Taylor Victoria Kleinpeter

Age:: 25
Occupation: Manager in training, Kleinpeter Dairy
Hometown: Baton Rouge

She was the first thing the calf laid eyes on. It was a glorious moment.

Then there was the truck to be scrubbed.

After the spray, it shone like the chrome on a motorcycle.

Its reflection scorched her skin in the summer sun.

And there was mud and dung, and she wore it all proudly, pausing only a little before she marched into the nearby gas station, the scent of the farm all over her body.

Last summer was Taylor Kleinpeter’s first rotation in her Kleinpeter Dairy internship. She spent it at the family business’s dairy farm outside of Baton Rouge.

Next comes the dairy’s lab on Airline Highway, where she’s getting to know milk on a molecular level.

Kleinpeter is of the fifth generation to work the family’s business, which recently celebrated 100 years.

Nobody’s laying the Holstein-spotted mantle on Taylor Kleinpeter’s shoulders—yet.

That won’t happen until her father Jeff, president of the dairy, is certain his girl knows the milk business down to her marrow.

“I have got to work and prove myself to get where I want to be,” Kleinpeter says. “And if it’s not in the cards for me to be president, that’s fine. But I’m sure going to try, and my heart is to get there one day, hopefully.”

Kleinpeter graduated from LSU last year with a degree in marketing.

“It will take her three years to complete the rounds,” says Jeff Kleinpeter. He designed her course of study to be tough.

“If she does a good job, keeps a good attitude, she’s going to be sitting right here at every meeting I have.”

But first, there is a cow’s trust. How to earn it?

There is the deep ache. It sets in solid after a day spent harvesting corn. And it lingers.

There is wisdom in how cold a freezer has to be to keep ice cream perfect: between 20 and 50 shivering degrees below zero.

“This is in my blood to do this,” Taylor Kleinpeter says.