Hello OLDGAS !
I apologize for the late start, without further ado!
Welcome to this month’s installment of Company Of The Month !
This month’s feature will cover the Illinois Farm Supply Company, which later changed to FS and is still operating under Growmark . I’ll start off with a brief history, a timeline, and then we’ll start posting pictures of signs, globes, cans, pumps, maps, and everything else that we can find.
COMPANY HISTORY:
The Illinois Farm Supply Company has its roots in the early 1920s. In the 1920s, Farm Bureau members in Illinois invested money and efforts into forming local cooperatives as a means to ensure a reliable supply of farm inputs and to maintain ownership and control of their own business. In 1927, nine local cooperatives formed Illinois Farm Supply Company.
Edward J. Mikula was recruited to design the Illinois Farm Supply logo. Mikula, a native of Chicago, was born Jan. 3, 1916 and graduated from the Art Institute of Chicago; he was experienced in the graphic arts and had created logos for the Methodist Church and the Associated Church Press. Edward J. Mikula passed away at the age of 88, on June 20, 2004.
More than $10 million in farm supplies were sold in 1935 by 60 locally owned service companies associated with Illinois Farm Supply Company, up by about 25 percent from 1934. Bulk of the sales were petroleum products, which generated$1.4millionfor Illinois from gasoline and sales taxes.
About 68-million gallons of petroleum products - including gasoline, kerosene, distillate, lubricating oil and grease were sold by member co-ops in 1935. Sales of soyoil paint jumped 65 percent, to 175,000 gallons. Farmers' investment in the 60 companies reached $981,595. They had a combined accumulated surplus of almost $1.2 million for use as working capital.
Nearly half of the companies operated service stations for petroleum products. Three-fourths of the business in 1934 was with 80 percent of the members. Each company set aside part of its earnings for working capital purposes. Cash dividends to members totaled $805,000. This all coming from a company who wasn’t even in existence ten years earlier.
Coming out of the depression into the war era, these were trying times for a lot of companies, but Illinois Farm Supply knew what needed to be done. Because of gas rationing and the shortage of rubber they switched from an on-demand delivery system to a route system. Instead of delivering supplies whenever a farmer member ordered them each farmer customer was placed on a route. Depending on the farmer's needs he would be serviced about once a week or once every two weeks. Farmers were asked to empty drums for fuel storage so additional fuel could be delivered with fewer stops.
Drums for lubricating oil were recycled back to Illinois Farm Supply for use again.
Feed bags were also in short supply. Jute used to make burlap feed bags was no longer available from India and the Maylay Peninsula. To deal with this shortage Illinois Farm Supply created a feed bag recycling program. Farmers were paid to turn back in their Blue Seal feed bags – eight cents for each burlap bag and five cents for each cotton bag. Equipment was set up at the Iroquois Service Company in Watseka to sort, clean, recondition and fumigate bags that were being recycled. The number of different size feed bags was reduced from 30 down to only six. The feed inside these recycled bags was probably not the feed name printed on the outside so a new tag system was implemented to identify the actual contents of each recycled bag.
Illinois Farm Supply started a tire recapping service for its own vehicles, due to the rubber shortage, those of member companies and for Farm Bureau members when possible.
Major rubber and scrap iron drives were also initiated and run in 1942 by the 575 truck salesmen of Farm Supply that sold the Blue Seal label. Farm Supply collected 2.25 million pounds of scrap iron and one million pounds of scrap rubber. An interesting side note – included in the rubber drive were four solid rubber tires weighing 34 pounds each from the Christian County Farm Supply Company. Solid rubber tires were used on Great Western autos from 1900-1910.
In 1955 Illinois Farm Supply adopted the FS trademark. Through a series of mergers in the early 1960s, FS Services, Inc. was formed serving Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin.
In 1980, FS Services and Illinois Grain Corporation consolidated to form GROWMARK. During 1994, GROWMARK purchased the major assets of United Co-operatives of Ontario. UPI, Inc., a joint venture between GROWMARK and Suncor Energy Products, Inc., supplies rural Ontario with petroleum, diesel, and propane.
As of 2005 there were roughly 200 FAST STOP stores, which it services using a combination of a private fleet, dedicated contract carriers and common carrier operations. Growmark was expected to add roughly 30 more sites within the next coming year the cooperative had interest in almost doubling the size of the network by bringing in new retailers in the Midwest with fuel volumes of 60,000 gallons per month or better. (Marketers within the GROWMARK system pump anywhere from a low of 40,000 gallons per month to a high of 250,000 gallons per month.)
As of 2005 Growmark had FAST STOP stores in Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Nebraska and Wisconsin. The cooperative had hopes to soon branch out into Indiana, Missouri, Ohio and Oklahoma to pursue new growth opportunities. Growmark offers a branded fuels program through an arrangement with ConocoPhillips, giving marketers the option to fly the Phillips 66 flag, if desired.
In conclusion,even still today FS operating under Growmark still offers services to the customer, with the standards set forth by the Illinois Farm Supply back in 1927.
[This message has been edited by oil stuff (edited 07-02-2007).]