 Thank you very much, Frane. And I also want to say how honored I am to have been asked to come here at the behalf of the Birtic Center and give the Bloomquist lecture because, well, there's a lot of reasons. I'm really honored because I knew Al Bloomquist. I had a chance to meet him on several occasions. Had a chance to visit with him way back in the 1990s, the early 1990s. And I really respected him. And so I'm really honored to be a part of something that has his name. And I'm honored because of the Birtic Center. Because the Birtic Center is where this is all housed. And I'm so proud of the Birtic Center and what it's done. And I'm so happy or so glad that we have representation here from the co-ops that helped make that Birtic Center possible. Because it was the financial contributions to the Birtic Center by many, many cooperatives and groups of cooperatives and so on that let this happen. And that's all one great big co-op principle. And that's education. And it's one of the most important principles in my line of thought. Because without education, how are you going to pass any of this on to the next generation or even to the rest of the people outside? So the foresight of those co-op leaders and to establish the Birtic Center is just really something to be thankful for. And again, let me also thank Crystal Board and Management for helping increase that contribution to keep this boom quiz lecture going. I think that's great. My remarks are going to be tailored to the students and the rest of you are guests. This is for the students. That's the other reason I'm really honored to be here. Because I get a chance to talk to you and you are the next generation of leadership in the co-op system. Some of you are going to be management and you might be managing a cooperative. Some of you may end up becoming members. Maybe some of you already are. Depending on what you're going to do, what your career takes you, but you're going to be part of the co-ops. And you're the next generation. Now, I've already turned, my generation's already turned over the keys to the next generation. That would be like your parents. But someday and someday soon, some of those responsibilities are going to be turned over to you. And so the more that we can educate about what a cooperative is and why it is and who it's for and the more we can do that, the more knowledge you have, the better off we're all going to be for it. So I'm honored to be part of that. So thank you. And by the way, I hope everybody's done now with their tomatoes because this isn't very big. I can't hardly duck them all. So we're hoping that part is over with. I come into Fargo last night. I winter nowadays in Arizona. I come into Fargo last night, actually around midnight. Was greeted by that four letter word, S-N-O-W. And I hadn't seen that for a while because we usually escape home, back home. By the way, back home is about, some of you knew where Makoti was, but I live about 300 and some miles, pretty much west, a little bit northwest of here. That's kind of where I come from. And so I've seen snow, I understand what it's like. I've seen cold, I understand what that's like. The only thing I like about cold is you don't have to shovel it. So that helps a little bit, but. So we'll talk some about co-ops. And people sometimes ask, well, why? Why do we have co-ops? You know, why do we have co-ops? Well, why do we have anything for that matter? Co-ops serve a need. If there's a need out there that hasn't been addressed, why not use a co-op and address it? Why not become the, you know, maybe you'll come up with a reason why you should have a new co-op. Co-ops aren't done. You know, there's a lot of chances, I think, for this whole thing to increase. So serve a need, that you gotta have the need. If you don't have the need, you may as well not have the co-op. But part of the need is to provide services. And by the way, well, I'll skip down a little bit. I'll go down to about the fourth bullet there. The different kinds of co-ops. I mean, there's all kinds of co-ops, real utilities. I was on the board of a real electric, like Bob, for 27 years, I think I was on. And I don't know how long you've been on, Bob, but you're getting up there. It's, here's what happens. Those things become your family. And you develop these relationships, you become friends with people you haven't met before, and they last the rest of your life. Because you're dealing with the best people on earth. You're just, that's just what it is. So we have real utilities, and that could be communications, could be electric, could be water, you know, whatever. Egg cooperatives, you all know the marketing and supply cooperatives and so on, that we have. I see CHS is here today, that's great. So we have the egg cooperatives. We have financial cooperatives, and of course, I know Cold Bank is here today. I've seen, had a chance to say hi to many old friends. Financial co-ops could be farm credit services, could be credit unions, whatever. And then there are the consumer co-ops, like housing co-ops, or like grocery co-ops, or food co-ops, or farmer's markets co-ops. There's all kinds of co-ops. I don't know much about a lot