COUNTRY CORNER

MFA leadership says that our value is in our people; they are right.
By Steve Fairchild

Toward the end of summer, MFA has a kickoff meeting for the new sales year. Managers and employees from our entire trade territory come to Columbia for an update on the cooperative. On the last page of this issue, you can see by MFA president and CEO Don Copenhaver’s comments that MFA just closed the books on a challenging year. Drought, high energy prices, volatile fertilizer prices, soft commodities and the spiking cost of employee benefits swirled to make a tempest of unusual proportions. Yet even with this perfect storm of increased costs and reduced margins, MFA finished in good standing.

The reasons for meeting the challenge are many. Among them, MFA management, from the home office to local managers, put a tourniquet on expenses; our solid-performing proprietary seed lines continue to gain market share, and a variety of joint-ventures continue to deliver good margins. Yet those are just random examples from a complex business. And behind the complex reasons we survive in a challenging year or turn sound profits in a good year is something much simpler—MFA’s employees.

On the final evening of the kickoff meeting, managers sat down for a service awards ceremony.

I have attended these meetings before, but this year I was particularly struck by the collective experience that guides MFA.

Among the managers who were celebrating 20 years of service or more there were some 645 years of collective service. Throw in the couple hundred years of combined experience spread among the 5- to 15-year employees and the total approached 800 years of service. Remember, these were just the employees that had reached a 5-year-increment milestone this year. The amount of experience in the audience was exponentially larger.
The idea of a Company Man—a person who spends a career with a single employer—has become rare in today’s society. We are increasingly rootless. We change jobs at a chance for more money. Corporations dump employees when times get hard. But here were managers walking up to receive a token for their long-term dedication. Just 23 of them made 645 years of experience.

The manager at your place has probably moved around within the cooperative and seen different geography and communities in the MFA trade territory.  And you’ll see that the manager is involved in community. When the biographies were read at the ceremony, most of them mentioned the service award recipients’ devotion to the three Cs that hold society together—children, church and civics.

Master of ceremonies for the evening was Bill Streeter, senior vice president for MFA’s Agri Services Division. He listed the reasons he is proud to represent MFA. He said the company engenders a sense of family; that it values individuals for their talents; that the chance to live in rural places is a good thing; that MFA has a good reputation and that the cooperative operates on a plane of high ethics.

Streeter said that MFA consistently faces the challenge of playing the “will always have it” role in the countryside. The cooperative is counted on, and that costs money.

“I’ve done some figuring,” said Streeter. “The reality of MFA’s bricks and mortar presence is that it takes about $500,000 to unlock the doors and turn on the lights each business day.”

Behind those doors and under those lights, however, are so many years of experience, expertise and loyalty to agriculture. That, along with service, is what makes MFA valuable.