Got milk? Not without the drivers who haul it.

This story first appeared in The Long Haul 2025, an annual special section that celebrates National Truck Driver Appreciation Week by looking at Eastern Iowa’s trucking industry.

CASCADE – Hunter Bergfeld was 2 years old when his parents, Randy and Wendy, gave up their milking operation and bought a milk transport route in 1997. They started R&W Transport in Cascade with two trucks and picked up milk from 20-25 farms, hauling about 90,000 to 100,000 pounds of milk a day.

Now 30 and the company’s chief operating officer, Bergfeld has six trucks picking up milk from 70 farms, hauling an estimated 800,000 pounds of milk every day.

That’s a lot of milk.

“We shoot for three loads of milk (to the plant) per truck per day,” Bergfeld said. “Typically, your farms are milking between 6 a.m. and 9 a.m., with some curveballs thrown by farms not getting done until noon.”

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A “typical” day in the milk transport business, he said, is moving the milk as efficiently as possible. That means his trucks are running 24 hours a day, seven days a week, year-round.

“We run the schedule around the clock, so it’s a little high-strung sometimes,” he said.

Drivers work different shifts, depending on their route. Trucks start rolling at 1 a.m., 3 a.m., 6 a.m.— those are the day shift drivers — then at 6 p.m. and 8 p.m. The company’s “opening time” is sometime between 4-5 a.m., when they want to have trucks loaded and waiting at the plant to deliver the milk.

“If there’s anything you have to have with milk hauling, it’s consistency,” Bergfeld said. “You want to run the same route at the same time every day. You want to save on time and on miles, and you have some bigger farms that are on a really tight window, so you need to make sure your truck is on time.”

“We’ve got to get the milk to town, and we don’t let anything stop us,” said Scott Gehl, a 53-year-old former forester who has been driving for R&W Transport for the past 12 years. He was a shift driver for a while with his own route, but now he’s a “fill-in” driver, meaning he has one load he’s committed to every other night, working from midnight to 6 a.m., then fills in for the other drivers when they want time off.

Gehl is one of two drivers picking up night loads. Each shift, he stops at three different farms and loads from four tanks at those farms. He puts in about 60 miles in eight hours.

Before any milk is loaded onto the truck at any stop, the driver must follow a strict process to ensure the milk is safe: they must visually inspect the milk, measure it, sample it and check the temperature. Those same steps are taken when the milk is delivered to the plant.

“If any of those steps get messed up, that’s on me,” Bergfeld said. “We have loads that have to get dumped or rejected, about once a year, so we do a lot of testing before it gets to that point.”

Each truck has a pump system, which allows drivers to pump milk from the tanks at the farms into the insulated trucks. Once the milk has been inspected, tested and is at the required 45 degrees or colder, it gets loaded onto the truck.

The trucks aren’t refrigerated and have no cooling capacity, Bergfeld said, but as long as the tank is full, the milk will hold its temperature.

“I have deadlines once it’s on the truck,” he said. “Once I put milk on a truck, I have 24 hours to deliver it, or I have to buy it. Having that clock constantly ticking in your head, it’s something.”

“That milk stays cold, as long as it’s cold when it’s loaded.”

An R&W Transport milk truck pictured late morning outside of Independence, Iowa. (Photo courtesy of Hunter Bergfeld)

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Milk pumps through valves from a dairy farm that utilizes robotic milkers. (Photo courtesy of Hunter Bergfeld)

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Three R&W Transport trucks are unloaded and washed at Prairie Farms in Dubuque, Iowa. (Photo courtesy of Hunter Bergfeld)

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The last time he had to buy a truckload of milk, which can cost anywhere from $10,000 to $16,000, the temperature was off by one-tenth of a degree.

“It was 45.1 degrees, and we had to buy it,” Bergfeld said.

A typical dayshift for Gehl and other early drivers starts with picking up the full truck and heading to the plant, usually Prairie Farms Dairy in Dubuque or Luana, and waiting until they open at 5 a.m. Gehl likes to get to the plant around 4:40 a.m. and back the truck into the bay to be ready to unload.

“I’ll go turn in my paperwork, turn in my seal from when the truck was loaded, and put my milk samples in their sample fridge,” he said. The samples are kept in a cooler in the front of the truck.

“When we get to the plant, the Prairie Farms folks go to the top of the truck and take another sample,” he said, checking for antibiotics or blood. “If all goes well, they go and empty the truck.”

That process takes about an hour to an hour and 10 minutes, Gehl said, with the plant pumping out about 1,000 pounds of milk a minute from a 60,000-pound load.

Once the truck is emptied, it goes back on the road to pick up more milk. On most days, the truck will be back at the plant two more times.

At the end of the plant’s business day, and every 24 hours, the trucks are cleaned and sanitized at the plant.

R&W Transport employs 11 drivers, including Hunter and Randy Bergfeld, and by 4 a.m. there are five trucks running.

“They’ll run all day until late afternoon,” Bergfeld said, “but there’s an hour or two in the afternoon where everyone can sit, sometime between 3 and 6 p.m., when it’s a bit calmer.”

In addition to the six trucks running every day, R&W has one back-up truck for when the others are down for maintenance.

“But if you have one truck down for maintenance and you’re using your spare truck, you can’t have anything else break down — and sometimes that does happen,” he said.

Bergfeld said he has good relationships with other milk transport companies, and they all pitch in to help each other.

“A lot of stuff can happen, but that’s the high pressure of the industry,” he said.