of them, so I'm gonna limit whatever, when I say co-op, I'm thinking about a rural cooperative and mostly rural and in an agricultural setting. Put it that way, and that's kind of what I can bring to you, is my insights on those kinds of cooperatives. I'm not gonna go through a lot of numbers that you have to remember, they won't be on the test. So you don't have to worry about the numbers, but I'm gonna just talk about my insights and experiences, and I'm gonna try to explain why it's important for competition to be there. Not be afraid of it, competition, the needs that the co-op fills. Sometimes the need is the service that's provided. You know, I don't know how you would describe it, and a rural electric cooperative is the need, the electrons that come to your farm, or to your place, or is it the service of bringing, you know, bringing that and having that available. So sometimes those things get a little bit hard to define. Sometimes it's the product, sometimes competition is the need. Sometimes you just plain need competition. Kind of an overview, like I said, I won't get into a lot of the technical aspects, like how much patronage should we declare, how much of it should we hold in reserve and equity, how much equity should we have, when do we pay our capital credits back, all of that, you've got professors here that can do a way better job than me going through that technical part of it. And I would guess in your class, you probably had some of that. So, by the way, Travis is really, do you notice how he's really listening? I think he deserves extra credit. All right, besides that, he had to sit by me at lunch, so, all right. So anyway, we'll go to that competition, maybe the need. Now this picture, and by the way, I told you I was going to talk about what I know about, I was going to talk about cooperatives. I grew up in a family that believed cooperatives were a really great way to do business. And it turns out not only my father and mother thought that, but so did my grandparents. This picture is showing threshing occurring on the Dabrinsky Homestead in 1914. And the reason I put it up there, well, there's a couple of reasons. Number one, look at all the people around there. See how many people that takes? Well, unless you had a whole slew full of kids, you didn't have enough people that come threshing time. But what happened was farmers in that era decided, well, you know, we could work together. Does that sound familiar? We could work together to do something together that we can't do by ourselves. And they figured that out. And in the case of my grandfather, who was one of them around there somewhere, I don't even know which one, they formed a formal partnership with their neighbors. There was like four of them, I think, that formed this partnership and they bought the threshing equipment and some of the heavier equipment and they owned it together. It was too expensive for any one farmer and those days they farmed one or two quarters of land because it was the homestead and maybe they had acquired another one by that time, but they couldn't afford to have all the equipment necessary to thresh or harvest their crop. So they worked together. Now, look in there as well and you see that, well, what did they need? What was their need? Probably wasn't fuel delivery because it looks like the horses were bringing the bundles of grain to the threshing machine. Now, that threshing machine, you can't see it on that picture. It was probably a steam engine, which means they just needed to have some logs well dried out and that wasn't the most efficient fuel for a steamer, but it worked. And so they didn't have a lot of needs that way, but they had the needs of cooperating. Now, I don't have a slide on it, but I want you to think about 1914. Now we're gonna go way up to 1927 and things really got modern and that tech was coming in and things were changing and everybody was going to the coffee shop saying, man, alive, nobody's ever seen change like this. And in 1927, they got rid of the horses to pull the hay wagons and they had Model T trucks. And they would go out and get the bundles and bring them in. And they probably had a big gas tractor with a big pulley on the side and a belt driving the threshing machine. You've probably all been to threshing shows where they do that. But they had a need. They needed to have gasoline. And so one day in 1927, and this story, by the way, was told to me by a friend and I can say this name here because there's probably enough Scandinavian ancestry that you'll understand. His name was Paul Restovit. No, you can't go down to Tennessee and give that name and they would never remember it, but we can say that. But Paul Restovit was a good friend of my dad's and he became a good friend of mine because we started farming at the same time. He was a chemistry teacher in Minot, North Dakota and him and I both broke up some family soil bank which is kind of like Conservation Reserve now. And we would meet at the co-op and visit and became good friends. He told me this story. 