STATE COLLEGE, Pa. — The load of manure was piled high behind the Allis Chalmers 6080 as 17-year-old Peggy Sue Coffeen rumbled toward the field that winter morning. Her father’s parting instruction was simple: “Watch out for the wet bottom.”

They named everything on that little Wisconsin dairy farm — the big hillside, the back flat, and that treacherous stretch that could swallow a tractor without warning.

“You probably already know where this is going,” she told more than 300 dairy farmers and industry representatives at the 2025 Pennsylvania Dairy Summit.

The tractor didn’t have GPS or auto-steer or OnStar, “but it did have a radio with a dial,” she laughed. Distracted by the station instead of the ground ahead, she drove straight into the low spot.

“You know what happens next,” said Coffeen. “You downshift, you hit the gas, you gun it, and then you realize you’re buried even deeper.”

Next came “the walk of shame,” barn boots and scarf trailing down County Road C toward the barn where her father already saw the tractor sitting crooked in the distance.

“Get the chain,” she said, knowing Dad had the chain and the plan.

“Have you ever been stuck in a low spot?” she asked.

Along with big hills and back flats, farming has its share of the muddy “wet bottoms” — margins, markets, weather, murky family meetings, employee struggles, neighbor tensions, all the places where wheels spin without moving.

“Those are the days when we’re buried deep… when we have to dig deep and remember why we do what we do,” said Coffeen, now a dairy journalist, consultant and host of the Uplevel Dairy Podcast, as she moved from that muddy memory to her message about understanding ‘your why.’

Borrowing from Simon Sinek’s “Start With Why,” she explained the “golden circles”: the what (what you do), the how (how you do it), and the why (the purpose under it all). Farmers can easily articulate the first two, she noted. The ‘why’ is harder.

“It’s because the what and how are in your thinking brain,” she said, while the why “lives in the part of the brain where our feelings are. It determines our behaviors, the way we make decisions.”

Yet that deeper ‘why’ matters because “people don’t buy what you do or how you do it. They buy your why.” In agriculture, that kind of buy-in shapes consumer trust, employee motivation, and family unity.

Coffeen emphasized that a ‘why’ isn’t a polished mission statement. A mission statement can be written; a ‘why’ must be uncovered because it comes from the emotional center of the brain — the part that governs trust and loyalty.

To help farmers give it words, she offered a simple structure: begin with “to…” (the contribution) and follow with “so that…” (the impact). It turns emotion into a clear, usable statement to carry into tough times and difficult conversations.

To show this in action, Coffeen turned to someone right in the room, Jared Kurtz, a dairy farmer near Elverson, Pennsylvania who was a recent guest on her podcast.

His story fit the moment. Jared had talked about the challenge of connecting his dairy with the people around him, especially because his farm sits close to the center of the community and a busy road. He wanted neighbors to understand the role the farm plays and how agriculture is woven into the community’s future.

She replayed a piece of their discussion, pointing out what she’d heard beneath the surface: he wasn’t just telling his farm’s story, he was helping others see their future through it.

Then she distilled his purpose into a full ‘why’ statement: to connect people, so that they can see a future for themselves, their families and their community through his farm.

For Coffeen, Jared’s example showed how a ‘why’ keeps a farm both grounded and moving forward with purpose.

A colostrum movement

She next shared a story that captivated the room about California dairy farmers Rob and Erica Diepersloot. Early in their marriage, their young daughter was constantly sick, worn down by rounds of antibiotics. Rob had done colostrum research at Cal Poly. He knew what it could do for calves and wondered whether it could help their daughter.

Driven by their child’s needs, they experimented with ways to turn bovine colostrum into a safe, shelf-stable human supplement. What grew from that purpose became WonderCow, a natural colostrum supplement that took off on social media and health-and-wellness channels, long before they hired a marketer.

Their customers aren’t just buying a supplement. They are buying the belief in what dairy farmers know colostrum can do for health.

A kid on a bicycle

Next came a story from northeastern Iowa about a farm built not only on family, but on opportunity.

‘Pat’ married into a dairy family and slowly gained his father-in-law’s trust, becoming a partner. As he was learning, a neighborhood boy, ‘Sam,’ rode into the farm almost daily on his bicycle to visit. He asked questions, helped, learned, and kept coming.

Years later, today, Sam is a partner in the dairy.

Someone had given Pat the opportunity he might not otherwise have had, so Pat paid it forward. Purpose multiplied to shape a succession plan defined not only by bloodlines but by shared commitment.

‘The American Dream’

Then came ‘Omar.’ Coffeen described sitting down with Omar and farm owner ‘Jim,’ planning to talk about repro protocols but discovering something deeper.

Years earlier, Omar had come to the dairy as a young man who didn’t speak English. Working through a translator, Jim asked him one question: ‘Why do you want to work here?’

Omar’s answer was simple: “To show my wife the American Dream.”

Twenty years later, Omar is still on the same farm, now as a partner. His ‘why’ grew from his own family to the families of those working beside him. His journey showed what opportunity looks like when purpose is honored.

‘Someone did it for me’

Coffeen also shared the story of the late Katie Coyne, a beloved mentor in the dairy youth world and one of the most influential people in her own life.

Katie’s ‘why’ began simply: someone believed in her, invested in her — a 4-H agent who took her to contests, pushed her, encouraged her, and showed up.

Katie’s calling became doing the same for others — spotting potential in kids before they see it in themselves, handing them calves to show, opening doors, driving trailers, teaching, coaching, cheering.

Even as she faced her serious health challenges, Katie continued living her ‘why,’ day-by-day, child-by-child, show-by-show.

“That’s what a ‘why’ does,” Coffeen told the room. “It pulls you forward even when your energy is low. It fuels you.”

The deeper ‘why’

For Coffeen, the hardest conversation was discovering her own mother’s ‘why.’

The farm had been in her mother’s family since 1890. As they began estate planning, Coffeen approached it with logic, tools, articles, checklists, yet the conversation stalled.

So she looked back, pulling out a 1975 Hoard’s Dairyman clipping that showed her mother as a young woman running the dairy almost single-handedly. What those pictures didn’t show was the loss that shaped her long before that article was written.

As the second-youngest of five girls, Coffeen’s mother had lost her father at age seven. She still remembered neighbors approaching her widowed mother at the funeral, offering to buy the farm in that vulnerable moment.

That memory, the fear of losing the one thing her father had left them, stayed with Coffeen’s mother for nearly eight decades and formed the core of her ‘why.’ She wasn’t just thinking about passing on the farm; she was thinking about protecting it.

Realizing that deeper motivation, “our whole conversation changed,” Coffeen shared as she wondered how many transitions stall, not over dollars, but because families haven’t named the emotion beneath them.

‘Get the chain’

As she closed, Coffeen invited farmers to turn their own muddy moments into motivation.

The tractor doesn’t get out of the wet bottom alone, she observed. Families don’t get through hard conversations by accident. A farm doesn’t move forward alone on ‘what’ or ‘how.’ It also needs the ‘why.’

If you keep your ‘why’ in your pocket, or even on your cell-phone’s lock screen, you have something to reach for when the mud gets deep and the future foggy, she said.

In that way, “your ‘why’ becomes the chain you grab when you need pulled out.”

Author’s Note: Eye-opening, thought-provoking, business building speakers like this are hallmarks of the annual Pennsylvania Dairy Summit. The 2026 event preparations are underway for Feb. 4-5 in Grantville.