We passed the first part of this century in an agrarian culture. More people lived on farms and ranches than lived in towns and cities. That's changed, recently the US Census Bureau announced the urban population of Minnesota had more registered voters than outstate. Minnesota is one of the last bastions of rural America even much of our urban economy has agriculture at its core.

When America was rural there were concerns about production. But as we moved into the middle of the century advances in machinery and science made America the breadbasket of the world. We could produce so much food by the 1960s the government paid people not to plant crops. We could also pay huge subsudies to keep commodity prices higher than their production costs.

In the last quarter of the century we've watched all that slowly fall apart for reasons no one much thought about. They just happened. Increased exposure to the outside (urban) world created a sense of alienation and envy that drove young people away from the farms in droves. Rising production costs squeezed the producers more and more. Then the free market philosophy that began with Ronald Reagan's administration began to nibble away at the only thing keeping small family operators in business, price supports. Then in 1996 the so-called "Freedom to Farm" bill took away, for many, the last of their remaining safety net. As more and more small producers sell out and move to town this ill conceived legislation is currently dubbed the "Freedom to Fail" bill. Add that to several successive seasons of adverse weather and the rural outlook is grim indeed.

Farmers were one of the first groups to recognize the power of collective bargaining, lobbying and buying. Farm cooperatives have been a part of the rural landscape since before the Great Depression. One of the first and most influential has been Cenex of Inver Groove Heights. Cenex was started in 1931 by 25 local cooperatives with a total investment of $525.00. Since then it has been going strong with an emphasis on one of the most essential farm necessities, petroleum.

But Cenex like the farmers themselves has felt the squeeze of time. Ten years ago they joined marketing cooperative Land O' Lakes. In june of this year it made another bold move and merged with another local cooperative Harvest States. Itself a result of the merger of the Farmers Union Grain Terminal Association and Oregon-based North Pacific Grain Growers. Like their farmer members and the local cooperatives that make up their constituencies these large organization recognize the need for solidarity in hard times. Someone once told me the Twin Cities had one of the most stable economies in the country because it was built on two things, high technology and food. By talking to this new cooperative giant we thought we might get some insight into what can be done when these two industries get together on the Web. 

We called Cenex and found Sheri Brenden, Managing Editor, Marketing Communications. That's how she answered the phone. " Sheri Brenden, Managing Editor, Marketing Communications, Cenex, Harvest States Land O' Lakes."

iBiz: Cenex Harvest States Land O'Lakes, that's quite a mouthfull. 

Brenden: Well it is. Cenex merged with Harvest States June this year. The LoL association began about ten years agao. Land o' Lakes is a cooperative and they were in farm supply in particular animal feeds. Harvest States is actually two companies combining. They were the marketing business for wheat and grain and some supply. The combination was not done for efficiency it was done for strategic reasons. 

iBiz: What did Cenex bring to the table? 

Brenden: Petroleum is their bread and butter. 

iBiz: How did you get to be the web guy? 

Brenden: In Marketing Communications we really saw some opportunities for web technology. We're delivering all kinds of messages to our farmers and our ranchers. Trying to create a kind of unified image for our organization. We thought we could do it more efficiently, in a more timely fashion, for less money by using the Web. 

iBiz: What I see on the web is your public face. Do you have an Intranet too. 

Brenden: Yes we do and that's very different in the way it's organized. In the way we put it together. But we have this ongoing challenge because we are different companies combined, with many different products, to find a central way to do anything. We felt that Marketing Communications had the charge to do that. So we worked with our agency, Colle McVoy, to develop a framework for the site. A place for each of the divisions within the company to launch their part of the site. So each of them can say, can do what they want with the web. 

iBiz: Do they do that. Are they all under your banner? 

Brenden: They're all there. Some have jumped into it more than others. We have, agronomy, livestock production, crop production. We chose, rather than naming them by division, we thought the user would understand them better in the kind terms they're helping the producer with. So for example, Petroleum has put up an extensive product listing of their lubricants. So customers can find out the details of the products they need. 

iBiz: So the end user is the target there? 

Brenden: Right. Let's back up a bit. One of the things that Marketing Communications started with from the beginning… he reason we're doing this web site is to reach our farmer/rancher members and our cooperatives. That is our primary audience. Those are the people we needed to talk to. That's our role to talk to those people. So we wanted to use the technology to enhance that relationship. To see if there were ways to add value to that relationship using web technology. 

iBiz: How has that worked out? 

Brenden: Well the most exciting thing for us has been. . . we've seen steady growth in the traffic on the site. But one of the things that has prompted the most growth, in terms of traffic and also seeing a real payback to the system, is the employment section we added to our site last October. Lots of businesses have employment sections, what's different about ours is that it's really not aimed at corporate positions. We're doing it as a service for all our local cooperatives. For all those cooperatives, 1400, 1600 hundred some, cooperatives across our territory. They have a need for agronomists and feed department managers and general managers. So we said we'll use our placement staff to help funnel those positions in and we'll market those positions on our web site and we'll create some interest. We'll let people know that if they want to work in agriculture and they want to work in mural America visit our web site. We can tell you where there's opportunity. 

That's really taken off for us. The traffic to that part of the site is the highest. People are bookmarking that part because they're just going directly to those pages to check the ads. We were able to do something that we haven't done before, previously we published those kinds of ads in our newsletter. But that went strictly to our own cooperatives. We reached an audience, but it was a fairly limited audience. With the web site we really broadened our range. We opened up the possibilities for cooperatives to get good people. It's a tough job for them to find the kind of technical skills they need in small towns throughout rural America. 

iBiz: Were jobs a long time problem? 

