THE IMPULSE FACTOR by NICK TASLER

Author:NICK TASLER
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster, Inc
Published: 2008-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

3. Pressure Drop

Don R. has spent most of his adult life scouring the midwestern plains for opportunity. He grew up the third of eight children on a rural midwestern family farm. After finishing high school, he elected to leave the farm for the business world, although he never veered far from agribusiness in one form or another. Throughout Don’s thirty-six-year career, he and his high school sweetheart and their four children have lived in no less than fourteen different homes in eleven different towns. They’ve owned more than forty family vehicles. That’s at least one traded vehicle per year, a different domicile every two and a half years, and a new neighborhood in a new town every three years—all by choice.

Despite Don’s early stints in insurance sales, door-to-door smoke detector sales, and a dry-cleaning business, by his early thirties he had settled into what had always been his calling—agriculture. Don spent the next twenty years managing grain elevators, or farmers’ cooperatives. Co-ops, as they are called, are the linchpin of the farm industry, and they are operated exactly as the name implies. Every year at harvest, farmers need a place where they can deposit their grain so that it can be sold and then transported to buyers. To do this, farmers form a co-op that is managed as its own commercial entity. A board of directors consisting of elected local farmers guides the co-op in its business affairs. The co-op’s forty-story cement silos—the closest thing farming communities have to skyscrapers—accommodate the storage, and an onsite office conducts the transactions that turn grain into revenue. The farmers sell their grain to the local co-op, at which point the co-op then turns around and sells it to buyers from coast to coast. Similar to a corporation, most co-ops have various branches in different towns, managers, and a board of directors. In most farm communities the co-op is the biggest business in town.

One of the challenges the co-op faces during a banner harvest is that it simply doesn’t have enough storage space to accommodate all of the grain. At these times, the co-op is forced to close the door on incoming grain. No more grain means no more revenue. As grain is perishable, there is usually only a limited window of time in which cultivated crops can be sold at their highest value, free of defects. If grain isn’t sold after harvest, there are no guarantees that it won’t rot before it can be sold, and that is assuming that the farmer even owns adequate storage for the grain. Refusing grain during harvest is for a co-op what shutting the doors on incoming inventory would be for a department store during the holiday shopping season. Not only is the co-op forced to turn away revenue, but it has to deal with the wrath of key stakeholders. The farmers—who happen to be both customers and shareholders—are understandably upset when the fruits of their harvest are ready to be transformed into profit, only to have them turned away by the co-op.

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