A life devoted to Brown Swiss

LAKE MILLS, Wis. — The word passion would describe Norman C. Magnussen’s lifelong involvement with the Brown Swiss breed.

Magnussen, who grew up on his family’s Norvic Farm near Lake Mills, recently retired from the Brown Swiss Cattle Breeders’ Association of the USA, after serving as the organization’s executive secretary for the last seven years, and owning and operating Brown Swiss Sale Service for more than four decades prior.

While the time he spent at the helm of the association was just a fraction of his career, Magnussen is proud of what was accomplished. Magnussen said he entered into the position with two priorities: maintaining the integrity of the breed and keeping the association’s front door open.

“Our breeders have made huge strides with production,” Magnussen said. “With the 2020 and 2025 base changes we have put more value on fat, to go along with the high protein. We’ve put more emphasis on fertility in our Progressive Performance Ranking formula.”

Magnussen noted, as an example of production gains, that for a Brown Swiss cow to make the 2X Milk Honor Roll in the milking senior yearling class requires her to make a record over 37,300 pounds of milk.

“I used Facebook as a promotion tool to feature those top individual and lifetime production cows,” Magnussen said.

The greatest challenge Magnussen faced during his tenure was steering the association through the coronavirus pandemic, which delayed the 2020 World Brown Swiss Conference
— set to be held in the U.S. — by two years. The BSCBA had previously hosted the event in both 1980 and in 2000.

“When I was hired, the association had already committed to hosting the conference,” Magnussen said. “It’s not an easy feat to plan an event like that on a normal basis. Keeping the plans organized, current and moving forward, for nearly four years was a real trick.”

Through the combined efforts of the group’s event planner, staff and volunteers, Magnussen said the association was able to host a great conference, held during World Dairy Expo, featuring the World Premier Sale, which boasted an average of $8,278, while promoting U.S. genetics to the world market.

Hosting the World Conference opened many doors, Magnussen said.

“I had the opportunity to travel to Europe and attend meetings and events with officials of the European associations,” Magnussen said. “At that point we were working with them to share genomic information back and forth. It’s essential for us that genomic information be shared amongst all Brown Swiss associations, to keep the breed moving forward.”

Magnussen said there was one task he wanted to accomplish that proved to be out of reach during his tenure, because of the prohibitive cost of the project.

“There’s a card in the office on every Brown Swiss, male and female, that was ever registered, up until the point we started computerizing our registration,” Magnussen said. “I’d say, without exaggeration, that there are at least a million of those cards.”

Those cards are just a portion of the wealth of breed history stored at the association’s office.

“The association moved to their current address in Beloit in 1936,” Magnussen said. “Besides the registry cards, there are old (Brown Swiss) Bulletins, catalogs, photographs and print cuts. You want to save the history, but there will come a point in time when it’s going to have to be downsized.”

For 41 years before becoming the association’s executive secretary, Magnussen ran Brown Swiss Sale Service, which had been established by his father, Norman E. Magnussen, in 1947.

Magnussen’s entry into the family business came earlier than he had expected, following his father’s sudden death in 1976. Magnussen was a student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison at the time.

“I had the option of either finishing school or getting into the sale business,” Magnussen said.

Opting to forgo finishing his degree, Magnussen moved forward with his father’s business.

“Just a couple of weeks before he passed away, my father had sent me to Colorado to pick cattle for the 1976 Wisconsin National Sale,” Magnussen said. “The sale was 90% set-up when he passed, the advertising had been started, and everything was in motion. Family and friends, like Al Piper and Darrel Worden, helped me set the course to continue.”

The decision to leave behind his career in a business steeped in family tradition, in favor of heading up the association, was not an easy one for Magnussen.

“Being in the sale business, I was gone a lot, sometimes two weeks or more at a time,” Magnussen said. “I really enjoyed getting to the farms from coast to coast, sometimes two or three times a year. I used to say I was on a first-name basis with most of the breeder’s dogs. But my wife and I haven’t ever really had the chance to travel, outside of cow functions. She would attend conventions with me and she clerked about 90% of my sales over the years.”

The couple hopes to remedy that with Magnussen’s retirement, with plans to visit their daughter in Louisiana and their son in Texas, as well as other family and friends. They have a few non-cow destinations on their list as well, including a possible trip to Europe.

Magnussen said he is grateful for the career he has enjoyed, centered around the Brown Swiss cow. From his earliest memories, he has had a front-row seat watching the breed and the dairy industry develop and grow.

“My father was one of the original founders of World Dairy Expo in 1967,” Magnussen said. “I have never missed an Expo, and to think of all the history I have witnessed, close-up, is pretty astounding.”

Magnussen said he feels his greatest accomplishment was the work he put into helping the breed advance.

“A lot of people thought I was the perfect fit for the job with my history with Brown Swiss, the cow families and the people,” Magnussen said. “That was all fine, but you can read about that in the history books. It’s about where we’re going to move forward from here.”