The Central Farmers Cooperative Annual Meeting was held Monday, January 17^th, in Marion, SD. CFC showed a net profit of $2,751,674 for the Fiscal 2021. Your CFC Board approved the following patronage distributions to members: $600,000 of Qualified Patronage all cash (staff is working on patronage checks and they should go into the mail shortly), and $600,000 of Non-Qualified Patronage (this is non-taxable allocation you are not taxed on this until it is paid). Your board did the Non-Qualified allocation to get more equity back in members names. During the past couple of years as your Board made the decision due to the difficulties presented by the 2019 and 2020 fiscal years financially to pay only estates during that time frame. With the profitability from the 2021 fiscal year your Board voted to catch up on our Equity revolvement program, voting to payback members with CFC-Fremar-Salem-Dimock-Viborg and Non-Qualified equities with birth years of 1949-1951 getting our equity payout back to age 70. For our members with CFI-Tyndall/Scotland Equity we voted to payback birth years of 1944-1946 at the September audit meeting and at the December board meeting we voted to payback the birth years of 1947-1949 after receiving equity revolvement back from AGP, this was part of the merger agreement when CFI merged in, to use regional equity payouts associated with CFI to help catch their members up to the rest of the CFC members. Between the cash patronage and equity payouts your Cooperative is sending back over $1,770,517 in cash back to the members. Your CFC Board and Management places a high priority on maintaining the financial strength of the balance sheet and returning equity to our members.

At the meeting was an election for directors. Ed Mesman current director from Springfield area District 1 was reelected to a 3-year term. Matt Eichacker candidate from Salem area in District 2 was elected to a 3-year term, and Mark Ortman candidate from the Freeman/Marion area in District 3 was elected to a 3-year term. At their reorganizational meeting Eric Neuharth was reelected as President, Ed Mesman was elected as Vice President and Mitch Larsen was elected as Secretary of your CFC Board of Directors.

I would like to finish this month’s article by thanking two directors who retired from service on the CFC Board Norm Peterson from District 2 and Wendell Weeldreyer from District 3.

Norm was elected to the Central Farmers Cooperative Board in January of 2017 representing District 2. Norm could always be counted on to ask questions and share his thoughts. Norm will be missed in the Board Room as the task of making a motion to adjourn will now fall to another member. Thank you, Norm, for your years of service as a director.

Wendell was elected to the board of directors in November of 2002. Wendell is retiring after serving 19 years as a director and has served as both Vice President and President of the Central Farmers Cooperative Board and as the CFC Board representative to the Fremar, LLC Board. Through Wendell’s time on the board, he saw the mergers with Dimock Farmers Elevator, Central Farmer Cooperative (Salem, Canova and Montrose), Viborg Coop Elevator Association (Viborg and Irene) and Coop Farmers Inc (Scotland, Tyndall and Springfield). The building of the Lyons Shuttle loading facility and the building, sale, purchase out of bankruptcy and sale of the Marion Ethanol plant. Wendell’s experience, knowledge and history will be missed. Thank you, Wendell, for your years of service as a director and officer.

Thanks for your business; it is greatly appreciated.

This year is starting out to be a dozy. With Covid flare ups in the trade area, the task of keeping staff safe and healthy can be a bit challenging. Rest assured we at CFC/Fremar are doing a good job working together as a team to make sure the needs of our customers are taken care of in a timely manner. This seems to also be a worldwide problem with supply and shipping issues of many different commodities that we use daily as well as our seasonal products.

With all the availability problems we need to make sure all your spring plans are in place early. Price is also an issue no matter what it is that we use, from tires to fertilizer. As we plan for spring and summer needs, do it early. An example would be some tire sizes are getting scarce and can take awhile to get. That is also true for some of our chemicals that we need to keep fields clean.

We would like to thank you for your business in the past and future and if there is anything we can help with for your vehicle needs contact one of our stations, and for any agronomy needs contact one of the agronomists.