Beyond the farm: What happens after the milk leaves?

You know what it takes to get milk into the tank. You know the early mornings, long days and hundreds of decisions that go into keeping a herd healthy and a dairy moving forward. You know the work that happens before a milk truck ever pulls away from the farm. However, once that truck leaves the driveway, there is an entire side of the dairy industry that farmers may not get to see every day.

That is one of the biggest things I have learned during my internship with Midwest Dairy.

Coming into this experience, I understood the basic role of the dairy checkoff. I knew it supported dairy promotion and helped connect consumers with dairy. What I didn’t fully understand was just how much work happens behind the scenes to make those connections possible.

Once milk leaves the farm, it enters a much larger marketplace filled with consumers, retailers, foodservice operators, health professionals, educators and industry partners. Each has a role in how dairy is viewed, purchased and enjoyed. Understanding that side of the industry has given me a new appreciation for how many pieces have to come together to support dairy.

Midwest Dairy’s mission is simple: “We work with others to give consumers an excellent dairy experience.” The organization focuses on sharing consumer insights and developing programs and resources with retail, health and wellness, school foodservice and industry partners. The goal is to maximize the impact of dairy checkoff investments by working with and through those partners to understand what resonates with today’s consumer.

As a dairy farmer, you probably aren’t spending much time wondering what a consumer is thinking while standing in front of the dairy case. Midwest Dairy is.

What are consumers looking for when they shop for food? What influences their decisions? What questions do they have? What makes them trust the products they purchase?

Those answers continue to change. The way consumers shop and get information changes, food trends evolve and factors such as nutrition, sustainability, convenience, local connections and enjoyment can influence purchasing decisions.

Midwest Dairy uses consumer research and real-time experiences to understand those changes and identify opportunities for dairy. That information then helps shape the programs, resources and partnerships designed to keep dairy relevant to today’s consumers.

One of the most eye-opening parts of my internship has been realizing how much goes into something that a consumer may only see for a few seconds.

A consumer might see a dairy promotion, nutrition message, new product or an educational experience. What they don’t see is the research, planning, conversations and strategy that came before it. There are decisions about the audience, the message, the best way to reach people and how to measure whether the effort made an impact.

In many ways, it’s not all that different from running a dairy.

A consumer sees a gallon of milk on the grocery store shelf. You see everything behind it. You know that gallon didn’t happen because of one decision or one person. It took healthy cows, good nutrition, equipment, employees and countless decisions made throughout the day. Much of that work is invisible to the person who eventually buys the milk.

I’ve come to see dairy promotion in much the same way. The finished message is only one small piece of a much larger process, and that was something I didn’t fully appreciate before this internship.

I also didn’t realize how much the checkoff relies on listening. Midwest Dairy isn’t simply deciding what consumers need to hear about dairy. It is gathering information, learning from experiences and using those insights to determine what may work next. When an idea reaches the grocery aisle, classroom or another consumer setting, the response becomes another opportunity to learn.

For me, that has been one of the most valuable lessons of this internship: The dairy industry is much bigger than what happens on the farm, but it all remains connected to the farm.

The farther milk travels from the farm, the easier it can be to lose sight of where it started, but every consumer experience with dairy ultimately traces back to a dairy farm.

Farmers produce the milk. The checkoff helps create opportunities to build demand for it, and the work in between helps connect the two.

Before this internship, I thought of that process as a much straighter line. Now, I see it more as a network of people, research, partnerships and experiences all working toward the same goal.

For dairy farmers, that bigger picture may be easy to miss when the focus is on the herd, crops, employees and everything else that comes with running a dairy. But there is a lot happening after the milk truck pulls away.

I am leaving this internship with a much greater appreciation for that work and for the farmers at the center of it.

The work on the farm may end when the milk truck pulls away, but the dairy story doesn’t. It simply moves beyond the farm.