Ririe Co-Op
Customer Stories
Background
Ririe Grain & Feed Co-Op (Ririe) is a farmer-owned cooperative established in 1927 and based in Ririe, Idaho. They are a licensed and bonded state warehouse and market wheat, barley, oats, peas and other grains. They also offer seed and retail feed products. Lee Andersen has been manager at the co-op since 2016.
The Opportunity
Growers were asking Ririe for access to their scale tickets and settlements. Andersen said he preferred that farmers have self-serve access to their data, rather than push them daily or weekly reports via email. “If you’re constantly pushing it, it becomes noise,” he said.
Andersen also said farmers were missing opportunities to sell grain because they couldn’t remember or easily reference their contracts to see what they had sold. Many times, farmers would call Ririe with account-related questions, starting with “I know this is a dumb question….” While they knew they had the account information they needed somewhere, their paper-based record-keeping was cumbersome, resulting in inefficiencies for the farmer and Ririe alike. From a compliance standpoint, Ririe was also concerned about their paper-based contract process, noting that they didn’t have a good way to keep track of what contracts had been signed and what contract signatures were outstanding.
“If you don’t have it [Bushel’s customer portal], you’re just kind of behind the times and don’t have what the farmers want. The farmers want the ability to have all that information at their fingertips. If you don’t have it, you’re missing out.”
Lee Andersen, Manager, Ririe Co-Op
The Solution
Ririe launched the Bushel-powered customer portal to their growers in 2021.
“Contract signature management is a lot better with Bushel’s eSign. Before, we didn’t have a great system for tracking who hadn’t signed yet or who had returned theirs,” Andersen said. “Now we can nudge farmers to sign and submit their contracts right in the app [customer portal].”
The co-op also takes advantage of the customer portal’s push notification functionality. With the click of a button, Ririe can send updates and announcements to all of their growers at once, and the messages are professionally formatted and easy to read on a mobile phone. Typically, they send out a push notification once or twice a week, and then follow up with an email.
From the grower perspective, Andersen said their grower customers appreciate the ability to export their scale tickets from the customer portal. This allows them to import their scale ticket data into spreadsheets that they use to calculate their yields, rather than entering scale ticket information manually.
“After hearing Bushel’s vision and seeing what you were doing in the industry, we wanted to be involved because it was only a matter of time until Bushel would be the common thread,” “You take a non-biased approach, not trying to take out the middleman, but rather providing the benefit of being the information tool.”
Lee Andersen, Manager, Ririe Co-Op
The Results
Today, nearly all of Ririe’s growers are using the customer portal. Andersen said growers particularly love the easy access to their scale tickets, contracts and commodity balances. Andersen also sees a return on investment related to the risk mitigation eSign provides. “If it saves us from one contract problem, it’s paid for itself for a year,” he said.
Andersen said that instead of fielding calls about transactional account data, the co-op is taking the initiative and calling their farmers to talk about grain marketing. “This now gives us a chance to initiate conversations [with farmers] about the markets, their grain positions, and the best opportunities to sell. If you call them, it encourages them to make a decision, and they are looking forward to that call,” he said.