May'19 Board Book

Larson’s phone was blowing up with calls, and he couldn’t keep track of them all. There were so many that he couldn’t even get a call in to his office. When he finally made it through, they knew all about the video—they were swamped with calls as well. It got so bad Larson had to unplug the office phones. Some of the calls were press, most were harassment.

“We understood people just wanted to vent,” Larson says. He tried to answer as many calls as possible. “Your initial instinct is to defend, because you feel like you’re under attack, and I was. I was under attack personally, my industry was under attack. So I wanted to defend.”

Problem was, some of the things that were shown in the video were undefendable.

“Every member of our family and extended family was affected,” Larson says. “Unfortunately, the Larson name was severely tarnished. The activists were so good at their attack, even some people in the industry who knew us began to have some doubts.”

In the next few hours and days, media flooded the dairy. Members of the issues and crisis management team from the national checkoff -- Dairy Management

Inc. – arrived in Okeechobee to assist the state checkoff organization, the Florida Dairy Farmers. All told, Larson estimates about a dozen reporters mostly from the Miami and Palm Beach markets visited his farm and office over a three-week period.

“It was very chaotic, just trying to get our jobs done,” Larson recalls. “The tension was building. This thing was so hot that people wanted to have something to run with, they wanted live video, they wanted to see if this thing was true.”

It was hard to know what to say, but representatives from Florida Dairy Farmers were there almost immediately to help with messaging. They provided Larson talking points to help him explain standard industry practices. The part Larson was more comfortable talking about was the practices specific to his farm that go on every day. “The Florida Dairy Farmers (FDF), boy they were spot on. The closer my relationship got with those folks the more I realized how personal it was to them,” Larson says. “Some of the trenches they went through for us was just above and beyond the call of duty.” The help was a team effort between FDF, DMI and representatives from National Milk Producers Federation (NMPF). Within the first 24 hours Larson terminated two employees. The video spurred a large criminal investigation, and as the sheriff’s department got involved and investigations continued, two more employees were fired within the next week. Two others resigned out of fear.