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Rob:
Welcome to our podcast, all about the car, brought to you by Schierl Tire and Service. I'm your host Rob Hoffman an auto service specialist with over 46 years of industry experience. A regular guest on the ride with me today is Bill Schierl a guy that logs a lot of Wisconsin miles and always has a lot of great questions. Welcome back, Bill.
Bill:
Thanks Rob. Glad to be here today on the road.
We also have a very special guest with us, Nancy Dick of Nancy Dick Trucking. Welcome Nancy, and thanks for joining us.
Nancy:
Thanks for having me.
It's good to have you here. It's actually, we're in your town, so .
Yeah.
Thanks for inviting us. Nancy's in the business of transporting milk, I guess to say it plainly and she'll tell us in our podcast, this is a very specialized type of trucking that is a crucial link between the producers and the processors. But it hasn't always been like this. In the early 19 hundreds, dairy farmers would not only haul their own milk in 10 gallon milk cans, but also for the neighboring dairy farms as well. They would use steak bed trucks or in some cases horse drawn wagons in where they would also haul ice, eggs, feed, and even furniture. I found out. So not very specialized at all. By the 1970s, most milk can handlers. Were on the way out making way to today's proprietary milk haulers. So Nancy, you've been doing this for quite a while and as a matter of fact, it's been in your family for a while or you've taken over.
I've had the business for 25 years.
Oh my god,
That's a while.
Yeah, that's... That's a long while.
And I've hauled for my dad for 41.
Wow.
Oh, so this is nothing new to you at all by any means?
No, no, not at all. I'm a lifer. That's what I tell my farmers .
So you could probably almost do this with your eyes closed, but that's the last thing you wanna do. Do it with your eyes closed cuz you're on the road a lot. You're driving a lot. You've gotta play well with the D O T. So your father started this we.
The actual...
Or is that a really deep question because there's probably a lot to that?
Well it is cuz dad hauled cans before he hauled bulk. He hauled... Started hauling bulk in 1958. So I would say probably another 10, 12 years before that he was hauling cans.
Now is this a business that he started?
No, actually he worked for Farmer's Pride Cheese Factory that was just east of Stetsonville when he was 13. And when he turned 16 they had him start hauling cans and eventually he bought the can business from them and went from there.
Wow. So definitely a lifer . Yeah.
That's amazing. So how many cans actually fit on a truck back then?
That I couldn't tell you. That was before my time.
. Lemme just think of, you know, cans of milk and that, the volume differential and the number of trips that you were taking out to a farm.
I really have no idea.
That'd be a lot more, let's just say it was a lot more trips.
Yeah, the first milk truck that dad put on the road had a 2,500 gallon tank on it. I've got farmers that have bigger tanks than that right now.
. Got it.
So when you say cans, I'm trying to picture what a can is. How many gallons is that?
It's gotta be around 10. It's 87 and a half pounds.
87 and a half pounds. Okay.
So it comes out to about 10 gallon cans.
Speaker 2:
It's the old cans that you see sitting in antique stores on the side with like the little, with the two handles on the side. That's a milk can.
One of those.
Okay. Or many of those . Yeah. Well Jamie from our Medford Tire and Service Center has just walked in and joined us. Welcome Jamie.
Jamie:
Good morning. Thanks Rob.
It's good to see you. And we have somebody you're very familiar with, Nancy here.
Yes.
And my next question for Nancy was how many trucks does she operate? But I bet that's something you could tell us too, because you service her trucks when it comes to tires. Is that right? Jamie?
Three.
Three trucks. Okay.
That's my guess
Three now cuz I just downsized a little bit. So yeah,
That's what I thought. There was four at one time.
I was up to six for a while.
Oh my goodness.
And that got to be a little more than I wanted to handle, so we backed off a little bit.
That's a lot to keep track of.
Speaker 3:
It is and it's way more headaches than I need. So... .
Yeah, sometimes the bigger you get, the more headaches that come with that.
With everything, with the paperwork and employees and the paperwork that goes with them. It just got to be too much for one person to handle.
You've gotta have drivers to drive these trucks.
Right. And that's another problem, trying to find somebody that's dedicated and can handle the trucks that we have and is good with the farmers. Cuz if they're not good with the farmers, we have a real problem.
