FROM THE MANAGER
Dear members
& patrons
t
he last quarter has been really busy for your
cooperative. As we enjoy the success of
a great cotton harvest and a good grain
harvest, industry around us is taking note. Your
board and management have been approached
about many expansion and new ventures to
consider for further success and the needs of our
members and patrons.
One opportunity came about with the closing of the John Deere
store at Edna. After the urging of many of our Jackson, Victoria and
surrounding counties’ members and patrons, your co-op pursued
the purchase of a fourth farm supply store in Edna. After much work
from our farm supply staff, the Edna branch of United Ag opened its
doors in late February.
A very customer-oriented staff was put in place and a very successful open house was held on May 10 and 11, 2013. This store has a
lot of potential and will be a full-service location, selling all types of
farm supplies, feed, ag chemicals, seed and fertilizer. Please stop by at
your first chance and examine this new addition to United Ag.
We are also making major changes to our gin trash and dust control system at the Hilje gin. Your board has also chosen to finish off
our upgrade of the Danevang gin.
We will be replacing the first and second stage precleaning equipment and adding a fire protection system to the Danevang gin. This
new fire system will alert at the slightest spark and shut down that
machinery to control the spreading of any gin fire. To say the least, this
should protect your gin and save much down time during a gin fire.
In improving our precleaning, we are adding 12-foot horizontal
cleaners, stick machines and inline cleaners to replace the old eightfoot machines. This will also add more cylinders for the cleaning
of leaf trash. Cylinders will remove more leaf trash while not losing
turn out, which is much different than saw cleaning. The cylinders
that cotton will go over after the upgrade will number 42, while the
eight-foot old equipment only had 24 cylinders. Along with these
changes, we will upgrade our dust control and trash system at Danevang. This should really increase our capacity at the Danevang gin.
Because the structure of the fertilizer industry has changed
drastically over the last few years, we felt that to serve our members
better and more economically we must expand our liquid storage
and capacity. In the past, we have not been able to take advantage of
purchasing opportunities on fertilizer because we were only being
offered material when first handlers were willing to sell, and then we
could onl 䁍