1927, they're out thrashing and they just get done with one farm and they're ready to move, unhook everything and move to the next farm over and it was on a Friday and well, the new farmer, he had to go in and get the gasoline, right? So he'd go to town to get the gasoline to run these Model T trucks and the gasoline tractor and he gets the town and the fuel dealer and rider North Dakota says, well, sorry, it's Friday. I'm already closed for the weekend. Well, there were storm clouds on the horizon and these guys wanted to thrash and they wanted to be able to thrash on Saturday as well. Not only finish up Friday. He said, well, I'm sorry, you can come back Monday and you can have all the gas you want. Well, they had to wait till Monday. I don't know whether it rained or not that weekend but I suppose we could say it did in our story but they finally got through the season but that winter, that group of farmers around Rider North Dakota decided, you know what? We see a movement going on in the state and people are forming cooperatives and why don't we form a cooperative and sell gasoline or later on diesel or kerosene, whatever. And so they did. Now they had some help. At that time, the Farmers Union would go around and help people like that organize into cooperatives. And so they had a little, there was a little help, a little education that went on but they formed, and all throughout the state, this was occurring, it went on until probably the 40s, mid 40s when it kind of, by that time they pretty well had everything done. But at any rate, we see there was a need and what was the need? It wasn't gasoline. The need was competition because don't you think that if there was competition they would have been able to get their gas in town. But in this case, the need was simply to have some competition. By the way, that cooperative still got the doors open. It was formed in 1928, in the winter of 1928 and it's now part of the enter base system in a headquartered in Minot North Dakota but it's still serving farmers. Now this one, you'll say, oh, what's this got to do with anything? Well, this is what I call the barn. This is on the place where I grew up. That's the farm yard I grew up. That barn is still there. I'm not sure why, I just spent quite a bit of money restoring it. I'm not sure why of that either but it just is gonna illustrate a point I wanna make. You know, until the early 1950s there wasn't any rural electric or not very many farms had power. I'll put it that way, had electricity. And then the rural and the, I'm not even sure when Varendry, Maxine, when was Varendry formed? 19, I don't know, I think 40 or something like that. And by the time, it took a while. By the time they got all that, you know, they got the co-ops organized. They go, organizers went around and sold farmers a $5 share to be part of the, and they called them REAs at that time. And they formed the co-ops and the co-ops finally built the lines out to all the farms. Now the utilities that were there, you know, the villages, the towns, they all had electricity but they didn't wanna go out in the country because there's just too much investment and not enough income. You know, it just didn't fit their business plan. So all the farmers did it themselves. See, a group of farmers got together and cooperatively got something done that they couldn't do on their own. So now, again, what about the barn? What's the deal there? Well, I don't remember, I'm way too young to remember when the lights came on at our place. I was probably four years old or something like that. I just don't really remember that event. But I do remember every night after supper, which is what we called our evening meal, every night after supper we'd go down and do the chores. We had a few milk cows and a few pigs and so on. And so we always had chores every night. We always had supper first. And you know, in the winter time, after supper it's pretty dark. So my dad would turn the yard light on. It was on a switch and controlled in the house. Turn the yard light on. That would illuminate the path that we would take down to the barn. And we'd go down to the barn and when I got to be, you know, probably six, seven, I was helping every night with the chores. And I remember following my dad. He never let me go first. I never quite understood that. And he never let me open the doors. He would always slide the door open and he'd reach around and flip the switch. And then he'd get this smile on his face like, wow, isn't that something? The lights came on. So that's the story of the barn. And that's, you know, the need was to get that service at the farm. And so that's why I show you the barn. I also think that it's important to remember that again, a bunch of farmers got together and they organized and they formed cooperatives because they found they could do something with a cooperative. They just weren't able to really do on their own. And of course it has to fit the time. You know, and what's going on in the world and all that. I mean, a lot of things gotta come together. But that's the picture of the barn. Okay, think about that picture of them threshing in 1914. This one is probably about 19, maybe 2014 probably. I don't even know when this picture was taken. But it's actually harvesting grain on my farm or our