I would strongly encourage you to figure out your rootstock questions (including irrigation, support/training and size/manageability) before you start anything at scale. 118, 890, 969 and 106 are reasonably similar. G41 is an entirely different animal, and 214 is also.
Anything of significant size in WI shouldn’t need irrigation, but the dwarfing stock will. I spend a lot of time in southern WI. If your field is anything like the farms I go to, drainage will be a humongous concern. Apple trees really don’t like wet- the roots can literally drown, and if they don’t root rot is still an issue.
I do love to see the Wolf River in any WI planting
I’m in a similar position: I’m looking to plant 10-20 acres, but I now have years of grafting experience and have learned how best to care for and manage the new trees. My wife and I work together when we graft, I have the tools and the parafilm, she does everything else. LABEL EVERYTHING… nothing is more frustrating than realizing you don’t know what the scion is or whether it’s a fully dwarfing or semistandard rootstock… and once you lose track there’s no good way to find out before it’s “too late” (except that the B118 is your only redflesh apple I see, so you should be able to ID that one pretty easily). The first few years when I started out I had no idea what I was doing; I learned that conventional wisdom is often wrong. Every grafting clinic I’ve ever been to says to use cut chunks of scion, and the new leader will come from a side bud- that advice is terrible, you want terminal buds whenever you can use them (they can easily save you a year on establishment). I’ve estimated that I want trees per acre in the mid 300s, and I don’t want to graft more than about that many trees per year. I’m pretty time-efficient grafting, but it took multiple seasons before I learned to do everything the way I do now.
You really should buy at least some nursery stock to plant a test plot. Those trees will be at least a couple years ahead of what you’re growing out, and they’ll let you make some mistakes on a smaller scale. I can’t stress this enough.
You talk a lot about how your materials costs are “less than a university course”. That’s a pretty silly comparison. That university course will run for one term and end, and you get whatever benefits it confers for the rest of your life, no ongoing labor or cost involved. The cost of buying/collecting rootstock and scion is just the very tip of the iceberg. The labor involved in grafting 1,000 trees is radically more expensive than the components. Even with “free” labor, you’re probably housing/feeding/insuring these people. They probably have limited experience with this, and they will kill your trees, snap off your grafts, and make all the dumb mistakes that every single person giving you advice here also made when we were learning… mistakes you will also probably make.
I think what you’re doing is cool, but it sounds more than a little reckless to me. If you have land, cash, labor and patience to burn, go for it. But farming isn’t about just jumping in with both feet to do something new. It takes time, patience and experience. And money, and more time.