Our leadership had the pleasure of hosting nearly 70 Wisconsin FFA (Future Farmers of America) students on October 25th, 2022, as the student bus carrying high school students from ten schools in Western Wisconsin (Black River Falls, Melrose, Osseo, Whitehall among others) was on its way to Indianapolis to attend programming for the National FFA convention. Vice President of Marketing, Mark Losching, spent a few hours with these students educating them on our businesses and topics covering national and international dairy and food & beverage processing.
The students were split into two groups and taken on tours of our Schlueter Co. factory where we highlighted both sides of the business: stainless processing equipment and milking equipment/ dairy supplies. Separately, the groups attended a session in our conference room that covered categories of products in these industries, showed them videos of some of the largest dairies in the world that are customers of ours and also took them through emerging and new technologies in the dairy world including our new Calf 35 lower vacuum and compressed air revolutionary pulsation system for improving herd and teat health and overall milk production.
The groups were given a chance to showcase their knowledge of these industries by answering trivia questions for candy and prizes. They were aware that Wisconsin is the nation’s largest cheese producer and California the largest milk producer, but some were surprised to learn that the world’s largest dairy is in Saudi Arabia and our nation’s largest dairy is in Texas.
Overall this was a wonderful experience and high school students soon to be entering college and the work force were given the opportunity to learn about food and beverage and farming industries and also manufacturing and production of products used within those industries. Many students engaged directly with our factory employees who told their stories and what they were currently fabricating. Hopefully, we encouraged some of them to consider looking into agriculture more as future career opportunities and encouraged the sustaining of Wisconsin as America’s Dairyland.
We capped the morning off with delicious ice cream sandwiches and photos with the students in front of our factory. We bid them good luck at their National FFA Convention and spoke about continuing to do this in subsequent years! Everyone at The Schlueter Company greatly enjoyed having them with us!
