Dairy Management Inc. executive Vilsack wins $150,000 playing Powerball lottery

A top executive at Dairy Management Inc., a nonprofit funded by dairy farmers that promotes milk and other dairy products, has won the lottery.

Tom Vilsack, executive vice president of the group which came under fire last summer after a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel report about salaries and spending, won $150,000 playing Iowa's Powerball lottery in January, the Des Moines Register reported this week.

Vilsack is a former Iowa governor and was U.S. agriculture secretary under President Barack Obama. In addition to being executive vice president of Dairy Management Inc., he is the CEO of the U.S. Dairy Export Council.

“I forgot about the ticket,” Vilsack said in a news release from the Iowa Lottery. “Then I woke up 10 days later, on a Saturday morning, and I said ‘Oh, geez, I wonder how I did?’ ”

In 2018, he became the highest-paid executive at Dairy Management Inc., with his pay coming within $579 of topping $1 million.

In 2017, a year in which more than 500 dairy farms closed in Wisconsin, and 1,600 were shuttered nationwide, IRS records showed the top 10 executives at the organization were paid more than $8 million — an average of more than $800,000 each, the Journal Sentinel found.

Vilsack donated some of his Powerball winnings to St. Boniface Catholic Church in Waukee, Iowa, split some of the money with his two sons and used the rest to pay down his mortgage, the Des Moines Register reported.