farm. And way in the background is the yard where that white barn sits. And so that's, I just wanna show you that because when I'll show you another one, then I'll tell you why. That's the picture of the farm where I live today. And that was my grandfather's homestead. And I'm standing about in the same place, or I shouldn't say I am, the picture taker is standing in the same place where that threshing machine was set up. If you look out, and I'll never find it. So I won't go clicking back and forth. But if you can remember that photo, there was a little tiny white shack. That was what we called the homestead shack. And that sets about where our house now sits. So what I wanna, the reason I wanna show you that, not only maybe you can't see it from where you sit, but there's a pretty good set of power lines going through, going by there. That's important. I wanted to show you that because of my background. And so like I said, I'm making this personal, but that's okay because that's kind of what I have to offer. So think of those kinds of farms now, compared with those farms, or that farm I showed you before, and think of the needs. What do you suppose the needs are? Are there any different, or do we even need co-ops anymore? After all, I mean, we got everything we need, right? No, probably not. And that kind of brings me to the slide where is this really relevant today? Yeah, fewer farms. No question about it, but they're way more complex. And the needs of those farms probably eclipsed the needs of those farms a long, long time ago. They have just, you just need services of all kinds. I mean, when I first started farming, I was my agronomist. You know, I'd study things, I'd get books from the county agent, and I'd figure it out. Just think of the services you need to, I mean, you need a full-time somebody to scout in fields and, you know, recommending products to use and so on. You have a high demand for services. They could very easily be an R being met by cooperatives. The electric demand, think about back to that barn, and we had, I think there was three light bulbs in the barn, and the one in the yard light, and then of course the house had electricity, and just think what that did for the domestic engineer of that household when they could get an electric iron and an electric water pump and electric stoves, and I mean, just think that's changed their life. So, but now the electric demand has, I don't know, some of you guys probably probably have better numbers than I do. I don't remember how much our farm even takes, but I do know that it's, I do know that I use more electricity in a day than my dad probably used in a year. You know, especially if we're drying grain, or a lot of farms are using electric motors to irrigate, and, you know, it's just a high, high demand. That's a need that needs to be met. And the co-ops of today have to look at that and figure that out so they can meet that demand, meet that need. Marketing services, you know, when those guys were threshing, they'd put the grain into two-bushel guinea sacks and take them to town and dump them and get whatever it was they'd get. And now, you know, my son's doing stuff. I don't even have a clue what he's doing, but he's doing it. He's doing it mostly on his phone, and he's selling puts and calls and bases. I don't know what all he's doing, but it's way more complex today than it was even when I was an active farmer. And so the marketing services are an important part. Technology and agronomy. You know, I talked about agronomy some of the technology. I mean, now I would assume NDSU probably has classes in technology. I know they do on agronomy, but they probably do in technology too, and you can get a degree in ag tech. There's just, the world is changing and the needs change, but the co-ops can keep up if they think it through. Connectivity and communications, and I'm thinking there about the internet and the Wi-Fi, and you know, if we still have a landline at our place at home, but it's just because it's free. It's because we get a better deal on our internet than we get a better deal, you know, so you still have a landline. I'm thinking about, I don't know, maybe a month ago, I saw a video on YouTube of the new John Deere driverless tractor. Have you guys, any of you ever seen that thing? It's supposed to be hitting the markets, probably any day now, maybe it has. Tractor drives itself, but you need to have the app on your phone, and that means you gotta have, you gotta have enough bars to make it work, right? And so, that's just gonna get more and more and more. And so there's needs that certainly cooperatives are handling it right now, and they can keep changing with that. Financial needs, nobody needs coal bank anymore, right? That's, oh, I maybe shouldn't say that right here, but just kidding, but just think about the financial needs, not only for the farmers, you know, that probably do their financing through farm credit or through their community banks or credit unions, but think about the cooperatives. In the financing, they have to keep up with all this. And so we're really, really lucky that we do have a coal bank in place, because from my knowledge