative person.

He doesn't think a lot the same way a lot of people I know think and so it's kind of refreshing and exciting to hear him talk.

- In what way?

- I think he just thinks really big.

(slow music) (plaster scraping) - [Mike] The company is Hero Braces.

Blecha says the hero is the dog, or the owner, or the veterinarian.

- [Ben] There's a hero in all of us, and we're trying to tease that out.

But so much of what we see of someone that's has to wear a device, right?

They're challenged.

Well, they're a hero.

They've overcome different things, and we're just trying to help guide them along the way from what we've been through.

- [Mike] Kinda like an entrepreneurial guy who heard the words, "You've got cancer," and made good things happen.

(gentle music) An old painting of an important event in Nebraska history came here needing some work.

Let's follow that restoration from start to finish.

(gentle piano music) - [Mike] Let's start with the painting.

It's called The First Homestead, and that's what it depicts.

The artist is Gusta Strohm, who lived in Beatrice near the site of Daniel Freeman's homestead claim.

Painted in 1888, likely working off a photograph.

- It's a very honest attempt to reproduce what we know of the first homestead.

- [Mike] The painting took a beating, for a while, tucked behind a door in a US Congressman's office, before landing in Kenneth Bé's lab at the Ford Conservation Center.

There are problems like large tears and small holes, a brittle canvas pulling loose at the edges, and lots of dark grime and soot.

Remount, clean it, make it brighter, fix the holes, varnish it, all in the next month?

- All in the next month.

You'll see a big difference.

- Okay, we should let you get to work then.

We'll follow Bé as he gives new life to The First Homestead.

But first, how does someone become a painting conservator?

Start with degrees in art conservation and history, plus geology.

- [Kenneth] Together with my hand skills in studio art, it's kind of a three-legged stool that I have to navigate to be a conservator.

(gentle piano music) - [Mike] As a student, Bé discovered he didn't want to just look at art, he wanted to touch it and help others experience it.

- We want to number one, make sure that work of art survives past our generation and forward into the next generation.

But we also wanna make sure it's presented in the best way possible as the artist would have originally intended.

So here we have the canvas, which has now been removed from its old wooden stretcher.

I've also prepared these areas where there were tears and the canvas was buckling with weights, where I've had overnight flattening going on so that we can now line the painting and have these tear areas aligned properly.

- [Mike] Adhesive is helped by a heated table and vacuum to attach the painting to a new reinforced canvas.

(gentle music) - [Ken] So I'm about to start cleaning this painting.

(lid jingles) (gentle music) - [Mike] Getting rid of decades of exposure to black soot.

- [Ken] This darkening of the picture has sort of illusionistically compressed the image.

We no longer have that sense of space that the painting was meant to have at one time when we looked at it.

- [Mike] Bé's also filling those tears in the canvas.

(gentle music) Meanwhile, colleagues in nearby paper and object labs are working on different projects, a typical day at the Ford Conservation Center, a History Nebraska facility and major regional conservation lab.

- There are only maybe about five or six major regional centers that are comparable to this one.

- [Mike] A crazy range of stuff from private, museum, government, library, and corporate clients gets new life here.

Objects like saddles, swords and sculptures, books and birth certificates in the paper lab.

Bé's got his own art smorgasbord waiting for work.

The Last Homestead is easier than some past projects.

- [Ken] Paintings that have been so heavily damaged that we have just a scant recognition of how they would've once looked.

(gentle music) (paintbrush brushing) By varnishing, I'm adding a protective layer.

But aesthetically, I'm adding a layer that fills in that finely pitted surface and gives a nice even saturation, and a slight gloss to the painting.

- [Mike] This will bring out some of the color, some of the feel?

- [Kenneth] It will.

Not only will it even out the sky, but it'll especially saturate and darken all the dark foreground terrain.

(gentle music) (table rolling) (gentle music) - [Mike] How hard is it to match that color?

- [Kenneth] What I actually see is not just one color, but it's a whole sequence of colors.

I'm trying to create the same illusion that the original painting has, of layering little wisps of color.

And I'm using pigment and paint medium, which is easily removable.

- [Mike] That plus a lot of testing provides a safety net.

But to me, working on another artist's creation, owned by someone else, would be nerve-racking.

- One of the skills that I've developed is knowing what not to do, knowing the battles to pick, knowing where to stop, and knowing my limits.

And even conservation can have limits.

And so, we owe it to the artist and also the owner of the work of art to know what we can't do for them.

So that's how I stay out of trouble.

- So you're done?

- Yes, the painting treatment is finished, and now we can see it much better as it was originally intended.

(gentle music) - [Mike] Do you think Gusta would be happy with your work?

- [Kenneth] Oh, I hope so.

