Alan Bjerga: Hello and welcome to Dairy Defined. The year is ending, and along with it, the tenure of the longest serving employee at NMPF. Chris Galen is our guest today. Chris is retiring at the end of the year after 28 years with the organization. In recent years, he has served as NMPF’s senior vice president of member services and governance, working to ensure that NMPF’s members derive value from that membership and that NMPF is effective in engaging other dairy, agricultural and food organizations. He’s also been the executive director of the American Butter Institute. And before that, he was NMPF’s communications lead. And if you go way back, we’re talking 20th century here. He worked as a television anchor and as a reporter in the Midwest. He’s also worked on Capitol Hill in the White House and in other communications jobs around town. The University of Nebraska graduate is joining us today, and it’s great to have you here, Chris.
Chris Galen: It’s great to be here, Alan, as a capstone to that 28-year tenure at National Milk.
Alan Bjerga: So tell us about NMPF, Chris. I went back and found the front page of the day you started on November 10th, 1997, and the front page of the Washington Post says, “The Clinton administration was trying to get Congress to give it fast track trade authority, even as it was urging the UN to get Iraq to give its weapons inspectors free access to the country. And DC Mayor Maryanne Barry was under investigation. No surprise there.” But no headlines about you, Chris. What was going on in the dairy industry?
Chris Galen: Well, Alan, I like to joke as I’m wrapping up this 10 years that a couple big things happened to the dairy world on November 10, 1997. One is that I started this job, which I’ve been in now for 28 years and change. The other thing that happened that caused a kerfuffle at the time was there was a district judge in Minnesota who issued a ruling preventing the US Department of Agriculture from collecting class one differentials. And this gets into the whole issue of federal orders and milk pricing. I don’t know if it was like the fight over Fort Sumpter at the start of the Civil War, because actually the war had been going on within the dairy community for a while, for many years. So this was just another battle in that. Eventually that court ruling, I think, was enjoined and it didn’t take effect.
But to me, on my first day on the job, it was a harbinger for the fact that a lot of what I had worked on at the start of my career, and also now in the last few years of my career at National Milk has been on milk pricing, in particular federal milk marketing order reforms. But a lot of what we have to do, as you know, has to do with just making certain that farmers are paid fairly.
Alan Bjerga: And so you start with FMMO and you come full circle. Of course, this has been a big topic the last couple years, but a lot of other things have changed. Talk about the industry then versus the industry now.
Chris Galen: Yeah. Well, something else you mentioned in your prelude as to what was going on back in November of ’97, and that was the quest for fast track authority. We had just passed, I think it was a couple years before and before I’d started at National Milk, passed the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico. And when I started back then, we were exporting maybe 3% of our milk production. And because of the NAFTA deal, because of a lot of the other trade deals, the World Trade Organization allowing China in, and then also just because of efforts made by farmers and farm organizations going back to the late ’90s and early 2000s, the creation of the US Dairy Export Council, all those things conspired together to make the export market much more robust. Now we’re exporting what, 16%, 17% of production-
Alan Bjerga: 18% some months.
Chris Galen: Compared to low single digits back 28 years ago. So if I’m doing this now and looking back at what’s changed, what hasn’t changed in the last 28 years? Well, there’s a lot of things that have changed, including yours truly. But probably the most dramatic is that we have to really be much more focused on external markets compared to where things were in the late ’90s.
Alan Bjerga: Also a lot fewer dairy farms now than then.
Chris Galen: I’m glad you asked that because I was anticipating that question, Alan, but that’s one of those things that hasn’t changed. And what I mean by that is if you were to look at the number of dairy farms ’97 to 2025, obviously it’s dropped. If you were to look at the preceding 27 years from 1970 to 1997, there would’ve been an even bigger drop, certainly in terms of absolute numbers and probably about the same in terms of percentage. And if you’d gone back from World War II to 1970, the same. So really long before my entire lifetime, not just my years of service at National Milk, the trend has been the same. And not just in dairy, but obviously everywhere in agriculture, you have fewer but larger farms. And I think that’s a trend that probably started at the end of World War I, which is more than a century ago now.
