Management

When you walk into your home after a long, hard day of work, you’d probably like to enter a space that’s clean, calm and comfortable. Messy, disruptive and uncomfortable living quarters can cause stress and anxiety. 

Dairy farms are similar to the aggregate industry in that they spend a significant amount of time handling materials, from feed and manure to sand and livestock. Ross Veltema and Allen Bonthuis took their farming backgrounds and dovetailed them into their aggregate businesses.

A statement often made by professional athletes is: They stayed in the game beyond the years of their peak performance. Of course, the couple of million dollars they made for their time helped ease the transition.

If you look up the word resilience in a dictionary, you’ll find one definition says it’s “the capability of a strained body to return to its original shape after being put under stress.” Another defines it as “the ability to adapt or adjust to misfortune or change.”

“An LLC, corporation or cooperative is a good thing,” said Rachel Armstrong, founder and executive director of Farm Commons, which offers legal education and support to farmers, seeking to encourage them and implement best legal practices.

Dairy farmers struggling to remain profitable face a dilemma: What’s good for an individual operation may not be beneficial for the industry as a whole.