-[Mike] Gusta Strohm's The First Homestead leaves refreshed, for display at the Homestead National Monument.

Bé moves on to more paintings in need of new life.

Why is what you do important?

- Oh, I think art conservation is very important because we only have the material heritage, the artwork, the historic artifacts that we inherited, that have come to us down through history.

I love it, I love art conservation and it's what I do.

(gentle music) There aren't many regional conservation centers like this in the country.

The same is true for a unique tool the University of Nebraska-Lincoln uses for crop research.

(crowd cheering) - [Mike] You see this at football games, a moving camera hanging from cables above the players.

Viewers get pretty cool views of the action from this thing called Spidercam.

Did you know, this tech also helps farmers?

(upbeat rock music) (metal clanking) - Make sure you get a shot at our high-tech equipment (upbeat rock music) - Clothespins?

- Sometimes simple solutions are the best solutions.

- [Mike] The idea came from the sports world, but this Spidercam flies over plants, instead of players.

Corn, soybeans, sorghum, even tobacco.

Gathering information for different UNL crop research projects.

Scientists call it phenotyping.

- It's the only one in the states, and I believe there is another one in Europe.

- [Mike] Here's how it works.

This one acre field has an underground system for precise irrigation for the different tests.

Cables run from poles at the corners.

Changing the tension on the cables moves the dangling payload... 66 pounds of cameras and imaging equipment.

(techno background music) - We collect phenomic data like plant height, maturity date, flowering date, the biomass, something like that.

- [Dave] And because we can control the water applied to this field, we can look at it very specifically as far as the ability of the plants to use that water and then also how they respond to it, which is part of the phenotyping.

- So, this is a lot like a video game, isn't it?

- That's right.

- Okay.

So three controls and I can do this without crashing it?

- Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Absolutely.

- Okay.

All right, so we're going to go up?

-[Geng] Yep, Now, it's going up.

- [Mike] Okay, and we can go east or west at the same time.

- [Geng] That's right.

So, basically you can separate the two motion controls, one is up and down... - [Mike] Okay.

- [Geng] One is east west, south north.

- [Mike] Most of the time this isn't operated by hand.

Automation provides fast, precise, consistent measurements of plants as they grow from ground level to as high as 30 feet.

- When we use our automatic program, we will stay plus/minus five centimeters.

- Wow, - In a field.

It's pretty good.

- [Mike] Better than, say, using a drone which would be less accurate and couldn't handle the heavy payload.

Better than researchers walking fields, looking at plants and taking notes.

- [Dave] You may look at a plant and say, "Well, that's a nice, dark green color," but it's still that person's subjective opinion.

This gives you a concrete number in a lot of cases that you can't get with having different people doing the data collection.

- [Ed] And so these camera systems, like the Spidercam system, allows researchers to monitor many different populations of plants, many different genotypes, and to do it more rapidly and more precisely.

- You could actually play a football game here.

- [Geng] That's right.

- [Mike] You've got the camera.

- We'll have to invite someone here.

(laughs) (upbeat music) (cheering and claps at the background) COVID-19 quickly forced educators to find innovative, creative ways to teach remotely.

Here's how one school did it in a place where remote is a way of life.

(shoes squeaking) - [Sarah] In a matter of a few days I had to completely kind of flip the way that I teach.

- [Jordyn] And it really went from see you next week, to see you next fall.

- [Chris] It is really weird walking around here.

Kids are supposed to be running through the halls.

- [Sarah] I think we're in uncharted territory.

- That uncharted territory hit Mullen and every other Nebraska school in March of 2020.

COVID-19 forced schools to close doors.

Forced parents, parents and students to find new ways to teach and learn remotely in a really remote place.

(train horn blowing) - The thing about Mullen is we're right in the heart of the Sandhills.

We've got probably about 500 people in our town, but our district is the size of Rhode Island, square footage-wise.

We run six bus routes and two of them are over an hour one way.

- Our kids go to school in Mullen and in order for them to get to the school bus though, we take them to our neighbor's place actually, which is a private trail road, about five miles.

It takes about an hour and 20 with the bus.

- A place with challenges for this new way of teaching.

Quality internet and cell service are issues for some.

But advantages too.

Every student was already assigned a Chromebook through a special program.

And some Mullen teachers were already trained in a blended education model involving more use of online interaction and materials.

They made the less common choice of graded work for grades 6-12 and figured out new ways to teach and learn.

- Show of hands, who has the materials that I sent you in an email.

I think they're all in most houses.

Awesome.

So this is super fun.

- Sarah Hardin starts her Chem 1 class with an experiment on intermolecular forces.

- So I'm gonna take you to my lab.

You guys excited to see my home lab?