Yeah. The farmers don't want 'em to come in their yard.
Absolutely.
And the next thing you know, they're hollering and they're my boss. So if that comes to that point, we either gotta move em on or move em off that farm, which makes for another problem.
You know, to get somebody else in there. So...
That might be the hard part of the job. So you've got three trucks and are they typically all moving or going at the same time? So every day, all three trucks?
Two that are on the road full-time and one sitting just in case because...
Okay.
Most of the dealers now don't carry or have on the lot a milk truck for rent. It just costs too much for them to have it sit there and get used part-time. I mean, it's there to be sold, but I'm still, you can't have trucks sitting there just waiting. And it is a specialized truck, so it's not like a tractor where you can just hook on another trailer and go with it. So...
You have trucks that run all the way up to Ashland, right? Or is it Superior or you go quite a ways?
Yeah, we go all the way to the water. At one time I ran almost the whole state. It was from...
Oh really?
Ashland to Reedsburg to Grantsburg to Waupaca.
New Speaker:
When I had...
So are they overnighting at that point?
No. No.
So it's
Always there and back.
One load and back. Yeah.
That's a long day.
Is that...
Yes, very long.
Do any haulers go overnight like that? Or is it the milk quality, you know, like freshness?
No, I mean the milk can be on the truck the 24, 36 hours, but the only ones that I know that run overnight are the people that haul the goat milk because they are so far spread and obviously the volume isn't there. So...
Right.
They end up having to overnight and then continue on the next day sometimes, but or bring it in the next day they get it loaded anyway.
But mine all came back, but that was part of the reason that we backed off because it was just getting to be too much. The drivers were getting tired and it's not worth it.
So today, what is your geography radius of service?
We still go to Ashland every night.
Oh wow.
Oh my gosh.
We have one very large farm up there that we pick up and then a couple smaller ones to fill in the load. But there and over to Wausau as far as one just outta Anoa. And then the rest is pretty much local here.
So in that sense of like you're building a relationship with, and I'll say the producer or the farmer, then how do you bring on, or if a producer changes haulers, is that typical? Talk a little bit about the contract of how does the business work?
Let's see...
That's a big question.
. Well you know like you, you're talking about a haul that you've had for years up in Ashland and I just think, oh well say they stop. Do they bid out hauling?
Occasionally they do. The bigger ones are good for sending out notices that they would like bids on their milk. Most of the smaller ones are pretty much settled where they are.
So there's not a lot of change. If I've been hauling for a farmer, I've been hauling him for years.
Well that farmer I've up north, I've been hauling him for 17 years.
That's a while. . Yeah.
That's awesome.
Dad had something that we hauled for 25, 30 years.
But there isn't a lot of milk that's moving from company to company right now as far as processors go. Everything is pretty much stagnated. It's just where you are is where you are and a lot of the processors aren't taking extra milk. I don't know if there really is too much milk in the system or if they're just, their contracts on the other end aren't enough to warrant them wanting to move that kind of milks.
So as much of the state that you cover today, Nancy, are those your accounts? Would you call them the farms?
I guess, yeah.
Okay. How many accounts do you have, if you don't mind sharing that information?
I wanna say there's like 50 or 52 total.
Okay. It sounds like there's administrative part to your business too, is that you also, are you doing that part of it?
Yeah, I'm the chief cook bottle washer...
You're doing the whole deal.
Mechanic, electrician, veterinary for the farmers. You know I...
.
Oh, oh my gosh.
Well when you walk into a barn at two o'clock in the morning and everybody's bellerin', you go look because there's something wrong.
You know there's something wrong. And whether it's a water leak or a calf in a gutter or whatever, you take care of it, call 'em and keep going.
Well you've gotta do just about everything. Wow.
Well you help out as much as you can.
And you're also driving one of the trucks.
What's amazing with the research I did is how important the milk haulers are. I mean you're a very important link between the producer or the farms as we're talking about here. And the processors, which are the cheese factories. What other kind of factories butt...
Cheese factory, bottling plants, butter plant now.
So without trucking firms like yourself, it just, they'd never be together. It never happened. It's such an important piece.
How long does it actually take for a pickup? I just think of coming back to the cans. we're well beyond that, but there's pump stations, there's gathering points, the farm. And as technology has continued to progress, how fast do you load the truck?
