Another brillant move by our elected officials to make Deans Foods sell golden guernsey dairy. Deans Foods had big plans for that plant.

i was told about this from a employe of 30 plus years and i was outraged this has as been a staple in our community for 70 plus years . what did the big cow do to anyone

Who gets custody of the giant cow?

Just curious, in the past year, when all of this was going down, did our mayor ever visit with the officials of Dean Foods?

Which would have accomplished exactly what?

Armed guards shut it down? There is more to this than we are being told.

Jason or whoever you really are..

I will be more careful when I read if you will stop slanderous remarks and anonymous postings.

There was no slander in his remarks and you saying stop anonymous posting is stupid you don't know his name is not Jason.

It must be really easy to change names on this blog. You guys are faster than a speeding bullet.

Forget aboutthe mayor. Its the greedy capital invetsment group's fault. People in LA don't care about Waukesha. Can anyne local buy the dairy?

Whatever happens, the cow needs to stay!! My daughters love that cow! We pass it everyday

As a former employee I could see this coming. Deans was ordered to sell Golden Guernsey off because they would have a monopoly on the school milk market, way to go Department of Justice, now Deans has control of the market regardless. I talked to some people who were told to keep hope they would remain open. What kind of hope can you actually have when you just lost every distributor and account that you had and now completely crippled a company that was already unstable. Don't blame Open Gate Capital for this, blame your elected officals in Washington. Open Gate is in this to make a profit and probably balences their budget unlike our governement.

Maybe if the government would keep there mitts off of farmers and all the other ag companies out there they could actually turn a profit. Stop farm subsidies and let the market make the prices not the government. If farmers and companies could actually base their prices on actual costs to produce the product then private equity companies wouldn't have to buy non money making businesses and try and make them profitable then we wouldn't have these kinds of issues. This is why deans is as big as they are it's the only way they can be profitable in this government manipulated industry. Yea sure government manipulation helps keep prices for goods down but it also hurts in businesses in surviving. If prices were actually based on actual inputs companies could price accordingly and businesses would be able to compete on keeping prices in check by being more and more efficient and this in turn would keep prices from going out of control and still keep businesses profitable. So I blame our government first do to its price fixing in the ag business

What I think victoria means is if the Mayor would have reached out to this company and got a heads up that this would be coming, maybe he could have done something to help grow their business and keep it going strong. After all it is his job to make sure these type of staples stay in the community. Not say he could have help, but I guess we will never know now.

just a note to say that the owner of Mapleton Dairy Haulers is Lynn Hiemke. i feel very badly for everyone that derived their income from Golden Guernsey and wish them well. i worked as a distributor 20 years ago out of that plant and the people were 1st rate.

How will this affect our dairy farmers?

What a way to start out the new year.

This is a clear case of the government messing up something that was not broken.

I am not blaming R or D...but NO ONE believes that Dean wanted this plant shut down. The government stepped in and helped out not only Guernsey but the collateral companies impacted.

More total stupid,

Imagine that...the federal government over-regulating and over-reaching in a private business. This is only the beginning. Ever heard of ObamaCare? Elections have consequences!

What isn't it a unions fault??

Dean foods had big plans for that plant. The government was worried about school milk. The thing is there isn't much money in school milk. Dean foods has buying power because they are big. We have to keep costs down just like every other business.

Foremost Farms sells to Dean's. Dean's get sued and is forded to sell to Open Gate. But who was the complainer in this law suit. Seems like it was Foremost, but that does not make sense since they sold to Dean's. Does anyone know who complained that Deans was monopolistic? Did the Foremost to Dean's sale have to get approval from the Feds?

The milk isn't going to waste. Foremost is likely working diligently (and frantically) today to move the milk to other plants.

I honestly thing there is some kind of bacteria in the milk that they don't want us to know about. It's pretty fishy that they won't tell us why its shut down... I'm deffinitly not drinking their milk till I find out what is going on!!

There's nothing wrong with the milk, they just shut down. I'm a worker outta there so lets not spread rumors.