The National Dairy Shrine 2026 Awards slate just dropped — and it’s a landmark one. Pine-Tree Dairy takes the Distinguished Dairy Cattle Breeder Award, four Pioneers join a roll that now exceeds 360 names, Vita Plus’s Bob Hagenow is named Guest of Honor, and a brand-new Emerging Leader category debuts with four under-40 honorees.
Executive Director Mike Opperman announced the winners live on the Uplevel Dairy Podcast with host Peggy Coffeen, broadcasting from the Shrine’s Fort Atkinson office beside the original 1949 Dairy Shrine Club sign.
Pine-Tree Dairy: A Legacy That Rewrote the Pedigree Chart
If you’ve opened a Holstein sire summary in the last decade, you’ve probably read Pine-Tree’s fingerprints without realizing it. The Steiner family operation in Marshallville, Ohio — now in its fourth generation — takes the 2026 Distinguished Dairy Cattle Breeder Award, a category dating to 1973.
The operation today: 1,400 milking cows, 1,500 heifers, and 140 bulls across Holstein, Jersey, and Brown Swiss, with a 28,658-lb rolling herd average, 1,000+ embryos produced annually, and 19 consecutive years of Progressive Genetic Herd designation.
Why they reshaped the breed: Matt Steiner was selecting for NM$, cheese merit, daughter fertility, productive life, and calving ability before those traits carried real weight in official indexes. That commercial-first philosophy traced back to one $8,100 phone bid in 2003 — Wesswood-HC Rudy Missy at the Wisconsin Holstein Convention Sweetheart Sale. She grew into an EX-92 GMD DOM brood cow, exceeded 40,000 lbs of milk, and earned Holstein International Global Cow of the Year honors in 2014. (Read more: The $8,100 Gamble on Missy, 198 Dragged Genes, and the 20-Year Breeding Blind Spot Hiding in Your Herd)
The sire list traced to Missy and other Pine-Tree cow families reads like a 2010s–2020s greatest-hits album:
- Seagull-Bay Supersire — generational commercial sire, from the Missy branch via Ammon-Peachey Shauna
- Mountfield SSI Dcy Mogul — one of the most-used Holstein sires in history, from the Missy Miranda branch
- De-Su Balisto — highest-ranked Holstein sire ever in Australia, majority Rudy Missy maternal line
- AltaOak, Pursuit, Sid, Burley (2021 HI Outcross Sire of the Year), Heroic — all trace back to Pine-Tree
The kicker stat from Opperman’s announcement: 48 of 50 heifers at the 2025 World Dairy Expo World Classic Sale traced back to a Pine-Tree prefix. Matt, Gail, and the next generation also supply A2A2 milk to two small processors, farm entirely on non-GMO inputs, and earned Wayne County Soil & Water Conservation District’s Conservation Farm of the Year — a stewardship legacy started when grandfather Ezra co-founded Wayne SWCD in 1947.
The 2026 Pioneers: Four Careers That Built the Modern Industry
Over 360 Pioneer Awards have been handed out since 1949. Four more join in 2026 — three academics and the duo behind “send her to Sunshine.”
Dr. Larry Chase — Professor Emeritus, Cornell University. Built a dairy nutrition research and extension program where applied research answered real producer questions and moved rapidly into on-farm practice. His research and extension arms reinforced each other, creating immediate industry impact.
Dr. Dennis “Denny” Funk. BS, MS, PhD from Iowa State. Managed Holstein sire development at Holstein Association USA starting in 1988, moved to an assistant professor role at UW–Madison, then joined ABS Global in 1995 as director of genetic programs. His career spans research, education, genetic evaluation systems, global germplasm commerce, and the commercial rollout of reproductive and genomic tech.
Dr. Rick Grant — Past President and Trustee, William H. Miner Agricultural Research Institute. 13 years at the University of Nebraska as professor of ruminant nutrition and extension dairy specialist, then 28 years at Miner with adjunct appointments at Vermont, Cornell, and SUNY Plattsburgh. Thirty-five years of field-shaping work in dairy nutrition, cow comfort, and producer-focused outreach.
Drs. Chris Simon and Dr. Dan Hornickel — the “Sunshine Boys.” University of Illinois vet school classmates in the 1970s who left their practices in 1983 to found Sunshine Genetics in Whitewater, Wisconsin. They built one of the world’s most respected embryo transfer operations — so respected that “send her to Sunshine” became industry shorthand for flushing your best cow at the gold-standard facility.
