SFG Update Mark White Knoxville Location Manager
In late August Smith Fertilizer and Grain bought 4 locations from South Central Coop. These locations are at Melcher Dallas, Milo, Columbia, and in the city of Knoxville. The timing of this purchase meant we had a short timeframe before harvest to clean and repair these facilities. Fortunately, we had our other locations close to harvest ready condition as we had been working on them all summer. We have had crews working very hard at the 3 grain elevators we added. They have cleaned all the storage facilities down to bare steel and concrete. At the same time, we have had people working on all the equipment that’s needed to operate these elevators. This has included legs, pits, conveyers, bins and augers. They have spent several days and thousands of gallons of water flushing grain pit basements and the scale pit at Melcher. We take pride in
keeping our locations clean and organized and I am confident you will find our new locations being brought up to this same standard. We have spent many hours cleaning, painting and reorganizing the Melcher and Knoxville City offices. The Milo office is also receiving a face lift, but it will not be as involved. The grain facilities at Milo and Knoxville City will be ready to receive grain by the time you read this. We are presently on track to take grain at Melcher around the first of October. We have come a long way in a month’s time. There aren’t very many companies our size that could pull this all off. The trick has been great organization and communication. Max and Sharon have been great leaders from day one. They have been thru this exercise before as they bought additional locations. However, they have never bought 4 at one time. All our managers have stepped up and took an active part in this endeavor. Our employees have been very good to take on tasks that they don’t do everyday and now they can take pride in what we have accomplished. People may ask why we have taken such a large jump all at once. Opportunities like this don’t come along very often. It’s like having the chance to buy a neighboring farm that may only happen once or twice in your lifetime. The honest answer here is we have done this for our customers.
Smith Fertilizer & Grain
September, 2019
We recognize that in order to continue to offer competitive prices to our customers we had to get bigger. The world evolves around volume and in order to receive the best price you must keep dealing in larger amounts. We have gained 1.2 million bushels of grain storage in this deal which will allow us to sell grain in larger blocks. Again, the object is to garner better prices so we can offer better grain bids to our customers. We will grow our agronomy department as we service a wider area. This too will mean we can purchase inputs at a better price and pass some of these savings to you our customers. We will also grow the number of people we employee at SFG. These will be full time good paying jobs with benefits. By the time we are fully staffed we will employ close to 100 people. I doubt Lyman, Jeanne, John, and Max ever envisioned growth like this when they first started this company in the early 70’s. As always, if you see something we could do better please bring it to our attention so we can address it. The Smith family and their employees look forward to meeting our new customers and providing them the quality of service our current customers have come to expect from SFG.