(ST PAUL, MN) – Last week, members of West Central Ag Services voted to approve the sale of their cooperative to CHS. With 14 locations and more than 3,000 cooperative members in west central Minnesota, West Central Ag Services is set to fold into the CHS footprint and grow the nation’s largest farmer-owned cooperative.
It’s a move that has been well over a year in the making, according to West Central’s Jesse McCollum. “You know, going back a year and a half ago, we spent a lot of time with our board of directors and looking into the future and where we should go next. We looked at a lot of options, looked at other mergers, possibilities, rolling people into the company.
He added “And after investigating some of those options, we didn’t see anything that really appealed to us and decided maybe it was time to look towards CHS and see if there was an opportunity to sell the co-op to them. We had a longstanding relationship with them. So we started communications with them and went through the process and decided it would be a huge opportunity to basically align our co-op better for the future, both, you know, globally and domestically. That was the primary focus on this as we just felt we needed to expand and be a little more integrated than we were.”
From CHS’ perspective, they are excited to welcome West Central into their company according to Rick Dusek, executive vice president of ag retail, distribution and transportation at CHS. “We’re thrilled to have West Central come in to CHS,” says Dusek. “And as Jesse said, there’s a longstanding relationship, a lot of trust built between our companies and we’ve just been good partners for a long, long time. And as CHS, we continue to build out our global network with the goal of connecting the US farmer to the global marketplace as efficiently as possible.”
The transaction is expected to close in the next several weeks with West Central Ag Services joining CHS as an ag retail business unit called CHS West Central, based in Ulen, Minnesota, operating as part of the CHS global grain and agronomy supply chains.
According to our conversation with CHS and West Central, all the members of the West Central board and their employees will remain as the company enters into the CHS umbrella as an ag retail business. When asked why now, McCollum reiterated that the opportunity to grow was the biggest driver for West Central as a cooperative.
“I think it’s always good to look at things when you’ve got control over your own destiny,” says McCollum. “And, you know, West Central Ag has been very successful over the last 25 years. We just seen the market changing and just felt like I mentioned earlier that we really needed to be aligned better. CHS, we’re both owned by farmers and really didn’t think it made a lot of sense to duplicate our efforts and thought we’d be more efficient working together and it’d be a good move for our patrons and an opportunity for them to take the value that they built in this co-op and get rewarded for that and position themselves better for the future.”
Dusek added from the CHS perspective that “we’re continuing to build out these global supply chains and the more that we can connect to the farmers with good assets, with good people and create more and more synergies around our network that there’s a lot of value in that. West Central comes in as a very successful co-op with really good assets, very complimentary to what we’re building. And I think we’re going to be more efficient going forward in the way we manage and invest in our assets, the way we run our supply chains and the way we even manage talent, because there’s some great talent coming in to us as well. So just a great enhancing opportunity for CHS.”
Learn more here: https://www.chsinc.com/news/2024/11/27/members-of-west-central-approve-acquisition
View or listen to our full conversation below: