A second chance at farming

Dale McClellan rebuilt his grandfather’s bankrupt milk processing company into a leading business and became a champion for agriculture.  McClellan, who had grown up milking cows, was just 23 when the company — and his family — went broke.“I was young and just trying to survive, but I had a burning passion to get back into processing because I didn’t feel it was our fault that we got out,” McClellan recalls. “They bled him to death through pricing, but that happened to every family milk plant in the United States. National brands squished them. Then supermarket chains started building their own plants and squished the national brands.” He considers it a defining moment — a spark that ignited a lifelong effort to champion agriculture. Now M&B Dairy is thriving, despite tough times for dairy farms everywhere. That success happened, in part, because McClellan forced himself to climb out of his shell and become a face of the milk industry in west-central Florida.