And so yes, it’s been predictable and right as rain, the fact that you see fewer but larger farms every year. What I would also add, Alan, though, is that when I started 27 years ago, we had something like 9.3 million dairy cows, and guess how many we have today? I think it’s within 100,000 of that. It dropped for a while 20 years ago, and then in the last four or five years, it’s rebounded, not by a huge amount, 4% or 5%. So I think that’s kind of one of the other ironies is yes, we’re talking about a lot fewer dairy farms in the US from coast to coast, but the number of cows has been almost completely constant. I was reading The Wall Street Journal this morning though. If you look at beef cattle, they’ve really seen a huge reduction in their herd, not just over the last 25 years, but in the last few years. So at least for dairy, yes, we’ve seen the decline in farm numbers, but we’re still keeping the number of cows going and consistent.
Alan Bjerga: You’ve spent your career predominantly, some would argue exclusively depending on the definition of roles and responsibilities in communications. That means a lot of time telling dairy story. How has telling dairy story changed? And I mean this in two ways, how has the story itself that you tell change and how do the media under which you tell it, tell us a little bit about that evolution and how you get the story
Chris Galen: Out. Yeah, you’re right, because it’s a two-part answer. So thankfully you asked a two-part question because you can’t do it justice with just one question or one answer. So let me talk about the message and then the medium or media about getting that message out. One of the things that I did back in the late ’90s, one of the first things I did was to talk with counterparts at the National Dairy Checkoff Organization, Dairy Management, which had only been formed, I think, four or five years prior to that. And I said, we’re spending a lot of resources talking to consumers and the media about how great milk and cheese and yogurt are and butter to an extent. And so the message is primarily, as it was always for many years, focused on nutrition and how you need three servings a day and so forth. And yes, that’s an important message.
But the tables are turning a little bit where we need to also have a conversation with consumers about the conditions on farms that are producing that milk. Because there are more and more questions that I had seen as I started the job about animal care, about the environmental impact of dairy farming, and also just production practices. We were still dealing with the aftermath of the introduction of RBST in the late ’90s when I started, and then there were other things, antibiotic use and things like that. So one of the things I did, getting back to the messaging part, is to work with counterparts to say, “We need to incorporate other messages in what we’re saying to consumers beyond just, ‘Oh, drink three glasses of milk a day because it’s good for you.'” And so-
Alan Bjerga: Was the mustache thing still going on when you were there?
Chris Galen: The mustache thing was really in its ascendancy, I think that probably peaked early 2000s. But what I was going to say is that as I’m cleaning up my office, Alan, after being here for more than two decades, one of the things that I have kept, actually two copies of the same thing, is a toolbox that we put together working with a consultant. It was called Straight Talk on Dairy, and it’s just a silver box about the size of a small briefcase. And in it, we had floppy disks because that was how you shared media back in the day and paper and a few charts. No one was good at Excel or PowerPoint back then because they were just also in their infancy. But we put together materials that were sent to all of NMPF’s members. They were sent to a lot of the dairy checkoff local and regional offices because we wanted to make certain that they had tools at their disposal to help us tell a more comprehensive, I think is the right word, more comprehensive story about who’s producing the milk and how it’s produced.
And so if you look back at that, that was ’98 maybe when we did that. It would be 10 more years before the farmer’s assuring responsible management program was to really start going. And I was involved in that too. So I’d like to say that the straight talk on dairy was sort of like the proto messaging and the talking the talk, and then the walking the walk part of helping farmers demonstrate responsible production and good stewardship was the implementation of the farm program circa 2008. So you asked a two-part question and I gave you a long, but only exclusively focused on one part of the answer. The other answer was about the media that we use, less about the message. So when I started back in ’97, we had a newsletter, ink on paper newsletter. Actually, it was printer toner on paper because what we would do is we would write it up, print it out, copy it, photocopy it, and drop it in the mail every other Friday afternoon.
And so if you were in California, that’s a big part of the dairy industry or anywhere on the West Coast, you were lucky to get it maybe by the following Wednesday or Thursday, at which point it was practically a week old. And again, this is the late ’90s. It was just the dawn of when people were exploring the worldwide web and getting email accounts. So it became apparent, not long after that, that sending out a snail mail newsletter every other Friday was not the optimal best practice for communicating with audiences. So one of the first things I did then in the late ’90s is we converted our news for dairy co-ops, NDC, News for Dairy Cooperatives, from a print publication to a digital one, which as you know, Alan now comes out the beginning of every month and we email it out. At the same time, I also implemented a few other things. One is our beloved dairy industry news alert, which is our daily flagship publication.
