Brent Dreeszen didn’t have an ag background before he first dipped his toe into an agriculture career a decade ago. Up until then, he’d been managing a glass company – primarily windows for storefronts, hospitals, schools, restaurants and malls.

“It was a good business, but I guess I knew it wasn’t what I’d do my whole life,” Dreeszen recalls.

In 2010, he was hired away from the glass company to become a national sales and procurement manager for a colostrum company based in South Dakota, where he is from and still lives today. The job sent him to dairies all over the country, from California to New York, Texas to the Midwest. But after seven years, the travel grew tiresome.

That’s about when a sales manager job opened up with Kent, and Dreeszen says he jumped at the chance to work with dairies in a different capacity – and with less time on airplanes. The relationships he’d already built with dozens of dairies in the Midwest made the transition an easy one.

“Kent is a big company, but they excel at providing strong customer service that’s always very personal,” says Dreeszen, who now manages nearly 50 dairy accounts at any given time. “When customers call me, they know I’m going to take care of them, and our whole dairy team is going to take care of them.”

On every dairy visit, Dreeszen performs quality checks on minerals and feed, and reviews daily usage with the owners. Much of his conversations center around the producers’ need to get the most production out of the herd, so Dreeszen researches and presents new technologies and products that can help.

Since most of the larger dairies have their own nutritionists on site, Dreeszen also works with them to tweak diets and analyze performance.

“The dairies are constantly altering diets,” he says. “Weather changes, market changes, ingredient shortages . . . everything comes into play when we’re working with our producers. We have to stay up to speed on every variable out there.”

Brent lives near Sioux Falls, South Dakota with his wife, Heidi. Their four grown children all live less than 50 miles away, and Brent says the family is “serious about walleye fishing.” He and Heidi also enjoy playing golf together when they can.