The dairy industry typically brings to mind idyllic images of peaceful, rolling pastures and business transactions sealed with a handshake, but Bill Leep, vice president of Pleasant View Dairy in Highland, says that business wasn’t so genteel back when his grandparents, N.E. and Hilda Leep, established Pleasant View Dairy in the early days of the Great Depression.
“Our business has an interesting history,” Leep says. “There were a lot of incidents in the early days related to people who didn’t want him to start his dairy business.”
In 1928, N.E. and Hilda Leep purchased a dairy farm near Lowell known as Pleasant View Farm and produced milk for the wholesale market. Soon after, troubles, including cows sickened by a sweet corn patch which affected overall milk production, and tough economic conditions for milk producers largely due to an overabundance of milk on the market, led to the Leeps’ decision to go into the retail business. There were challenges from the get-go, including, as N.E. recalls in his book “A Brief History of the First 25 Years” (written in 1956), an overzealous state inspector who jailed and fined N.E. for one speck of dirt found in a solitary milk bottle.
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