On this edition of The Milk Check, T3 and Anna join our dairy market sage and patriarch, Ted Jr., on a trip down memory lane to talk about how the dairy industry has developed over more than 50 years.

They discuss changes in trucking, processing and entrepreneurship, among many other topics.

The trio also debates how the Federal Order System has impacted the industry, whether it still holds water in today's market and the perception that dairy producers are often the most impacted by market downturns.

T3: I thought this podcast would be a great opportunity to just talk a little bit about history. Talk a little bit about what were markets like back in the '60s and how have they evolved into what we're dealing with today? And maybe what are some of the things that are still the same and what are some of the things that are different? And I just thought it would be a great perspective to talk about how milk and cheese and whey and cream, how it all moved back then, and how it all moves around and gets balanced today. We really haven't talked about things from a historical perspective, and I thought it would just be a great conversation.

T2: Well, let's start in the '50s. Tank trucks came in in the mid-'50s. They were relatively small, they were about 30,000, 35,000. By the time you got to 1960 or so, you're up to a load somewhere between 45,000. In those days, the Class 1 utilization was paramount. Depending on where you were located, you had basically 60%-plus Class 1 utilization and milk move from upper Wisconsin, Eau Claire and Bloomer and Turtle Lake, during the short period of the year, we...back to almost everywhere, to Florida to Louisiana, New Orleans, Dallas, you name it, St. Louis was a big market. Indianapolis in the '60s had 20 to 30 loads a day moving out of basically the Fond du Lac area down to Indianapolis, which is why Foremost is prominent in Indiana these days is because a lot of that milk was Foremost Milk, they actually had an office in Indiana, which wasn't closed until a few years ago.

The market was much different. Class 1 utilization was the big item and we had a much more cyclical milk production profile, if you will, where in the fall of the year when it got hot, and it seems to me, if my memory serves, it got much hotter in the '60s and '70s than it does today. And production really languished, particularly down in the Southeast. And so huge volumes of milk moved and most of that milk was moved directly out of plants. It wasn't moved directly from the farm, never moved directly from the farm until, oh, probably sometime in the '90s. Farms got big enough and the technology of dairy farming reached that point. That was the way the industry was structured in those days. And it's a much different structure today.

T3: To be back in the '50s and 60s, you also had a lot of Grade B milk, we don't ever talk about Grade B milk anymore. How did that affect the industry?

T2: Actually, we didn't have that much Grade B milk, and most of what we had stayed home. Yeah, we moved a little, it wasn't really that much. There were quality standards when you moved. Acid was the primary quality standard, acid and temperature. And you expected the milk to show up at a bacteria count of something less, basically, than 750,000 or half a million. Again, depending on where you were, and temperature less than 45 degrees. So that was the standard. And it wouldn't make any difference whether it was B or A in those days. Quality was not a matter of somebody saying that it was B or A, it was a matter of what showed up at the plant. And if it wasn't suitable when it showed up at the plant, it was rejected. It wasn't a question of arguing about it, it was rejected.