Groundbreaking news

Today was the groundbreaking ceremony for the Farm Credit Services building that will be built on Drexel Drive. There were a lot of people there.

Many people who were involved with Farm Credit Services were introduced and thanked as part of the ceremony. Then everyone was invited to Ricos for snacks and a chance to ask questions. They had an impressive cake there. (Too bad it was Ash Wednesday.)

 The building will be about 7000 square feet, about double the size of their present office. It will be brick and should harmonize with the Demotte State Bank. Farm Services has a corporate look that they want their offices to have, so it may look like this office. The floor plan of the office is shown below. It will have a conference room and two kinds of offices, one that is open (is that the same as a cubicle?) and one that it private, which must mean it has a door. They expect to be ready to move in this summer.

 The Farm Credit system goes back almost a century, but the handout they distributed said that it was not until 1985 that it joined the Rensselaer community. It began with four employees and has grown to 9. Their office volume is $153 million--I am not sure if that represents the outstanding loans that have been issued through the Rensselaer office or something else. As lenders, they must have a source of funds, and their source is AgriBank, which I recall as the Farm Credit Bank of St. Paul when I was a Minnesotan. If you want to try to make more sense of this institution, you can start on the Wikipedia page.

So expect to see a series of posts over the next few months following the construction of this building just as there were posts about another construction project on Drexel Drive, the medical building that from the outside seems to be pretty close to complete, though it might look quite different on the inside.