Domestic Study Tour – XVI
Domestic Study Tour – XVI
Marysville (KS), Lincoln (NE) & KC Federal Reserve
Domestic Study Tour Day One
Wednesday, November 8, 2023
Submitted by: Megan Hobbs
Landoll Corporation
- ´Quality Built for a lifetime.’’ 60 years 1963 – 2023 Owner: Don Landoll
- 860 employees
- Started in Hanover KS.
- 110 employees w/over 25 years.
- Production over 50 countries.
- Have their own farm testing ground.
- Largest donor to Marysville, KS Hospital.
- The Landoll family supports the sports complex for the Marysville school district in honor of his late son Pat Landoll.
- Profit sharing company for the last 28 years.
- 3 locations: Marysville, Beloit, Walkersville (1 satellite location: Wisconsin).
- 1966: 1st branded product landed.
- 1969: 1st patent. Traveling axel transfer.
- Deicer builder Poc. Airplanes, 1st to build.
- Goals: Set attangable goals!! One step at a time
- ‘’Take what you already know to find out what you don´t know.’’ Motto of Don Landoll
- 4 divisions:
- 1. Trailers
- 2. Forklifts
- 3. DEM: Deicers
- 4. Tillage
- 5. Iron dome: He built the base for it.
- Military: 4 steps process. Military is based on High Quality Now.
- Never got away from Vertical Integration
- Profit sharing program came from Lincoln Welding in Ohio.
- Never so organized
- Vote on Landoll History
- Lost local H…. during Covid
- Corporate offices are an old nursing home that’s remodeled.
- Make their own manuals for everything.
- Tillage sales – Engineering in Beloit, KS.
- Marks brollers in sales margins
- Drexel University designed the Drexel Forklift
- 54 inch narrow aisle a forklift can go down
- ‘’If you buy a company w/ a good image…don’t mess it up. Keep the colors, keep the brand.’’ Don Landoll.
- Material handling:
- 1. Swing most 90° Degrees
- 2. 75k Bendi 180°/360 inch. Highest it can go is 520 inch.
- 3. 48×40 pallet. Ron narrow aisles: can unload + load rocks w/ same pallet.
- 4. 3klb to 12klb capacity (260K) 12klb is for Gov.
- 5. Omaha Steaks – 9 of the Bend, OK Foods has…-20 Drexel
- 6. Southern wine +spirits – SGWS
- All material comes in sheets and is fabricated here.
- 6 loads/ day of Steel.
- Trailers/ All are from built. We do what customer wants.
- · 9 competitives ‘me-too-ers’’ but they won’t custom built.
- · Load time is 6 to 8 months. Every one is custom.’
- · 4% bonus for weekly full week.
- · 15% profit sharing = 8.15 weeks/pay
- · 2nd shift does body work for painting. All primary powder coated.
- · Russ art – Materials Production M…
- · 30 plus C + C Mad…..
- · Gov’t (EOM) contract benefits = $ per project but you keep equipment
- · Drill bits on new technology / cool art goes …. b.t.
- · Questions:
- 1. #patents?
- 2. Future growth?
- Trailer/ one of the few that do galvanized.
- All galvanized is done in Salma.
- Under carriage is heart+soul of their competitive advantage.
- Abert – All. Trailer w/all tech like vehicles.
- Subject rentals / 1300 to 1400 trailers.
- Submitted quote for more Iron dome trailers.
- Lock and M… custom trailers.
- Shop 50: Goal: Most modern trailer favility
- 70: believe they have achieved that.
- 90% of welding is w/robot. Allows maximizations of employees.
- 10 ft smallest – 50ft biggest drill.
- Supports trailer wood – Imported from Malaysia
- 5.5 trailers with no knob. A day for wood floor assembly.
- Apatone 90ft tall.
Marysville City
- Black squirrel City – 51 years – Wayne (speaker).
- Early 1900s / 1970s
- No harm to a black squirrel. Black squirrel day.
- Cant gathering. 51 years of City council ses…. Coffee.
- Valley Vef Supply (Homegrown)>
- 1973 Started.
- 1985 Catalize
- 1994 Refill
- 1999 E Comm
- All 50 states / 135 FTE
- 35 – 40 PT
- 60 miles N. Manhattan. 60 miles S. Lincoln
- Tension Envelope – 8 gema envelopes
- 25 million envelopes a week.
- 252 students 9-12
- Pony Express Museum – Biggest … to Marysville.
- Have to have a good place to work
Evening meal: Landoll Lanes
- Jerrod Westfahl – Innovate Livestock Server – KS/NE
- Feeding 235K/nd #7/US
- No H2O issues – lots of irrigation.
- Farming:
- 50k acres
- 450 miles. 5 st
- 2 times a year take cattle for feeding to grade.
- Only generates about types feeds needs
- Outside Investments
- Technologies
- Vytelle
- Country
- Vani Maz
- Maber technologies
- Greenfield robiotics
- Starting + growing a business
- 5 keys:
- Entrepreneur view
- Family factor – Everything you do will impact the business.