The story behind that’s kind of interesting because it shows you that sometimes you have to listen to your members to help you help them figure out where to go. I was talking to one of our board members. Because I was putting together a daily news summary, but I was just emailing it to our staff, the staff at the National Milk Producers. And the board member said, “Well, I need to have that information. Why don’t you send it to me? ” So it didn’t take long before we had that being emailed out to our board, at least everyone who had emails, not everyone did, back circa 1998. And since then, the audience has grown by loops and bounds then. And the product has evolved as all digital newsletters have in the past 25 years.
That, the DNA, Daily News Alert, and then our monthly news for dairy co-ops were both really important foundational elements of our communications program. And then you fold in Circa 2000, our CEO’s corner, which was a thought leader column. We didn’t call it a blog, but that’s essentially what it is, right? It’s a blog from whoever the president and CEO happened to be. We’re now on the third CEO that I’ve worked with now since then. And so that’s an important way, as you know, to get our message out. And we’ve added other things since then. What I would also add is that same time we were starting the farm program, that’s about when we saw the advent of the familiar social media platform. So I started up our Facebook page and our Twitter page, and we haven’t really delved into Snapchat and we’re getting our feet wet now with TikTok and Instagram because it’s always something, right? There’s always something new, some new dance that you have to learn.
But I think even though back in the late 2000s, not a lot of farmers were familiar with either Facebook or Twitter. It was pretty obvious that those were going to be important means for us to get our message out. And I think that’s been proven correct.
Alan Bjerga: Here’s a fun fact, just doing a little bit of quick math off the top of my head. You have been employed by NMPF for roughly a quarter of its existence. And I bring this up because I know another project you were very instrumental to was NMPF Centennial in 2016, which kind of helped assert your role as a staff historian of sorts. And I wonder if you could share a little bit about what people need to understand about NMPF and the function it serves within dairy.
Chris Galen: You mentioned our Centennial report, which we actually wrote and published 10 years ago. The Centennial of National Milk was 2016, but we did it the year before just because I guess we were trying to be clever. And that was technically the 100th year of national milk’s operation. And one of the things that struck me in putting it together, you take a hundred years worth of highlights. And so you got to figure out what to keep and what to edit out. But a lot of the things that we put in there were issues that we were dealing with back in 2015. If you talk about imitation dairy products, well, the OG fake dairy product dating back to the 1920s or even before was oleomargarine. So it may have been soy milk back in 2015 or fake cheese or fake yogurt and those sorts of things, but national milk was dealing with that similar issue on the butter versus margarine front practically 100 years earlier.
The dietary guidelines, they started, I think, 1980, and that’s been a big focus for us on the policy front. And lo and behold here today, now finally at the end of 2025, we’re expecting new guidelines which will be much more supportive for a full range of dairy products, including things like whole milk. But that’s something that has been an issue and a challenge with highs and lows for national milk over the decade. So there’s a familiar phrase, Alan, I’m sure you heard of it, which is that history doesn’t rhyme, but it echoes. And so there are a lot of echoes of the issues that we had been dealing with here in recent years that have echoed throughout the past 110 years of National Milk’s history.
Alan Bjerga: What would be the most surprising aspect of this industry to the guy who started in 1997?
Chris Galen: Probably the surprising thing is what I started off talking about, which is when we were dealing with the federal order battles, and it wasn’t just reforms dealing with USDA, that was part of it. But we actually, in 1998, ’99, had to go up to Capitol Hill and get them to pass a law that was signed by President Clinton to enforce higher class one differentials. And so that was actually a standalone bill where we had to fight opposition from forces that didn’t want to have higher milk prices. At that time in the federal wars, a lot of people thought, “Well, this will be the last big dairy battle. This will be the last battle over federal orders. The program’s just too anachronistic and we’re fighting a battle with swords and with horses and the cavalry, and it won’t be applicable in the 21st century.” And yet here we are with what happened last year.
We updated the federal order system and it’s still basically the same program that we were updating back in 1998 and 99. So would I be surprised to look back and think the program won’t have evolved that much and that’s still a bedrock of our milk pricing? Yeah, I think I would’ve been if you would’ve told me that I’d still be dealing with it in 2025.