It all depends on the size of the farm and in my case, which truck we have, because I've got three trucks and technically I got three different pumps in them. The truck that I normally drive has got the fastest pump. I can pump 1,435 pounds a minute.
Okay, that's fast.
That's impressive.
Yeah, there is one bigger than that yet, but I can't afford that one.
So that's on your wishlist, that's your Christmas wishlist.
All right.
And I'm assuming the ratio there is the faster you can get the milk onto the truck, you can get to another farm and pick up another account in that same eight hour, nine hour, 10 hour day.
Correct.
Take my big farm up north. We can load his big tank has got about 44,000 and we can load that in like 28 minutes.
Okay. Wow. So you're on the property and off within 45 minutes
Usually. Yeah.
At that particular, I mean your your average farmer, your average family firm, 20 minutes.
This is probably an unfair question and if you didn't know the answer, I won't hold it against you, but do you by chance know about how many milk haulers are in the state of Wisconsin?
No idea.
No idea. There's gotta be a lot of you out there, right?
Well if you run down 29, you would think there is cause that's all you need. chasing from one plant to the other. But...
So if you take that thought and you times it by all of these gallons or poundage that you're talking about, there's a lot of milk happening here. There's a lot of milk being transported. As with every, all about the car podcast, we always break away halfway through to a very interesting and somewhat distant at times road trip destination. And this time we are gonna take a cheese factory tour and the company name, which is deep-seated in history, is Carr Valley Cheese.
The reason I chose this to research and take our trip to was because they're located in Lavalle, Wisconsin. Their main location, their factory's actually in Lavalle and they've been around a long time. And we have a location in Lavalle. So we're gonna hop in, head down to Lavallle, Wisconsin and check out what they've got to offer. So Carr Valley Cheese remains one of Wisconsin's traditional cheese plants. Famous for its cheddar varieties. Oh that sounds good already. Made the old fashioned way. Owned and operated by the Cook family. Carr Valley will celebrate 120 years this year.
That's quite a few years.
That's quite, I call aged cheese.
Oh ba-dum-bum .
They actually have gotten to the point where they're doing designer cheeses and Mr. Cook has been known to say, no one's making them but me and that his name is Sid. So it's really interesting. You've gotta get there early to see the cheese factory and operation. Kind of like being a baker. You gotta get up at the crack of dawn and be down there and see it. The tour does open at nine o'clock each day.
I think it's eight to noon.
Is it? Eight to noon?
Eight.
So you can see the observation in cheese making process.
And they recommend you get there at eight.
If you wanna see as much as you can possibly see
You need a place in front of the window.
And open six days a week. All right. We're back with Nancy. With Nancy Dick Trucking. We're talking about North Central Wisconsin milk hauling. And let's talk a little bit about that fleet and what you have to do to keep those three trucks rolling and healthy. And Jamie, I know you have a part in that as well, so you've gotta deal with all kinds of things like seasonal axle, weight limits, the D O T of course it's very important that you get to the all these producers because milk can't stand still.
No, it can't. And most of the farmers don't have enough capacity to have more than two days in their tank. There's some states that have requirements that they have to be able to hold three days. Wisconsin's not one of them. So yeah, they have to run one way or the other.
No rest for the wicked for sure.
No.
And you service are picking up milk seven days a week.
Well how do you go on vacation, Nancy?
You don't.
Speaker 1:
Oh! .
You have really good people to back you up.
Yeah, great story. Every time mom and dad wanted to go somewhere, the drivers would rebel. Somebody wouldn't show up for work and the rest of us would have to pick up the slack and. and I do have a couple of really good sub drivers, but they have regular jobs too, so I kind of gotta work around what they're planning too. So...
Wow you've got a full day every day I can tell about how many miles does, let's say each truck put on a year, how long do these trucks last?
? Not long enough.
No .
That's very true. And it also depends on how they're driven. If the guys take care of 'em, you know, I can get six, seven years out of 'em.
For a while there we were averaging 125,000 a year.
Oh gosh.
It's not quite that much now because we've obviously we've shortened up the area.
Oh, the area okay.
Itself. So... But...
That's a lot of moving time.
It is.