of those folks, they're keeping up, and I think that's good for all of us. And so if the needs are being met, the co-op is relevant. All right, so when I say that coal bank is really keeping up on all this, I want you to think about coal bank and crystal sugar and all of those cooperatives that are keeping up, but someday they're turning that back to you. And so this is why this education, I think, is so very, very important. And so I want to talk again about crystal, and I haven't mentioned this to Tom, and I had a slide on crystal sugar. I didn't mention it to David Cragness either. And Frayn started out in his remarks, he talked a little bit about Al Bloomquist, and at that time he was the executive director of the Sugarbeet Growers Association. And the need was, they needed to have these factories owned by the farmers, that's what they needed, because that would add value and would provide a market. And they needed that because they were gonna lose their market if they didn't do something themselves. So guess what? Farmers got together, and they figured out there was a way they could cooperate. And they ended up with a business model that is pretty, I'd say pretty genius, if you think it through, of what they, especially of what they had to go by, I mean what they had to look at. But they ended up with a business model that they sold stock shares to the farmers, and the stock shares were related to delivery rights. And so what you got for that stock was you got the ability to raise sugarbeets, which were a highly profitable crop if you could market them. But they could raise sugarbeets, take them to their market they owned, and get value added besides, when they made sugar out of the beets. So I mean it was like, wow, who would've ever thought such a model could work? Well, it worked really, really well. And again, I'm gonna give a shot out to Al Bloomquist, because hard to say, it might have happened without him, but boy, he was a powerhouse behind that whole organization. And that organization has done so much and become such a co-op model for others. And especially in their ability to donate to places like the Burdick Center, help with education. They have a newsletter that goes out, I don't know, is it once a month? But they figure out ways to educate and they do it. There's another one off to the right, it's called Dakota Growers. Does anybody ever hear of Dakota Growers? Pasta Cooperative, pasta company, couple. Well, again, this is for the kids, right? Students, I shouldn't say kids, young adults. To me, they're kids. By the way, you're the age of my grandkids. So that's, keep that in mind. All right, well, in the early 1990s, group of farmers, Durham farmers, they were part of an association called the US Durham Growers Association, come up with an idea that we should have a value added pasta plant and it should be owned by farmers. And they set up an organizing board. I happened to get picked to be one of them and I didn't even hesitate when I got asked to serve on this board, absolutely. I'm gonna try something here. Because I had been planting Durham since 1961. That was a 4-H project. Notice that, the reason I wanna show you this picture is because you notice that really handsome guy driving that tractor, surely aged well, right? But anyway, what I really want you to see there, look at the brand of that tractor. Anybody see it? Is it too far away? It's a co-op E5 tractor. That's the brand of it, co-op. And that's the way, that's why I'm as passionate as I am. My family were definitely part of that co-op movement way back when it was time to buy a tractor. We also had a number three co-op on the farm and they worked good. But I'm gonna back up now, get that embarrassing thing off of there and we'll talk about Dakota Growers. So I was anxious. By that time I had been planting Durham. By the way, that one was a 4-H project. My dad rented me 10 acres of farm land and because it was a 4-H program, I was able to get registered seed. And so I raised a registered seed on that 10 acres and then I had come time to pay the rent. My dad said, that's okay, I'll just take the registered seed and I'll plant it. So he planted that. But anyway, it maybe wasn't quite that stingy, but anyway, I was happy to be part of that group of 11 that got together. And by this time, we were really pretty lucky because a year or so before that, the North Dakota legislature passed a bill. It was entitled, Growing North Dakota. And what that did was that provided a platform to provide seed money to value-added projects. Which changing Durham into pasta would be value-added. And so we were able to get some seed money through the state. That was enough to pay for a very extensive business plan by a consultant, a consulting company. They were based out of Boston and it was called Hale-Seneschal Consulting. Seneschal was actually a native of Drake, North Dakota. Anybody knows where Drake is? So anyway, they give us this business plan and I mean, you looked at that business plan and you thought, wow, I don't think we can go wrong. Well, we all know you can go wrong, but we looked at the business plan and we thought, we're gonna make this a goal. And