Emerging Leader Award: Dairy Finally Honors the Under-40s
Dairy has always honored grey hair. It hasn’t always honored the 30-somethings quietly reshaping the industry right now. The Shrine closed that gap in 2026 with a new category for leaders 40 and under — Opperman admits he missed eligibility himself by about six months.
The inaugural class (alphabetical, not ranked):
- Bo Harstine — VP Technical Initiatives and Innovation, Select Sires. Driving innovation management and strategic alignment at Select, plus curriculum work with Ohio’s Department of Education ag and environmental systems advocacy committee.
- Allison Ryan — Director of Marketing and Communications, MVP Dairy. The force behind two state-of-the-art dairy education visitor centers in Ohio and Kansas, plus active roles with Mercer County Farm Bureau and Fairgrounds.
- Lucas Sjostrom — Account Manager, Specialty Herd Solutions; head distiller at Redhead Creamery. By 39, he’d logged trade missions with Russian investors, federal milk marketing order hearings, and leadership roles with Midwest Dairy and Midwest Milk — while co-building Redhead Creamery with his wife Elise as a value-added model for family farm sustainability.
- Emily Yeiser Stepp — Senior Director of Industry Affairs, Fairlife. Helped establish the Center for Dairy Excellence Foundation, trained 400+ evaluators through the National Dairy FARM Program, and managed an on-farm social responsibility program covering 99% of U.S. fluid milk supply, 150+ co-ops and processors, and 26,000+ farms.
Guest of Honor: Bob Hagenow
The 84th Guest of Honor in Shrine history is Bob Hagenow, sales manager at Vita Plus Corporation, where he’s clocked 39 years. Dairy knows Bob from somewhere else entirely — the colored shavings at World Dairy Expo, where he’s served as ringmaster for the Holstein and Brown Swiss shows and as secretary-treasurer on the WDE board of directors, keeping Expo on solid financial footing.
Bob Hagenow’s firm handshake reaches your soul, reflecting his 40-year commitment to transforming the dairy industry. From the show ring to the boardroom, Bob’s servant leadership and genuine passion for helping others succeed have made him a trusted voice and mentor, shaping the future of dairy one connection at a time. (Read more: Bob Hagenow: A Legacy Built on a Handshake)
Beyond Expo, he’s board president of the Wisconsin 4-H Dairy Fund, coaches county 4-H judging teams, announces state youth shows including Wisconsin State Fair, serves as off-campus advisor to UW–Madison’s Badger Dairy Club, and mentors University of Minnesota students. As Opperman put it, nobody’s ever seen Bob on a bad day — and if he had one, he’d smile through it.
Save the Date: 2026 Awards Banquet
All 2026 honorees will be recognized at the National Dairy Shrine Annual Awards Banquet on Monday, September 28, 2026, at the Alliant Energy Center Exhibition Hall in Madison, Wisconsin — kicking off World Dairy Expo week.
Capacity is roughly 320 seats, and the 2025 banquet sold out a couple of weeks early. Tickets open July 1 via dairyshrine.org/banquet/. World Dairy Expo itself runs September 29 through October 2, 2026, at the Alliant Energy Center. Winners are permanently installed in the Hall of Fame at the Shrine’s Fort Atkinson museum, with accompanying video interviews.
Also on deck from the Shrine: scholarship winners from a record 207 applications will be announced over the coming weeks, and the May 13 webinar at noon Central tackles “Maximizing Internships in Dairy and Agriculture Careers” with panelists from Midwest Dairy, Oklahoma State, Holstein Association USA, and Cargill.
Learn More
- The $8,100 Gamble on Missy, 198 Dragged Genes, and the 20-Year Breeding Blind Spot Hiding in Your Herd— Your 200-cow herd loses $6,400 annually to hidden genomic inbreeding. Breaking down the $8,100 foundation gamble behind Pine Tree Dairy’s top breeder award arms you with the exact barn-math required to plug profit leaks during your next mating run.
- Your Genetics Rep Has Bad News – But Won’t Tell You Until January — Secure your genetics contracts before an impending $12,000 annual price hike hits your operation. The latest financial data follows the money on the Select Sires combination, exposing why replacement costs are surging and how to strategically defend your margins.
- David vs. Goliath: Strategies for Small Dairy Farmers to Challenge Large Processors — Margin protection requires outsmarting the massive processors currently strangling farms with 1-3% profits. Our team dismantles the rigged dairy pricing system and delivers a proven value-added blueprint—inspired by today’s emerging leaders—to help you drastically increase per-cwt revenue.
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