“Here’s an extra special fun fact: The first potatoes grown in space came from UW–Madison,” says Halei Heinzel FISC’22, BS’24.

Heinzel speaks with enthusiasm to a group of sixth graders gathered in UW’s Discovery Building for the 2024 Wisconsin Science Festival. They’re here to learn what she knows about agriculture in Wisconsin. So, naturally, one of them asks her to name her favorite cheese.

“I like tomato basil mascarpone and burrata,” Heinzel says, introducing the students to what are likely unfamiliar cheese varieties. She continues, “Did you know that Wisconsin leads the nation in cheese production, and that 90% of the milk produced in Wisconsin is turned into cheese? And the number one selling cheese in Wisconsin is mozzarella — because of all that pizza we like to eat.”

It’s all in a day’s work for Heinzel. Selected as Wisconsin’s 77th Alice in Dairyland in May 2024, she has been traveling the state since July to meet with consumers, industry groups, school children, and the news media as the state’s official agricultural ambassador. It’s a one-year, full-time public relations gig with the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection. Heinzel predicts she will travel 50,000 miles throughout the Midwest by the time her whirlwind year ends in June.

Heinzel came to the program with an atypical Alice background. She grew up in a city (Oconomowoc) and has no relatives with ties to agriculture. “I’ve always loved animals, and when I graduated from 4-year-old kindergarten, I said I wanted to be a farmer,” Heinzel says. “My parents were very confused by that.”

She later fell in love with farming while participating in FFA in high school. She took that interest to the next level by enrolling in the Farm and Industry Short Course (FISC) in fall 2021. “It was really phenomenal,” Heinzel says of the residential.

FISC program, which has since transitioned to UW–River Falls (UWRF). “I learned as much outside the classroom as I did inside. Agriculture is about the connections you make, and Short Course was a really great place for that.”

Before FISC, Heinzel attended UWRF for a year and a half, with the goal of becoming a large animal veterinarian. It was during her first year in Madison that she was encouraged by then-FISC director Jennifer Blazek MS’10 to seek a four-year degree to help her achieve even more on behalf of the agricultural industry. Heinzel eventually majored in life sciences communication (LSC); she graduated the week after she was selected as Alice.

“Her personality is perfect for the role,” Blazek says. “She has a great outlook, is optimistic and passionate. She has a great way of explaining things, which I think comes from being a nontraditional student in agriculture and is a huge strength. She didn’t grow up with it, she wasn’t immersed in it every day, so when she’s teaching other people, she has a sense of how to explain it and use the terminology they can understand.”

It was through FISC that Heinzel met Taylor Schaefer BS’22, who was Alice in Dairyland at the time. Schaefer encouraged Heinzel to pursue the education side of the agriculture industry and to run for Alice. Later, while earning her bachelor’s degree, Heinzel honed her communications skills through courses in video and audio production, graphics, and social media marketing.

“I learned so much from my two years at the UW, so much that I use in my day-to-day job as Alice,” she says. “I run Facebook and Instagram pages, and between the two there are more than 20,000 followers. I learned a lot of practical, hands-on things, but I also learned about concepts — why we talk about things the way we do, how we communicate to a broader audience. Alice isn’t about convincing somebody one way or the other. That’s not my job. My job is to present information so people can be informed consumers and make good choices at the grocery store.”

Heinzel also credits her LSC academic adviser Lynn Bartholomew with keeping her on track while working toward her four-year degree. “She was phenomenal to work with,” Bartholomew says of Heinzel. “She has a very strong passion for the agricultural industry. She always had a plan of what she was hoping to accomplish.”

As for what her future holds, Heinzel says she would love to be a first-generation farmer.

“I really want to work in the industry to the point where I can eventually have my own farm, whether that’s a couple beef animals or a small herd of dairy animals,” she says. “For me, [Alice] is a step in the right direction for that big dream.”

But her father, Heinzel says, wants her to pursue public service after she completes her year as Alice. “He wants me to go into politics and run for governor,” she says with a smile. “That would be interesting, to go from running campaigns as Alice to someday running a campaign to become Wisconsin’s first woman governor.”

This article was posted in Food Systems, Health and Wellness, Offshoots, Spring 2025 and tagged Agriculture, Alice in Dairyland, Farm and Industry Short Course (FISC), Life Sciences Communication.