In her short time on the staff of FarmConnect, 2002 University of Minnesota, Crookston (UMC) graduate Becky Kuechle has had many rewarding moments. But when it comes to a sheer adrenaline rush, she points to one specific moment that stands above all the rest: when she was an intern and wrote out a $5.6 million check. “I’d like to think that not many people can say they’ve done something like that, so that was definitely memorable,” Kuechle said in her FarmConnect office, located in Valley Technology Park just north of the UMC campus. As for the check itself, it was written out to a Japanese group that sold a struggling soy link plant in Iowa to FarmConnect. Kuechle’s performance during that internship, aside from correctly filling out the check, led to her full-time employment with FarmConnect even before she graduated in the spring of 2002 with a bachelor’s degree in agriculture business. She joined a staff of two others, Brent Sorenson and Zach Fiore. So what exactly is FarmConnect? It’s a marketing cooperative composed of approximately 740 farmer members primarily located in Minnesota, North and South Dakota, and Iowa. FarmConnect takes ideas and develops them into projects that help its members add value to their products. “We utilize our farmer members when promising projects come up,” Kuechle explained. “We do the work on this end for them so they can keep doing what they’re good at, and they can tailor their crops to a project we’re working on.” Sorenson and Fiore had a vision for FarmConnect several years ago and, in 1999, they formed a board of directors and gathered investors. Members own common stock in the cooperative, Kuechle explained. Other agriculture groups and initiatives know that if they want to see a project idea in action, they can contact FarmConnect to see if some of its members are interested, she said. “We’re kind of the assessment, diligence and development part of the equation,” Kuechle said, adding that one of FarmConnect’s latest endeavors involves delivering soybeans to the Korean sprout market. Kuechle recently hosted a group of Koreans visiting FarmConnect’s offices; she took them into the fields to show them the soybeans they’d be purchasing and introduced them to the farmers who were growing them. “We’ve established ourselves as a group that consumers, businesses and companies can come to because we have a group of farmers that they can utilize,” she explained. “It helps our farmers see the bigger picture beyond their combine and their field by showing the end result of their production, how it impacts the whole food business, and what consumers are interested in.” Those ventures have led to numerous identity-preserved contracts that are fast becoming valuable with various food companies today that like to track crops from the field to the end product on the store shelf, Kuechle explained. “Where it came from, what’s been sprayed or not been sprayed on it, those are things that people want to know today,” she added. “Consumers today more than ever want to know where their food came from, and it’s interesting to get farmers thinking in the other direction, about where their food is going.” Kuechle is a 1999 graduate of Kimball Area High School. She isn’t sure what her official job title is, probably because she does so many different things. She spends much of her time on member relations, grant writing and business development. And on occasions like the day the Koreans flew into town, she was essentially FarmConnect’s ambassador. “Sometimes, when Brent and Zach are off doing other things, I’m the voice and face of FarmConnect,” Kuechle said. “With a farming background, my favorite part of the job is interacting with the farmers, which is what this is all about and why we’re doing this. I’m very much a people person and this job lets me be me.” UMC connections Sorenson, who teaches ag business at UMC, had Kuechle as a student. That led to her internship at FarmConnect and, at its completion, her request for Sorenson to provide her an internship reference as she sought full-time employment. He provided more than a reference. “He said, ‘Come work for us,’” Kuechle recalled. She believes that it’s connections like those that are so valuable to UMC graduates. “The students connect to their instructors in class, but then the instructors have all these ties and connections to the fields they’re teaching in,” she said. “That’s what got my foot in the door and I think it helps other students as well. “Our instructors are so connected to the actual fields, and it results in better opportunities for their students, like me,” Kuechle continued. “I feel that the things I was learning were definitely advancing agriculture into the future; I was always learning what was coming up next, not just what’s happening now. What really inspired me was that my instructors were out there actually doing what they were teaching.” While she knows it’s a bit cliche, she said a lot of what she learned at UMC was “out of the box” and “outside the lines.” Business side Being part of the equity drive that led to the multi-million dollar check Kuechle wrote for the soy link processing plant really opened her eyes to the financial side of the value-added agriculture business. After purchasing the plant, FarmConnect brought in marketing expertise from food giant Hersheys/Kraft. In the case of the soy link plant, the equity drive was a success, Kuechle said, but sometimes there simply isn’t enough money to finance every great idea. “That’s the most difficult thing about this job, getting the farmers all fired up about something and then dealing with the financial realities,” she said. “This is definitely a business.”
