Jeff Broin
Agriculture Dell Rapids, SD
Jeff Broin, Founder, Chairman and CEO of POET, is a recognized innovator, entrepreneur, agriculturalist, business leader, philanthropist and global advocate for the biofuels industry. Over the last 30 years, Broin has played a vital role in championing an industry that creates jobs and grows prosperity by bringing cleaner-burning, homegrown biofuels to markets across the globe. When Broin was a teenager during the early 1980s, the United States was in the middle of an Ag Crisis. Corn prices were below the cost of production, farmers were being paid to set aside land and store surplus grain for the government, and farm income and land values plummeted. The Broin family saw the challenges as many of their neighbors filed bankruptcy or walked away from their farms entirely, so they turned to a new agricultural opportunity for revenue and built a small-scale biofuel plant on their farm near Kenyon, Minnesota. Serving as Broin’s introduction to biofuels, that plant represented a new market for farmers suffering economic hardship and formed the basis for what would become a lifelong passion. In 1987, when Broin was 22 years old, he invested in a bankrupt ethanol plant in Scotland, SD. He assumed the role of General Manager for the plant and, under his leadership, the company that was then known as “Broin Companies” grew from a small one million-gallon-per-year plant into “POET,” the world’s largest producer of biofuels and the largest company by revenue in the state of South Dakota today. Biofuels have created a market for agricultural products that is critical to rural America. POET purchases 5% of the U.S. corn crop from more than 30,000 farmers, has
15
South Dakota Hall of Fame
created income for more than 6000 farmer investors, and each biorefinery contributes an average of $200 million annually to its local economy. Today, POET’s 28 plants, located across seven states, have a combined annual production capacity of 1.8 billion gallons of biofuels, 550 million pounds of corn oil, and 10 billion pounds of co-products that are marketed worldwide. Broin holds a firm longstanding belief that our world can meet many of its needs through agriculture rather than fossil fuels. This passion, along with the development of the biofuels industry, has increased demand for the growing yields of South Dakota and
Pioneer of Biofuels
