Friday, January 30, 2009

Advanced Director Certification Program

A completion ceremony was recently held for the first class of the Advanced Director Certification Program. The program is designed to help local cooperative board members broaden their business perspective, enhance leadership skills, increase knowledge of strategic issues impacting the GROWMARK System, and improve their understanding of the System’s strategic direction. Participants met for three sessions which included visits to the Chicago Board of Trade, Alpha, Ill. Distribution Center, the National Cooperative Refinery Association (NCRA) in McPherson, Kan., and GROWMARK Lubricants in Council Bluffs, Iowa.



Participants were: Rollo Burnett, Southern FS, Inc.; Mike DeSutter, RIVERLAND FS, Inc.; Rick Dickinson, Evergreen FS, Inc.; Scott Durbin, Assumption Cooperative Grain; John Eccles, North Wellington Co-operative; Robert Gratton, La Co-operative Agricole d’Embrun Limitee; Kevin Herink, New Century FS, Inc.; Michael Hoeft, Ag-Land FS, Inc.; Jim Maw, AGRIS Co-operative Ltd.; Glenn Milne, Madoc Co-operative Association; Dennis Neuhaus, AgriPride FS, Inc.; Mark Neumann, Evergreen FS, Inc.; Joseph Pickrell, Lincoln Land FS, Inc.; Ron Polage, Gold Star FS, Inc.; Don Schrader, Gateway FS, Inc.; and DonVos, New Alliance FS, Inc.

Monday, January 19, 2009

Embrun Co-operative Increases Storage Capacity

About a year ago, Norm Surprenant, crop manager for La Co-operative Agricole d'Embrun put forward a proposal to increase the co-operative’s grain storage capacity to keep up with the upswing in corn production.

At a cost of $600,000, two new storage bins that hold an additional 5,800 metric tons of grain were added to the facility in September and all storage bins at the site are already at full capacity holding 15,000 tonnes of corn.


“This will not be the end of our expansion,” says Surprenant. “There is an obvious decline in the number of dairy and livestock operations because farmers are switching to cash crops, and with the ethanol plant in Johnstown, about an hour away from us, we are pretty confident the demand for corn and the need to store it will continue to be in high demand going forward.”

Gauthier Honored for Service to Cooperatives

The evening of the eighth annual Ontario Co-operative Association Conference and Gala unfolded with the evening banquet revealing this year’s new crop of Spirit Award winners, marking the 10th anniversary for these awards.

GROWMARK Ontario Director of Operations Claude Gauthier, was recognized with the Distinguished Co-operator Spirit Award.

Gauthier began his career as a founding member of the Temiskaming Grain Marketing Co-operative Inc. (Temgrain) and served as a director, president of the board and later was appointed to the position of general manager. Today, Temgrain continues to be an integral and thriving operational arm of Co-opérative Régionale de Nipissing Sudbury.

In his youth, Gauthier participated in the first ever co-ed Co-operative Young Leaders (CYL) program in 1975. In 1985, he was elected as the youngest-ever director of United Co-operatives of Ontario (UCO) and in 1991, was appointed the youngest-ever chairman and president of the UCO Board. Claude is a member of several co-op sector committees and organizations. He is vice president of the Canadian Co-operative Association’s Board of Directors, and has travelled as far as Singapore to spread his passion for co-operatives as a Canadian delegate to the International Co-operative Association’s General Assembly. He is also an active trustee on the board of CDF (Cooperative Development Foundation of Canada), a charitable foundation which raises money to fund many co-operative development projects aimed at alleviating poverty around the world.

Many past award winners were honored during the 10th anniversary celebration and among them that evening were Bill Chamberlain, past general manager of North Wellington Co-operative Services and Denis Bourdeau, president of La Co-operative Agricole d’Embrun, both of whom had a role in presenting the Spirit award to Gauthier.
Bill Chamberlain, 2001 Spirit Award winner (L) and Denis Bourdeau, 2006 Spirit Award recipient (R) present Claude Gauthier with this year’s Distinguished Co-operator Award.


AGRIS Co-op/Suncor Oil Extraction Study Receives Funding

On Nov. 28 at the University of Guelph, Ridgetown campus, Chatham-Kent Essex MPP Pat Hoy announced that AGRIS Co-operative, Ltd. and Suncor Energy will receive funding from the OMAFRA Rural Economic Development Program to complete a scoping study for a proposed multi feedstock vegetable oil extraction and corn fractionation project. In addition to the financial support from OMAFRA, AGRIS Co-operative announced that the Ontario Soybean Growers will also provide financial support to this scoping study.

“We are very pleased to receive this financial support to continue our investigation,” says Jim Campbell, AGRIS Co-operative general manager. “Each of these steps brings us closer to our ultimate goal of providing our members the opportunity to directly benefit from the addition of a uniquely positioned oil extraction facility. While this is a long journey, the fact that we are continuing our investigation through these volatile times shows the commitment of the AGRIS board of directors to this project and the financial opportunity it represents,” added Campbell.

AGRIS Co-operative and Suncor Energy will put together a project management team made up of in-house staff and outside engineering and consulting experts to complete the scoping study. The project team will generate a report and present its findings to AGRIS Co-operative and Suncor management teams in January.


Supporters of oil extraction study at University of Guelph on Nov. 28. From (L-R) Jason Vaillant, Suncor Energy manager communications and stakeholder relations; Dale Petrie, Ontario Soybean Growers general manager; Pat Hoy, MPP Chatham-Kent Essex; Richard Tanner, AGRIS C-operative board president; Jim Campbell, AGRIS Co-operative general manager; Matt McLean, Southwestern Ontario Bioproducts Innovation Network executive director and Art Schaafsma, director for University of Guelph – Ridgetown College.


Saturday, January 10, 2009

Panelists provide outlook for 2009

John Cripe, GROWMARK manager, energy risk management, offered a unique perspective on the energy outlook for 2009 at the Iowa Farm Bureau Federation Annual Meeting in Des Moines in December. Cripe was one of three panelists on the risk in the agriculture industry. He was joined by Jim Knuth of Farm Credit Services of America and Bruce Nelson of FC Stone LLC.

All agreed that recovery from the current economic crisis may take as long as 18 months, although the specifics are difficult to gauge. "We basically caught a cold and the rest of the world got sick," Cripe explained.

The three panelists agreed on some common themes: we're not repeating the 1980s as the bulk of farmers don't have high debt loads and interest rates are quite low; the grain markets are difficult to predict and volatility will return to the marketplace; and energy prices are difficult to predict long-term. "We tend to bottom out in the winter time," he said. At the same time, it's very possible that the dramatic downturn in energy prices will be short-lived, he said, noting there may be an abrupt turn-around in a few months.








Wednesday, January 7, 2009

Skemp Elected Chairman of Cooperative Network Board



Sam Skemp, Frontier FS Cooperative general manager, was elected chairman of the Cooperative Network board of directors at their recent annual meeting.


"The board of directors represents a wide variety of member-owned cooperatives from across Wisconsin and Minnesota," said Bill Oemichen, Cooperaive Network president and CEO. "Incoming board chair Sam Skemp leads a very successful agricultural cooperative and he will provide continued stong and innovative leadership."


Cooperative Network, formerly known as the Wisconsin Federation of Cooperatives, is a two-state organization representing more than 800 Wisconsin and Minnesota cooperative businesses.