HOW WE MET: Phil was working in the cubicle next to me at the San Francisco International Airport earlier this year. I was waiting for a connection to Boise, Idaho, when the flight was cancelled. Phil expressed his condolences about my travel delays. I asked where he was going, and he said to Kansas City for a funeral. I exchanged my condolences.

This issue we celebrate our 25th anniversary of the magazine. As one who has only been a part of the history of the magazine for 20 percent of that time, I am grateful to the many who came before me and laid the foundation for today’s Progressive Dairyman, including and most especially, founder and emeritus publisher Leon Leavitt.

This article was #19 of the Top 25 most well-read articles on www.progressivedairy.com in 2012. to jump to the article. It was published in the March 21, 2012 issue. Click here for the full list of the Top 25. Progressive Dairyman Editor Walt Cooley interviewed the then-new CEO of California Dairies, Inc., Andrei Mikhalevsky. The former Fonterra executive shared his views on both export and domestic opportunities for the U.S. dairy industry.

Soon after being named editor of Progressive Dairyman more than five years ago, my first assignment was to travel with a bus tour through the Midwest en route to World Dairy Expo. I remember sitting on the bed in my hotel room the night before the tour started, feeling anxious as to whether I would be able to write something about the tour that would be new and noteworthy. I wanted our coverage to stand out. But what made me nervous was that this assignment wasn’t the most obviously newsworthy event. It wasn’t the first-ever bus tour dairymen had organized nor was it the first-ever dairy exhibition that I was headed to. This was World Dairy Expo; hundreds of stories have been written about it already.

Click here to view the virtual farm tour video, featured at the 2012 World Ag Expo. An immigrant to the U.S. who thought in 1956 he’d settle down in Minnesota and bake for the rest of his career is now a successful dairyman in California’s Central Valley. Four years after immigrating to the U.S. from the Netherlands, Tony DeGroot, Sr., developed an allergy to flour. “Baker’s disease,” as Tony’s doctor’s called it, closed up Tony’s lungs when he worked around airborne flour particles. The disease was fatal, not to Tony’s life, but his career as a full-time baker.