- Failure is ok, its likely, make it count.
- Grit + 5m expertise + agility = 75%
- 5 keys:
- 4 Fortons from investors
- Team composition + alignment
- Solution + progress – must be real, solution must show investors progress.
- Size + nature of opportunity
- Comercial ‘’nose.’’
- Innovation trends + priorities.
- Affirmation + resource.
- Intensify + expertise.
- Scarcity
- AI – Human bosses
- Talent – scaly expertise
- Bro science – Discovery Platform
- Water
- How much to invest? Relative value: 250K + more, sometimes board seats the observers.
Domestic Study Tour Day Two
Thursday, November 9, 2023
Submitted by: Andrea Dietel
- Settje
- Company founded in 1997 by Dean Settje
- Zach Settje, COO, presented on organization
- Focus primarily on the domestic feedlot sector for facility design and water utilization
- Work on dairy and swine projects as
- Both new builds and expansions
- FARMAFIELD
- Solar panels as shades
- Cattle acquisition and pen optimization product
- Become a general contractor and permitting for livestock producers for sustainability projects
- Looking for c corp because you can buy tax credits from sustainability projects
- Ben Williamson: run investments for Invest Nebraska and raised an ag tech venture fund
- Most recent project is in Hays, KS
- Mike Young: focused on investing in technologies that serves midwest agriculture
- Have made 15 investments in 7 states
- Match companies with about 100 producers to test projects
- Goal is to make the Midwest the ag tech hub
Break out sessions
Josh Demers and Mike Young
- How do you activate interest?
- It started with the Nebraska Business Development Act
- It took 10 years to build
- In 2018 they only had 3 ag tech investments
- Created the INsights network
- Kauffman Foundation is leader in Kansas talking about tech
- Entrepreneurs and investors are the first to get started, it’s producers that are last
- Almost no ag tech are coming out of UNL, but almost all are Lincoln and Omaha
- They go and watch presentations like the Innovation Challenge with Farm Bureau
- Combine is modeled after Innova Memphis
- Grit Road?
- Created an environment to enable access to resources that could be provided by their investors (connection to customers, advice, etc.)
- Don’t give product pilots for free: the producer/farmer has to pay for the product or service but it is subsidized
- There is no equity to be part of the combine, it’s free
Ben Williamson
- Area is lacking in the funding side and they are trying to bridge that with Grit Road
- Innovation that is missing is robotics/automation and irrigation
- Biggest gap is relationships to get prototypes built
- Biological Systems Innovation is a relationship with UNL to bridge that gap, but they don’t move very fast
- KSU has TDI
- There’s also WSU innovation campus primarily aerospace right now
- +/- of being near the university: public perception is that they are under the university, but they are completely separate non profit. Also the university runs slow and expensive to get liscensing is expensive
- Product that comes from the computer science department that runs all facets of water tanks (heater, valves, usage, etc)
- There is a separate fund, outside of Invest Nebraska, that other companies can be part of it
Jesse
- Created a field surveillance and irrigation management technology product, Nave
- Made the decision to go try a start up on her own. She is very risk tolerant. Worked on Nave on nights a weekends for 2 years before leaving their other full time jobs to go exclusively to Nave
- Target customer is the agronomist/crop consultant or the “advisor”
- They are developing a score based on a rewards system based on good practices
- Use a combination of a satellite signal and modeling
- Within 10% accuracy of soil probes, next iteration will get within 3%
- Not sure how to market the product yet
- Hardest part was figuring out how to make it happen and build a business that is a “real” business
Mitch
- Was at UNL teaching ag engineering
- Wanted to buy feeder cattle and issues buying the right size and number
- Created the online marketplace for cattle buyers to by the last of a pen or “top off” a pen
- Using software to help automate some accounting for producers
- 1% procurement fee and 10% profit sharing
- Working on the solar panel shade part of things
- Tying back some of the excess tax credits to the producer and enabling them to sell them
- Currently listing the carbon credits as $0 and the benefits of the solar shades as $0 because they are still substantiating the value
- Have a good network of feedlots for FARMAFIELD
- They are hoping to bridge the gap from someone getting started and
- Using feedlot nutritionists to “vet” the feedyard that wants to list
Marble Technologies
- 3 years old
- A technology company focused on technology automation for food processors, specifically focused on meat processors, mostly beef and pork
- Started around the time of COVID
- Spent the first 6 months of the company getting to know the industry
- Have 22 ful time employees
- Also have a team in Cambridge, MA
- Have an automatics pack-off system that reduces labor by 50%
- Their computer vision has a 99% accuracy requirement
- Space is a massive restraint
- Product is modular
- Must be installed in 3 days or less
- Also make custom camera enclosures
- Chafik Barbar is CEO
Engler
- Part of UNL
- Started from a gift from Paul Engler, the CEO of Cactus Industries
- Meant to create a generation of employers instead of a generation of employees
- They build people that build companies that build communities
- 56 companies in their 10 year evaluation
- $148M in top line revenue
- Average age of founder is 24yo
- Majority of the companies are blue collar companies
- Seth Wright and Kade Wiese, members of the student executive team, spoke to the class about their experience
- “We don’t ever say to a student ‘that’s a bad idea’ because we don’t know. We push students to the market and the market will tell you”
- Make students discuss if they are abundance or scarcity mindset
- Do things to purposefully create “time pressure” like the real world
- Performed the Zen Obelisk exercise as a group
- Day ended with dinner on the KC Plaza with local business and community leaders
Domestic Study Tour Day Three–KC Federal Reserve Bank
Friday, November 10, 2023
Submitted by: Kevin Logan
Morning-Mr. Ryan Engle served as Host for the Day.
