Fresh Faces at Rockingham Cooperative’s Dayton Mill
Rockingham Cooperative’s Dayton Mill is located behind your cooperative’s corporate office in Dayton, Virginia. Over the past 3 years major capital improvements have been underway to improve efficiency and overall quality to our Rockingham Cooperative branded feeds – and better serve our member-owners and customers. During this time we’ve also welcomed a lot of new faces while continuing to provide the same standard of service that’s been expected in the mill’s long history.
Two of the more recent faces that play an influential role in the successful operation of the Dayton Mill and your satisfaction as a customer include Quade Kay and Blaine French, filling the roles of Mill Manager and Nutritionist, respectively. Among other responsibilities they are tasked with providing our customers with high-quality, consistent feed – by working with our whole team to follow strict protocols from manufacturing to quality control.
“Every ton of feed is tracked from start to finish. We keep detailed records of ingredients, batch numbers, and mixing times so we can trace everything if needed. There’s a lot of behind-the-scenes work that goes into making sure the feed is safe, balanced, and exactly what the customer ordered.”
The Dayton Mill manufactures just under 100,000 tons of feed in a given year, meeting the needs for bagged feed through our retail stores and custom bulk feed orders from producers. Blaine oversees our team of nutritionists to partner with producers on the custom orders for a multitude of species knowing that every farm is different and can tailor rations based on the producers goals for their operation.
“Making our customers as efficient as possible when it comes to the nutrition aspect of their operations is what excites me most. If we can enhance a producer’s animal performance by finding the right ration for them, that’s a big win in my book. I love working with people and look forward to forming a wide variety of relationships in the area.”