HOW WE MET: I met Mike on a flight from Salt Lake City, Utah, to Minneapolis, Minnesota. He was on his way to his nephew’s wedding there.

Mike’s extended family owns a landscape business near the Hallmark Meat Packing plant that was the subject of an undercover video release in 2008 by HSUS.

The video showed slaughterhouse workers mistreating culled dairy cows. Mike told me he knows animals are treated much better on-farm than the video depicted and that he doesn’t sympathize with the efforts of HSUS and others to convince consumers otherwise.

HOW WE MET: Jessie and I met in college. We were both members of the Association of Women in Agriculture, lived in the association’s house and became close friends.

After college, we tried to stay in touch but with starting careers and families, life never left enough room for everything.

Recently we’ve been able to get in some phone calls with one another and I took an opportunity to find out her viewpoints on the dairy industry and its products.

HOW WE MET: Laura and I actually haven’t met in person, but we’ve been exchanging emails for about three months.

I volunteered to help with alumni communications and fundraising for Alpha Zeta Fraternity, a co-ed, professional agricultural group that I was involved in during my time at Penn State University.

With more than a decade of marketing/communications experience, Laura seemed like someone who could give an expert’s opinion on how the dairy industry is performing in the area of public relations.