Cooperatives at the Tuesday night farmers' market

Tuesday night's farmers' market was sponsored by three area cooperatives. Farm Credit Mid-America ran a tractor pull for little kids. My little friend Irma was only able to peddle a bit over five feet, which gave her third place. (Guess how many kids were in her age group.)

I asked one of the people at the Farm-Credit table when they would be moving into their new building on Drexel Drive and was surprised to hear that they planned to move in about five weeks. The contract for the building specifies that it be finished in mid September. That explains why workers are on the site at least six days a week and for long hours. The exterior seems to be finished and yesterday I noticed that the curbs had been installed.

Another of the three cooperatives sponsoring the event was Co-Alliance. I was not familiar with them, but they own the large elevator in Remington as well as the elevator in Wolcott. Their handout said that they are a cooperative partnership of five businesses: Midland Co-op, IMPACT Cooperative, Laport County Farm Bureau Co-op, Frontier Co-op, and Excel Co-op.

The third of the three cooperatives sponsoring the event was Ceres Solutions, which is the company formed when the AgroKey Co-op (which had been Jasper County Farm Bureau Coop) joined with two other cooperatives. I asked what the story was about the building being torn down behind the CountryMark station, which Ceres Solutions runs. The building seems to have been built in the 1950s and was initially used for bagged fertilizer. More recently it was used to store appliances sold by Jasper County Farm Bureau. It is being taken down to allow better traffic flow for the diesel fuel pumps of the CountryMark station.

(Leaving Rensselaer this morning I saw the new Welcome-to-Rensselaer sign south of Rensselaer that Rensselaer Main Street recently installed.)