The UW-Platteville Dairy Club will hold its annual Pioneer Classic Dairy Auction at 11 a.m. Saturday, Oct. 20 at the Grant County Fairgrounds in Lancaster. This year marks the 25th anniversary of the event.

The Pioneer Classic is a consignment dairy sale. During the summer, students talk to farmers from Wisconsin, Illinois and Iowa to find people willing to sell their cattle through the auction, Heather Anderson, a senior dairy science and agricultural education major and chair for the Pioneer Classic, said.

The club seeks out strictly dairy cows, mostly wholesteins, Anderson said. Sixty-four lots, consisting of 57 animals and seven embryo packages, have been arranged for the sale, Anderson said. That total makes this event one of the biggest consignment sales in years, Mike Mee, adviser for the Dairy Club since 1991, said.

“It’s a service-learning process, in essence,” Mee said. “It does a lot of good for the dairy industry.”

The Dairy Club receives a 15 percent commission from each sale, with the rest of the proceeds going to the farmer who donated the animal. Mee said the sale has generated as little as $900 and as much as $8,000.

The money from the sale is dispersed to a number of areas, such as advertising for the auction and paying the auctioneer and ringmen, who take bids from buyers during the sale, Mee said. The profits also fund trips that the Dairy Club takes to the regional meeting of the American Dairy Science Association and the Canadian Royal, a large dairy expo in Canada. The club usually funds a project for the school of agriculture. In past years, they have donated gifts such as a display case and a digital camera. Funds from the auction also contribute to the Jack Weier Memorial Scholarship, a $10,000 endowment given to a Dairy Club member.

In order to achieve their goals, the students must contribute a lot of time to their work.

“Come sale time, you’re basically at the fairgrounds for three days straight, sometimes with very little sleep,” Troy Noble, a UW-P graduate and former Pioneer Classic chair, said. Noble still attends the sale every year and has been both a consigner and buyer since graduating in 2000.

The sale is a good learning opportunity for students interested in the dairy industry.

“We try to stress student involvement,” Anderson said. “Students do all the collecting and all the work with the cattle.” Club members have to clean and prepare the animals, set up a food stand, cook the food and put together a catalog for the auction. “We take it upon ourselves and do our best job, a professional job for consigners and buyers.”