Except for a brief period during his youth, Melvin Sprecher is a life-long resident of the Sauk City-Prairie du Sac area, in Sauk County, Wisconsin. He was born on April 27, 1911, in a farm home located one mile north of Witwen, a hamlet about seven miles west of Sauk City-Prairie du Sac. Graduating from high school on the eve of the Crash and Great Depression, Sprecher was thwarted in his desire to work in a dairy plant and, as a result, in his bid to enroll in the dairy school at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Employed as a hired man for several years, he began to operate his own farm after his marriage in the mid-1930s. One problem followed another but the farming operation eventually prospered, especially during the years of World War II. Sprecher marketed his milk at the nearby Honey Creek Valley Cooperative Creamery (earlier called Witwen Creamery) and grew more active as a farmer-patron. In 1947 he was elected to the cooperative's board of directors, the first of many elected positions Melvin Sprecher would hold on the boards of various state and national cooperative organizations over the thirty years that followed. Ultimately he was elected chairman of the board, Land O'Lakes, Inc., Minneapolis, one of the largest and most successful dairy products marketing cooperatives in the United States.
Melvin Sprecher is the most significant farmer involved in the planning and formation of the Wisconsin Dairies Cooperative in the early-1960s. Small dairy plants located in western Wisconsin, most of which were affiliated with the Wisconsin Cooperative Creameries Association, and a large dairy cooperative at Sauk City merged to create the WDC after Sprecher and others convinced boards of directors, managers, businessmen, and farmers in many western Wisconsin communities that merger would serve the best interests of all in the long run. The vision was to create one dairy marketing cooperative that would extend, in the words of Rudy Froker, dean of the University of Wisconsin College of Agriculture, “from the Wisconsin river to the Mississippi.”