Alan Bjerga: Always trying to be upbeat. This is your valedictory interview, right? But given your knowledge of the industry and knowing the ins and outs and wondering if you have any caution to offer the industry, anything to just be mindful of as we’re all working together moving forward, that is worth keeping in the back of your mind. That Chris Galen voice that may echo in some of our heads in the years to come.
Chris Galen: One of the things that I have been most proud of having been working here for as many years is the same thing that I think many dairy farmers are proud of, which is that it is a family business, dairy production. And actually dairy processing used to be much more family oriented, but because of mergers and buyouts and combinations of processing, it’s less so that way. And yet on the dairy production side, the dairy farming side, if you look at most producers, it’s a statistic, Alan, that we like to recite quite frequently that, what is it, 97%, 98% of farms are family owned. And the only thing I would say in terms of cautionary note is that if we get away from that and it becomes more, for lack of a better term, more corporate owned or owned by outside investors, or if the role of cooperatives themselves were to be diminished to where they’re no longer really the majority marketing channel for a lot of farmers, I think that it’s not just bad from an optic standpoint, it’s bad from a socioeconomic standpoint.
It’s bad for the rural character of a lot of places like in Minnesota or Wisconsin or even California and Idaho where you have farms of all sizes of different ages. But if you don’t have the family as part of the family farm dynamic, then you lose a lot of heritage. And I think it also makes it harder to sell our products and to talk about our products. So that would be my cautionary note. Now, there’s not any button that we can press that’s going to prevent evolution from happening economically, but I do think that we have to be mindful of the fact that a lot of our selling points are that this is a product that families need and that is also produced by farm families and we shouldn’t lose sight of that.
Alan Bjerga: We’ve been speaking with Chris Galen, he’s NMPF senior vice president and its longest tenured employee, but only until the end of the year. Any final thoughts before you hang up the microphone, Chris?
Chris Galen: Well, time goes quickly. Also, as the saying goes, particularly if you’re a new parent, but I can apply this to my work as well. Sometimes the days are long, but the years go by quickly, Alan. So it’s been a great capstone to my career. And it was 40 years ago that I graduated college. So we have to be honest that a third, roughly the first third of my 40 years was working, doing other things. And then the last two thirds of it has been at National Milk. But it’s been a lot of fun. It’s been interesting. I wouldn’t have stayed as long as I had if we didn’t have some of the challenges regarding economics and food safety and nutrition and animal care. Some people work their whole lives on very niche issues, very legalistic or specific issues. And one of the things I’ve liked most about this job is because we’re not a big organization, people have to wear multiple hats and you have to deal with many, many different issues.
And it’s a dairy product that a lot of people like. Not everyone drinks milk, of course, but most people consume dairy, whether it’s cheese, yogurt, ice cream in some form. So I think that’s also made it something that’s been culturally relevant and made it more interesting for me up to this point.
Alan Bjerga: So what’s next?
Chris Galen: Well, I’m looking forward on January 2, 2026 to doing the same thing I’m going to be doing on January 1st, which is to sleep in and not put on a suit and tie. Not that we wear many suits and ties anymore in the office, Alan, but being able to not set the alarm on January 2nd. And then I figure probably by the end of the winter and February’s a short month, it’ll be time to get moving. In all seriousness, I’ve got several volunteer projects that I’m lining up locally. I’ve got a family genealogy digitization project where I have to create a new website that my brother and I are going to be working on. So I’ve got several things lined up because it’s important to keep moving and not let the moss grow on the stones here. So there’ll be a number of things that I’m going to be doing here starting next year.
Alan Bjerga: Well, as always, Chris, thank you again for your service, your wisdom, your patience, and your passion for dairy.
Chris Galen: Thanks, Alan.
Alan Bjerga: NMPF Communications in no small way because of Chris’s contributions continues to thrive and its membership is growing. To learn more about both, visit our Sharing Our Story page on NMPF.org or go to the membership pulldown and click on become a member for more information. For more of the Dairy Defined Podcast, all you have to do is go to the NMPF website, nmpf.org, or go to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Amazon Music, and search under the podcast name, Dairy Defined. Oh, and by the way, Chris is the one who came up with that name. Thank you for joining us and happy holidays.