For sure. That's serious business and I would imagine it's not always easy getting in and out of the farms or producers depending on the time of the year. During the winter of course things are a little bit harder and solid. You can probably roll in and roll out pretty well if you don't get stuck on the ice. But spring and fall you've got some mud to deal with. I would assume in some of the farms,
Most of them are very good about keeping their yards up because they don't wanna be stuck in them either.
Occasionally you run into a spot on a road, but for the most part now it's been good. When I first started there was days. Yeah, , you buried them.
Yeah. Cuz a full milk truck's gotta weigh a lot of pounds and that's gotta take some specialized tires I would imagine, Jamie?
Well in Nancy's case it's a little bit different I would say because most of the milk hauler trucks we run like an open shoulder drive on cuz they're a lot more rural. But because of the miles she does go in the amount of highway that she travels, she has to run a closed shoulder drive on hers. We found that out through trial and error quite a few years ago.
They definitely work a lot better on my application.
Yeah. But it really depends on where their routes are and what they're doing. If they're doing doing a lot more back roads or gravel roads, then we would lean towards more of an open shoulder type tread design for that traction. But in her scenario, because she does so much highway with it, we actually found that it was better to run like an over the road tire closed shoulder.
So really Nancy's trucking company and Schierl Tire and Service in this case in Medford is really a partnership. Really trying to determine what's gonna work best for you in your particular situation or the types of travels and farms that you roll into.
Absolutely. Jamie and her commercial guys are very good at helping me figure out what works best for me.
Well Jamie, you never thought you'd be in the dairy business, did you?
She's gonna want free milk now and cheese. I just know it.
Speaker 5:
Well speaking...
Well we could trade for tires I suppose. .
Ooh, I like barter!
We've got some bartering going on here. . Speaking of that, I mean how does the fluctuating milk prices, how does that play into your business, Nancy? How does it affect you and what you do
Other than it'd end up forcing farmers to quit farming? It doesn't affect me because my paycheck comes off at the plant.
So whatever milk they send in, I get my check first. Their assignments,
They have to receive the milk in order to do something. They need a raw product.
So regardless of what happens in the numbers, you still have to get that milk from the producers to the to the factories.
Okay. So is there an off-season for you in your business? Not really. Seven days a week there...
Years ago when farmers used to put their cows out to pasture and so on. The milk used to fluctuate quite a bit. Spring of the year when everybody freshen their animals in the milk would rise and they'd be out on grass and they'd be pushing it on them out. Farmers let their cows out now, but not nowhere as near as much. They aren't out. I mean we've got the rotational grazers and so on obviously, but the majority of farmers will let their cows out for some exercise, bring 'em back in when it's the heat of summer. They've got big fans and stuff in the barns. The cows are probably taking care of better than most people are. You walk in those barns and there's like a 25 mile an hour breeze blowing through. So if they're kept cool and that helps maintain their milk volume pretty much year round. So the loads don't fluctuate a whole lot,
They don't. Okay. Is there a time of the year where you're able to actually, maybe you're able to take a breath and sit back and sharpen the saw. Are there expos that you go to or is there any research that you're doing to maybe fine tune the business, anything like that?
Not really. I mean, I've got people like Jamie and working with my mechanics and stuff to keep the trucks running optimal. Other than that, there isn't a lot.
It's just power on seven days a week.
Once in a while she finds time to go on a one, maybe two day motorcycle ride across the state.
Ooh! There we go. There we go.
That's a learning experience too. . Especially when you almost get hit one day.
Yeah. That's not good.
That wouldn't be good at all. We need you in that truck, unfortunately.
Everybody does.
Yeah. I was glad to get on that day. ,
Nancy, is there anything that you wanna talk about that is kind of have the conversation? Is there anything further that you wanna talk about?
Not really. I have a 2015 streetlight.
See there's some fun. There's some good stuff.
Yeah, when Nancy isn't on a lot of wheels. She's on two. .
Well, Nancy, we really appreciate this opportunity and thank you very much for joining us today on our podcast All About the Car. It's been very interesting learning more about the important link of the milk hauler's role in bringing Wisconsin dairy to our homes. We hope to have you ride along next time on all About the Car. To listen to previous episodes, find additional resources, or to simply send us a message, head to all about the car podcast dot com. We'll see you next time.
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