Brenden: Yeah it was a longtime problem we saw and we could maybe help solve with the Web. It's a part of a major push our company has been dealing with involved with employment and manpower issues. 

We felt like, individually the co-ops could put up and advertise on their own web sites. We felt what we can do is market and create a larger place that really adds some value by putting them all together in one place. Then creating a process and a system for putting the ads there and keeping them maintained and all that. We figured we could do that better for them than they could do individually. That's kind of what a co-operative is all about. 

iBiz: You also have the HR staff to deal with it. 

Brenden: (Laugh) Well actually, it's really not done with the HR staff. That's because it's really not a corporate issue. Which is probably why there was not a process to deal with it before. It was really a local co-op issue and we felt we could help out. 

iBiz: I see there's also an extensive training system in place for cooperative employees. 

Brenden: Yeah I think that is one of the things that will be the next step for us on the site. We want to a little more on-line training with the cooperatives; to provide that directly to them. 

iBiz: Are you doing any on-line training now? 

Brenden: No. Some of that is the nature of our relationship with the cooperatives. They are independent and we serve them. But they aren't required to use any particular technology. We can't demand that the have certain things, like a computer. That's their choice in working with us. It makes it harder to deliver some things when you don't have a consistent base. 

iBiz: How many cooperatives are there? You mentioned 1400 hundred, 1600 hundred. 

Brenden: We say there's about 1400. We just did a merger, Land o' Lakes did a merger with Country Mark and there's probably another 200 in that trade area. 

iBiz: What's your feel for how many of those stores have a computer or are on the net? 

Brenden: It's pretty hard to discern. I can't tell you. Lots of them have computers but whether they have Internet access? That's another step. We know farmers, the USDA reports anyway indicate about 13% of US farmers have computers. 

iBiz: I know it's more difficult to get access in rural areas. 

Brenden: Getting it and then the costs. America Online just isn't a cheap solution in those areas. 

iBiz: Where do you see the most traffic on your site? Does it come form rural locations? 

Brenden: Yeah it's been encouraging to see that. We see from the ISPs that they are primarily those serving rural markets. That's nice to see. We certainly have other companies and businesses looking at us and that kind of thing but I also see a lot of rural ISPs. I also see a fair number of universities. That was another target for us, with the employment area especially. We really wanted to talk to the animal science majors and the people coming out of the agronomy programs at different universities. We wanted to have them look at us. 

iBiz: Your site seems very much to be about the organization. Are you delivering any market reports, things like that. Like the crop market reports on rural radio everyone is so fond of making fun of. 

Brenden: Because our merger with Harvest States is pretty new we haven't become involved with that. I'm sure there are opportunities there. We'll be looking at all that down the line. In fact, Harvest States, in fact, Cenex Harvest States has a web site http://www.cenexharveststates.com. But we have to find a way to bridge what they're doing and what we're doing. 

iBiz: What new features have you added recently? 

Brenden: In June we enhanced the employment section by adding an on-line job application. Now people can indicate an interest in a position not just respond to a specific position. People can say they're interested in being a General Manager, or an Agronomy Manager in North Dakota. They provide basic background information and we have a database of people our placement people can then look at to help co-ops in identifying candidates. 

iBiz: You said you're traffic has increased do you have any numbers? 

Brenden: Well from the end of 1997 until no we've doubled the number of people visiting the site each month. 

iBiz: What do you hear back from your target market? Are the farmers and rancher talking back to you? What are they saying? 

Brenden: Well again we're getting real enthusiasm for our effort to help co-ops find employees. They're excited about that. The number of ads are increasing, the number of placements are increasing. The number of ads we're being asked to place are three times greater since we started doing this. It used to be the same old people they saw for many jobs, now they're getting a whole new set of people from the web site. They are regularly interviewing people from other states. That's a kind of mobility we haven't seen in out market before. 

iBiz: How many people do you have working on your site. 

Brenden: Currently we have three people that work on the it. Not the site exclusively but three of us contribute. 

iBiz: Primarily content? 

Brenden: Yeah. 

iBiz: Do you out source the production? 

iBiz: We work with our agency mainly. 

Brenden: We are Marketing Communications. We put out newsletters. We do press releases. All those kinds of things. All that stuff we just feed into the web site to keep it fresh, to keep the news comin'. We use Netscape Navigator Gold and we just do it. 

That's one of the things we like about the site. When we see something that needs doing we just do it. We make a point of keeping the news coming. The staff that does the bi-weekly newsletter gets it out on the site at the same time. The entire process actually dovetails with our publication process. We don't reinvent everything. 

iBiz: Do you use templates? 

Brenden: Kind of we just work from what the site is. That's another thing we provide to the divisions. We have a set of guidelines and standards about the way the site .is constructed . When petroleum or feed want to add things we can say, "Well this is the way you should work." This is the design, these are the limits that you should have. They don't have to reinvent that every time. 

iBiz: I know cooperatives have always had a priority to recruit new members. Are you doing any of that? 

Brenden: You know that really rests on the shoulders of the individual cooperatives. We try and give them the tools they need to bring in new business and serve their members and potential members better. Our customers as a regional cooperative are the local cooperatives. So while we want to help those local cooperatives by building a strong relationship with farmers. We don't serve the farmers, that's one of the reasons we don't do eCommerce on our site. It's up to the local co-op to do that with our farmer members we wouldn't want to get in the way of that. 

iBiz: Sure, it's a tenuous position you hold. 

Brenden: You could look at it that way. We certainly want to make sure that our connection and relationship with the cooperatives is not in any way harmed by our web presence. We want to enhance our relationship with the farmer members to the benefit of the local cooperatives. That's the bottom line. Everything we do, we do for the benefit of our local cooperatives. 

 iBiz