You didn't even know I had a lab at home did you?

Gonna take you there.

It's on the floor!

Okay.

Cause I don't have wifi in my kitchen very well, so I'm hanging out on the floor to do this.

- Hardin and 14 students are doing the same experiment remotely.

Put water on a cookie sheet, cut a piece of paper to create a boat, put the boat in the water, put a drop of dish soap in the cutout, and see how fast the boat moves across the pan.

- Here's the most important part though.

Why did that work?

I've got to get off the floor.

Hold on.

I think the biggest challenge for me as an educator, and specifically in science, was the fact that my classroom is never that classroom where kids are sitting the whole time.

I did lecture over Zoom quite a bit, especially those advanced classes, but at some point, they get bored, I get bored.

You know what, let's just find some simple materials in your house and do a simple experiment using those tools and try to get a little creative that way to still make it fun for the kids and not just sitting in front of a computer for hours on end.

That's some pretty sweet, really simple chemistry right there.

- In some cases you ran materials around to people.

- I did.

- A lot of the things the staff kind of came up with kind of on the fly a little bit.

- [Mike] Lots of creative use of Zoom, the online platform Canvas, Google docs.

Math lessons posted to YouTube.

Students recording daily videos of 15 minutes of activity for their PE teacher.

And teachers finding different ways to turn home spaces into classrooms.

- It was kind of a constant mess for those weeks.

And you kind of had to have a space like that you could just leave and walk away from at the end of the night and start again the next day.

- I absolutely loved that.

It still helped me visualize what I was doing.

- [Mike] Madison Jones was one of the students in Hardin's science classes.

- [Man] Madison J Jones (cheering, horns) - [Mike] And one of Mullen's 14 Class of 2020 seniors.

A self-described hands-on learner figuring out different ways to learn when this became her classroom.

So I wanted to kind of recreate the school life at my house.

I'd get up, have breakfast with my family if they were home, and then most of the time I'd go to the kitchen table and start on homework.

It was really hard, especially towards the end with the senioritis and just wanting to be done.

(relaxed music) - It took actually some time for me to really understand and comprehend exactly what all was going on at that time.

The most elusive thing for me to try to achieve was trying to keep the kids' attention and their creativity.

Instead of just her reading these daily on paper, I thought it was fun for her just when I would write them on the mirror or I would write them there on the dining room window.

It just was a little change of pace for her and a little extra fun-ness, I suppose, for her.

It worked out really well though.

Good job.

Okay, now circle each vowel that you see.

What are your vowels?

- A, E, I, O, U.

- Good.

Can you circle those please?

- You decided to kind of make sure your ranch was part of the classroom too.

- Absolutely.

Absolutely.

I think that the ranch offers so many learning opportunities for the kids.

(beeping) - [Girl] Between 90 and 100.

(cow mooing) - Take that one, right there.

- Okay.

- Hold the wire.

(acoustic guitar music) - [Mike] Alright, tell me what I need to do.

- [Kaisley] When you swing, you want it kind of in front of you, so when you look at the thing, you can see it.

(acoustic guitar music) - You are taking your life into your hands, you know that?

All right, we'll call that good.

I got close.

(acoustic guitar music) Yay!

- [Kaisley] Oh man.

- [Voice] Is it broke?

- What I've taken from this is learning though what my kids love to do and how they learn best.

Okay, well there you go.

(gentle music) - [Mike] When COVID took over, so did problem solving and creativity.

- Even though we weren't in the regular setting, we were able to move outside the box, think outside the box, and able to educate our kids.

- You will have essentially all week to do two things.

One of them is a lab.

- Do you think teachers get enough credit for being innovative?

- Probably not.

But when you really think about it, we do have to do that every day.

You have to make sure not only are you meeting all the curriculum, but that every student in your class is learning.

Fill out that form.

I need your home address to mail you some food for a lab.

Don't eat the food when you get it.

Jared, that was directed at you.

(laughs) And so every day, there's this special way that teachers have to monitor our kids to make sure that they are understanding it and having fun while they're doing it.

Okay.

Bye.

(click) (theme music) Check out all of our "What If..." stories and videos online.

And #WhatIfNebraska on social media.

Thanks to the Ford Conservation Center folks for letting us spend some time here and showing us what they do.

Thanks to you for watching "What If..." (theme music) (drone buzzing) (laughter) - [Mike] Whatta you got?

- [Justin] I have been pooped on while flying the drone.

Suffering for my craft.

You're welcome, Mike.

(Mike talking in background) -[Mike] Crashing into the field is bad?

- [Geng] Uhh... Well... (theme music) - [Mike whispers] Come here.

(tapping sounds, leaves crunch) (theme music) Copyright 2021 NET Foundation for Television