Wisconsin Life

45 years covering Wisconsin's dairy industry for The Milkweed

[gentle music]

Pete Hardin: Hey, Bertie, I like you. Come on. I’m currently 75 years old. I could’ve retired a long time ago. Who wants some green stuff? But I love what I do, and I’d like to keep doing it a few more years.

I’m Pete Hardin. I’m editor/publisher of The Milkweed, which is a monthly dairy economics report. The Milkweed is a 12-page publication. The intended primary reader is the dairy farmer. I love the industry. I love many of the people in it. I love the animals. It’s not work.

When I was born, my home county in New Jersey had over 4,000 dairy farms. Everybody in my family was either a dairy farmer or an agribusiness person. I spent a lot of time on the farm. In the mid-1970s, I pursued a master’s degree in agricultural journalism from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I founded The Milkweed in June of 1979. Been at it 45 and a half years.

In terms of what gets me up in the morning, just, hey, it’s another day, there’s another month’s issue looking at us. Hey, Ed. We’re gonna make that two columns wide, crop it as shown.

For the first half of this year, it’s like, cottage cheese, yogurt, ice cream, even fluid milk sales are up. I’ve developed my nucleus of hundreds of sources in the industry over the years. It’s a lot of, you know, sustaining and continuing personal relationships.

Is your dad still up here?

Person on phone: Uh, yes.

Pete: Say hi to him for me. I’m getting a lot of my info from real people. I may go to Arena Cheese or other cheese plants, and get the straight scoop from the owners and the employees.

Bill Hanson: This is the cheese curd crew. So, they’re…

Pete: Okay, they’re busy today.

Bill: They’re busy today.

Pete: We milk about 200 cows, 220. And I also talk to a lot of farmers. All I can say is, showing a bias, Jerseys are my favorite, and these are beautiful. Beautiful heifers.

There are several kinds of good stories. There’s the nice stories, and we got tough stories. There’s the feature story about a successful cheese factory or a successful dairy farm. Then there are investigative stories where I like to, I like to kick butt.

There’s virtually zero investigative reporting in the dairy press. How do these higher cheese prices affect operations like yours?

Person: Well, the only…

Pete: I’m a reporter at heart with a lot of activist at heart also. You gotta get your boots dirty in this business. You know, as a monthly publication, I have a monthly cycle. The weeks get progressively more difficult leading up to the week before printing, when it’s pretty hectic.

The Register Print Center in Brodhead becomes my home away from home the few days leading up to finishing the paper each month. And try to make the flame as prominent as we can.

The pages, when completed, are transferred to the printer up in Madison. [printing press running]

Within two hours from the printer receiving the electronic pages, the paper’s done.

We also have email subscribers, but my principal audience is the dairy farm family. They’d rather be able to spill coffee in the morning on their reading material.

It’s an art more than a science, what I do. You know, I view the dairy industry as having a wonderful story to tell. It is literally the principal economic lifeblood of Wisconsin. It’s got pulses. The pulse of milk production, the pulse of consumer demand, the pulses of the farmer and his or her cows, raising the animal and then milking it through its productive lifetime. It’s really intriguing and complex. I just think we have a lot more good story to tell. I’m not ready to go out to pasture.

[gentle music]