Sunrise Cooperative CEO optimistic about fall crops

FREMONT – Spring 2015 was the perfect time for planting corn. Until the rains came.

The CEO of Sunrise Cooperative, headquartered in Fremont, was actually concerned its 28 million bushel storage capacity in Ohio might not be large enough for the fall crop.

“This thing is going to be huge,” George Secor, Sunrise President and CE0, said of the spring crops. “And then it started to rain.”

Gene Cook, of Clyde, a Sunrise board of directors secretary, said there could be challenges for area farmers this fall because of compacted ground and damage done by the spring rains.

From June into late July, northern Ohio was hit with a record rainfall.

“That rain put a damper on some of the fields,” said Secor, who has been with the cooperative 19 years.

The hope now is that well-drained farm fields should be fine and have big corn yields, but there is concern that other crops, including soybeans and wheat, might be hampered by the very wet summer.

Sunrise Cooperative is made up of 3,314 member-owners, with more than 1,000 of those members joining in the past five years. It serves farm owners in about a dozen counties including Sandusky, Ottawa, and Seneca counties. The cooperative’s region stretches west to Pennsylvania, south to Mansfield and east to I-75.

In the past decade, the operation has been growing by leaps and bounds.

Secor said that, when the local agricultural industry has a good economic year, it benefits their communities as farmers put money back into new pickups, equipment, buildings and general operation improvements.

“Farmers are the best people to help the economy,” Secor pointed out. “They spend it.”

Although 2015 might see a production downturn because of the wet summer, the past five to six years have been a boom for member-owners of the cooperative.

Sunrise Cooperative itself also is looking good, with its 2014 Fiscal Year Report showing a working capital of $47.3 million — its best year ever. It also reported a return to member-owners of $62.2 million.

Even if production ends up in a downturn for 2015, the cooperative is in a good place to benefit its member-owners, Secor said. If the rainy summer is followed by a long, warm fall and a mild winter, most of the region’s harvest could come in strong.

Cook agreed with Secor’s assessment. He farms corn and soybeans in the Clyde-Green Springs area and has been part of the regional co-op for 30 years and a stockholder in Sunrise since the 1990s.

While weather has been a key factor in the success of Sunrise in the past decade, Secor credits his board of directors with having the vision to allow the cooperative to be competitive.

This year is the first in a decade that the cooperative has not built additional grain storage space. Sunrise’s grain elevator plant in Clyde has grown from a 500,000-bushel storage capacity to 8.2 million bushels today.

Cook explained that members pay a stockholder fee and then must do business with the cooperative by using its services or consultants and selling grain back to the elevators.

Another key factor in Sunrise’s growth was being able to quickly handle unit-trains at its plants, filling 85 rail cars with grain in 10 to 11 hours. The flip side is that the steady flow of 85-car train units from the Clyde elevator regularly blocks U.S. 20.

Secor said the track was not designed to cope with such fast growth, creating some traffic-flow problems.

“It’s tough,” he said with concern.

With the price of a bushel of corn down $2 from two years ago and the weather being so unpredictable, Secor said, this might very well be a tough year for Sunrise’s member-owners. It might be a break-even year for them and the cooperative, he said.

“We are in the strongest financial condition we have ever been in, in the history of our company,” he said, noting that the cooperative will be there to aid its member-owners no matter the outcome of the 2015 harvest.

“Sunrise has built itself up to get through the rainy days,” Secor said.

rrbrooks@gannett.com

419-334-1059

Twitter: @rrbrooks1

Sunrise Cooperative’s Customers:

Sunrise Cooperative sells red winter wheat to Star of the West Milling Co, which mills for Pepperidge Farms Goldfish snacks.

Case Farms Chickens buys about 2.5 million bushels of local cooperative corn annually by rail from Sunrise, which is shipped top Case’s Massillon feed mill.

Sunrise ships to Tate and Lyle in Loudon, Tennessee, which manufactures high fructose corn syrup used by Coca Cola, Splenda and Fremont-based Heinz North America.

Sunrise ships soybeans to Bunge in Bellevue.