Originally Posted in the Onaga Herald, 1-19-05

A while back I stopped by the Farmers Union Co-op at St. Marys. I knew a little of the Co-ops history and stopped to borrow some pictures to scan in for our web site. I met with the general manager Bill DeDonder and we had a really neat visit. If you go to their website http://www.smcoop.com and click on “history” you will be presented with a wonderful chronological history of the evolution of the St. Marys Farmers Union Co-op. Their history parallels Farmers Union Co-ops throughout the central states. The first paragraph of the history reads;

On May 22, 1919, about 100 St. Marys farmers from four different locals of the Farmers Educational Cooperative Union of America met in the Knights of Columbus Hall for the purpose of adopting a constitution and bylaws for a new elevator company.

Isn’t that great! In 1919 there were enough farmers in four local chapters of Farmers Union to meet and create their own cooperatively owned business. National Farmers Union would have just been 17 years old at the time and Kansas Farmers Union was chartered in 1907 in southeast Kansas and just 12 years later had grown to this kind of force! Farmers knew they needed to help themselves by helping each other if they were going to prosper in agriculture.

This Farmers Union Co-op created Kansas Farmers Union Co-op Hybrid Seed Corn and grew, processed, and distributed Hybrid seed throughout Kansas and into Nebraska and Oklahoma. The Hybrid corn part of the St. Marys Co-op remained vibrant into the 1960’s and Bill said that he worked for the Co-op as a high school youth de-tasseling the cornfields.

If anyone knows the history it would really be interesting to know the linage, KFU Hybid Seed Corn became what company? What company bought that company? Where are those original genetics today?

Bill asked if I had a minute and I said “sure”. He grabbed a flashlight and took me back into the old dungeons of the original seed corn plant. ALL THE STUFF IS STILL THERE!!!! Kansas Farmers Union Hybid seed corn signs! The cleaners and the seed sizers and the seed baggers! It looks like a person could just fire the thing up and away you would go!

The heritage of the St. Marys Farmers Union Co-op is great. As we visited about the Farmers Union as an organization and how it has evolved throughout the country he was surprised to learn that his main supplier now, CHS, was originally a Farmers Union started cooperative.

CHS, formerly known as Cenex / Harvest States based in Minneapolis Minnesota was created when the petroleum Co-op of Cenex and the grain handling Co-op of Harvest States merged. CHS is now the largest farmer owned cooperative in the United States. What’s really interesting about CHS is that all of the board members still have to be producing farmers, I like that, it should keep the mission true.

When you drive down the road now and see the Cenex signs or the AmPride signs on stations you are looking at an evolution of Farmers Union created cooperatives. CHS owns 75% of the refinery at McPherson Kansas as well as others across the central states.

The last I heard CHS was the third largest grain handler in the United States, moving a significant portion of the grain out of the northern plains states.

CHS, just like Farmers Union Co-op St. Marys started when 2, then 3, then 4, and so on and so on farmers started talking to one another until they decided to do something about it and created their own cooperative. What a great process!

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