8:00—Left Hotel for Federal Reserve Bank
8:30—Arrival at Fed. Reserve, Checked-In, and Proceeded to Presentation Hall on 2nd Floor
-Coffee, Juice, and Snacks were available while the class was able to informally visit with the day’s presentors.
9:00—Welcome by Jeffery Schmid: President and Chief Exec. Officer of the KC Fed. Reserve.
9:10–History of the Federal Reserve-Presented by Tim Todd, Exec. Writer and Historian.
(History and Structure of the Federal Reserve Bank)
-Established in 1913
-Tasked w/ providing Monetary Stability and Financial Stability
-Prior to the Federal Reserve
-The first US Central Bank was a 20 year charter shortly after the nation was founded
-This charter expired and during the War of 1812, the US did not have a central bank.
-The Second Central Bank was in existence from 1816-1833. Andrew Jackson doesn’t see the need for the bank and veto’s an attempt to extend its charter.
-Most of the 1800’s in the US were financially unstable.
-In 1907 JP Morgan began doing “Central Bank” things. In response to Morgan’s actions, the US Congress didn’t want one person to use their money to save the economy and earn that type of “influence.”
– A congressional action in 1913 created the Federal Reserve in 1913.
-The Federal Reserve Bank had 7 Governors. These governors serve staggered 14 yr. terms.
-There are 12 Federal Reserve Banks-Each with a Board of Directors.
-KC ended up w/ a Fed. Reserve Regional Bank due to the efforts of Jerome Thralls.
9:45 Ag Economy-Presented by Franciso Scott, Economist
-General Ag Outlook was discussed
-Kansas follows general US economy factors. No big outliers
-Covid-19 has elevated commodity prices
-KS commodity prices are still a little “artificially” high
-The US has overall Strong External markets, but China, Asia, and Mexico are challenging US grains in the Feed and Energy markets.
-KS follows trends in US Agricultural Expenses
-Both revenues and expenses have increased from 2019-2020.
-Carl, from Plains, asked, “What is the outlook on China?” Dr. Scott’s answer, “Main indicators point to small economic growth in China, this is concerning to the US, especially in our pork exports.”
-Ashley, from Waverly, asked, “Exports from the US have gone down, do we see partners of China furthering this?” Dr. Scott’s answer, “We are competitive in exports, but Brazil is cheaper in the markets. US prices are offset positively in bio-fuels industry.”
-Danielle, from Hays, asked, “What about net-worth; Good increase in capital to put into new production and machinery, but we have very high interest rates?” Dr. Scott’s answer, “Yes, farmers have built up capital, but there are pockets of stress across the region.”
-Ryan, from Madison, asked, Will real estate prices remain high or will they pull back with the continue high interest rates?” Dr. Scott’s answer, “I do not see land values going down.”
10:40 The Power of Community Banks-Presented by Joe Gruber, Exec. VP and Dir. of Research
– Banks are those with less than $10 Billion in Assets.
-Most banks, in fact 95% of banks, are Community Banks
-Banking Regulatory Frameworks really cut back on the number from banks during the 1980’s, from 15,000 to 4,500.
-Community Banks consist of approximately 95% of the total bank numbers, but hold only about 15% of the total assets.
-Community Banks are more flexible to address consumer needs as evidenced by the COVID-19 relief fund distributions to small businesses.
-Inflation is necessary for the nation’s growth, 2% is the target.
11:30 Lunch—Jeffery Schmid, President and CEO Joined us.
-He is a native Nebraskan
-Bachelors from University of Nebraska, Lincoln
– Master from Southern Methodist University
-Owns a small farm in Humbolt, NB; very down to earth person. Interesting point he made, he is the only “banker-by-training” who is the President and CEO of any of the nation’s Federal Reserve Banks. The rest are from other backgrounds.
-Was in his 10th week in current role during our visit.
-Work on a process called “FED NOW,” allowing payments to be made “any day, any hour, any time.”
12:15p Tour of the Fed. Reserve-by Volunteer Eric
-Information on the currency and coin display collection.
-Pointed out that $10 Million in $100’s weighs about 880 lbs.
-The KC Federal Reserve Processes between $104 Million and $208 Million/day.
1:05 Bus Departed for MHK