so the 11 of us, Chris crossed the state the next winter, I think even part of the winter after that and just held meetings. Now, I wanna give a shout out to NDSU on this because through their extension service, they set up and planned for all the meetings. They did all that work that we didn't have any way of doing it, but they did it. County agents set up meetings. They probably even put the coffee pot on. And they got farmers to come and they listened to the, we'd present the business plan with the farmers. And by the end of the day, we got around 1,100 farmers to sign up and pledge to buy stock. And that was enough that the St. Paul Bank for cooperatives, this was before the days of coal bank being in North Dakota, but the St. Paul Bank, which was later on merged into coal bank, they provided the rest of the capital needed. We had enough, we brought enough equity to the table by having these meetings thanks to NDSU that we got the farmers to buy into the business plan and we built a factory. We hired a CEO, hired some marketing people, built a factory, turned out high quality pasta, made from North Dakota Durham. So what's the difference between this story and Crystal? Well, again, it's the needs. Think about the needs. My need was to be able to deliver Durham and get the value added back in the form of patronage. That was my dream, that's what my thought was. However, by that time, the Durham growing region of North Dakota had moved west because the climate got so where it was humid enough that in the eastern part of the state, it was hard to raise Durham without fungus growing on it and nobody had it quite figured out how to stop that and so on. And so most of those farmers in the eastern side of the state had kind of quit raising Durham, but they still thought it was a great project and they invested anyway. And at the same time, Dakota growers set up a pool, a marketing pool, so that farmers could deliver to, actually the way we did it in my area, we delivered to the CHS elevator and the elevator kept this pool separate and let other people buy their Durham from the pool and then they shipped it to Carrington where the factory was. Other areas maybe did it a little differently. But the point is that we ended up with two classes of members here. The class that basically invested because it was a great return, looked like a good return and then there was those that invested because they were still raising Durham. Well, the co-op stock wasn't real liquid and so if you invest in something, you want two things. You wanna return on your investment, you wanna be able to sell the stock whenever you think it's the time. Well, you couldn't do that with the co-op stock. You couldn't sell it that easy. I mean, you could, but it just wasn't that easy. It wasn't that liquid. And the dividends weren't set up, they were set up as patronage dividends. So it's just, you can see the model maybe started to show a few signs of age here. After about five years, there was the co-op decided to take a vote and the vote was either stay a cooperative or change the form of business into a C-stock corporation and the majority of the owners chose and they just chose to become a C-stock corporation. Shortly after that, the company was actually acquired by another company and everybody kind of got their stock appreciation back. Was a great deal. I mean, as an investment, it was a wonderful deal. I don't remember. I think it was somewhere between eight and 10 times the initial investment in just a period of less than 10 years. So it was a great deal, but now the company is not owned by farmers. And so I just show you those two things because the business model needs to fit the need. Not the other way around. So you always keep that in mind. Loyalty is an important part of any business, not just cooperatives. It's basically what you need to have to survive. And how do you get loyalty? Well, it was easy for my dad to be loyal to the rural electric. It was easy for my grandfather to be loyal to the Rider Farmer's Union Oil Company. It's fairly easy for me to be loyal to those because I still remember the stories, but the next generation and the next generation, not so easy. The loyalty has to be earned. And so it's gonna happen whenever the customer believes or the owner believes the needs are being met or exceeded, then they're gonna be loyal. One way you as managers and directors make sure you hire the best customer-facing employees, those employees that the customer talks to and has one-on-one with. Because that's another way you're gonna create loyalty. There's some great people out there. I can think of many of them in the co-ops I've been associated with. They have such wonderful people. Makes it easy to be a director on that company because they have such great employees. So they do well. So that's another way of getting loyalty. Loyalty can also be tied. Here we go back to education. Because sometimes the customer and the owner, the member doesn't really understand everything that the co-op is doing. The co-op has probably started to be just a little co-op here in the corner, but it's over the years. It's doing more things. It's got different