Poulin Grain Senior Vice President and General Manager Mike Tetrault, looks over data with Dr. Christine Rossiter Burhans, staff veterinarian.
By Eric Jenks, Special to NEAFA
Time flies with our NEAFA Members! We last sat down with Poulin Grain nearly six years ago in 2020. For January, we caught up with Mike Tetreault, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Poulin Grain. “Since 2020, we’ve grown to five facilities, and we relocated our office and logistics distribution center to Derby, VT in 2024,” said Tetreault. “We’ve also added an additional bagging line to our facility. We were running out of capacity and warehouse space, so we developed another production facility and took the warehousing and moved it 2.7 miles away. The efficiencies we’ve gained from splitting up our spaces and increased capacity are phenomenal. We now service all of New England, including Rhode Island, and we go west into New York past Syracuse.”
Beyond facility space, Poulin Grain has also expanded their workforce. “We’ve expanded the dairy nutrition team significantly,” said Tetreault. “We added four new nutritionists in 2025, and we created a new position, Director of Dairy Business, which is filled by Melissa Carabeau. We’ve also rebranded one of our production lines, and have expanding marketing from one person to 2 full time and 1 part time positions. One of the key differences between us and many of our competitors is that whatever we do, we support. We don’t have independent consultants, we’re all in house. Our strategy is to be the company that manages the quality, nutrition, and logistics. We want to make sure that everything is done how we see fit to help make our customers more profitable. A lot of others don’t have that direct control to make sure the outcome is exactly what they hope it will be.”
“Our tech services department has expanded as well,” said Tetreault. “We’ve got 3 techs that between drone servicing, data collection and processing are working on our data management system, along with two veterinarians that work for us, and two nutritionists that work for us . We’re building the tech side to meet the needs of the modern, progressive dairy farm. One of our key tech people flies drones and does inventory and service management through that. They visit farms on a monthly business to get data for our algorithms. We have data dated back to 1999. We’ve moved all of that to our tablet and phone tools in the cloud. It creates an executive report that dairies receive every month. In 5 minutes, they can go through their reports and see where they need to direct their attention, and how nutrition or management might be able to make a difference – to have a full comprehensive system that looks at cost, metabolic health, milk performance, quality, reproduction, test a that summarizes that and a heifer management report that we’ve built into the system that’s been 27 years in the making.”
For Tetreault, joining Poulin 39 years ago originally came down to a bit of luck. “I was brought up as a dairy kid,” said Tetreault. My parents had 40 cows which wasn’t uncommon. We lived at my grandparent’s place, which I now own with my wife, but we don’t have cattle any more. Our farm wasn’t large enough to support a career for me, and one of our Poulin Grain delivery drivers pulled in and told me that they were a great place to work. My dad said maybe you should go talk to them . When I talked with Jeff Poulin, he said they were looking to add a person. It’s been a great run. I think back of all the opportunities that we’ve explored, and the successes that the family and employees have had, it’s been tremendous. To go from one mill producing 4-5 tons a week, to expanding to other facilties and growing those markets, it’s just amazing. I was the 18th employee in 1987; we’re in the 160 employee range today. The thing I’m most proud of is the team that we’ve grown to be. We’re fortunate to have the support of a family that is investing in us – we have a super comprehensive training program. It’s been a very special career to work with so many people that have made this company grow so much. Jeff, his main goal was to gear the company so that his kids could transition the business. One of my key goals was to help that happen, and his son Josh is full of passion and energy and a lot of fun. Josh’s daughter, Mya, joined the business about 1.5 years ago as well. It’s been extremely rewarding to see Josh coming to this and grow into the leader that he is. It’s been a great career, it really has. I’m not ready to retire, I don’t have a plan to do that right now. They say that once you have a plan, you’ve already retired, so I’m not there yet. My goal is to make sure that regardless of when I do, we have the people in place to keep the culture that we’ve built and the business moving forward.”
For more information on Poulin Grain, please visit their website: https://www.poulingrain.com/