trade areas, blah, blah, blah, all that. Sometimes you just need to tell the customer exactly what the co-op is doing. And there's a lot of ways of doing that. The newsletters are one. Statewide Rural Electrics does a fantastic job with that. I think at the last I heard, they had the most widely read publication in the state. I mean, everybody reads there North Dakota Living. And that's a great way to get the message across. You just, a newsletter sometimes is all it takes. Or you can do it in other ways. You can do it with annual meetings. You can, sometimes the co-op is doing something special. They could do a press release. Let yourself be interviewed. And those of you that are on the boards, that's what you hire the management for. That's why they get paid the big bucks. So you don't have to do that. All right, so back to education. The right education will give you engaged members. That's what you want. Engaged members, if they're excited about the co-op, they're gonna elect the best board members. That's what you want. So education, it's not only for the members though, it's also for the board. And it's also for the stakeholders. Now what I mean about the board is a lot of times you elect boards because of their reputation. Well, they're pretty, you know, so you elect them. Well, maybe they don't know anything about that particular business. And so they're probably gonna have to learn. And they're gonna need some education. We'll get more into education and training a little later on, by the way. Because I wanna make sure there's questions. That's what this is all about. All right, if I get going too long, you just stop me and we'll go to questions. All right, so members, the board and the stakeholders, who are the stakeholders? Could be public policy makers. Could be the governor. It could be a congressman, could be a senator. You might have to educate them. Maybe there's something going on that legally that you just, you need to do that. So like I mentioned before, annual meetings and newsletters, annual meetings can be a great way. And I come from Vrendry Electric and I think we're kind of the poster child for annual meetings. I'm not really bragging. I just think that's the way it is. Because we get a co-op that, well, I don't know the modern numbers, Maxine, but probably a lot of say 10,000 members, we'll get 3,500 to attend the annual meeting. Now, this is pre-COVID, okay? But we want the members to be at the annual meeting because we see that as an educational opportunity. If you get them there, you can tell them your story, but keep it interesting. We always have some kind of a guest speaker or something that's fun to hear. Keep it interesting and see if you can get the family to come. All right. Now, there's only one reason I put that slide on and I want you to all see one of the two cutest granddaughters in the world. This is, I don't know when, this was taken quite a few years back, but I was the chairman of the Vrendry Electric Board and we would hold our annual meetings in the State Fair Center in Minot. Even though the headquarters of the co-op is in Velva, North Dakota, we served the area around Minot and Minot was the growth area and that was an important area, economy-wise, for us. So we held the meeting there and we did everything we could other than, well, I should say, not other than, we did bribe them even to come. And we really, really got a lot of people to come. We give a door prize that was, and I don't know what that is now, Maxine, is it like, okay. So it's a significant door prize, but you have to be there to win it. And so that's whatever you can do, get them there because that's your chance to educate. There's nothing better than face-to-face. Before there's exhibits, people bring in exhibits, vendors have exhibits, people are walking around, there's a great dinner served and people are visiting and that's all part of the education and the board members and management get to visit with the members one-on-one. And then at the meeting itself, there's always question and answers from the membership and they do pass resolutions and there's always opportunity for education. So that's just one way of doing it. So there's actually a different reason for putting that picture on, but the main one was still just to show you how cute she is. All right, now we're gonna get into governance because that's what the Board of Directors does. And sometimes governance isn't so much fun. Sometimes you're sitting at a board table all day long and hearing reports and all of that and but sometimes it's kind of fun. That's a picture of, I don't know, 10 years ago probably but we're sitting around the table. Not all of the board is there, but board and spouses and we share a meal. And you know what, that's an important part because like I told you before, when you serve on these boards, it almost becomes like family. You just develop these relationships, you meet people from all over and they're the salt of the earth. You just don't get better people. And so having a little fun once in a while is okay, but then you gotta get to work. And governance, the fiduciary responsibilities and I'm sure you've heard this in class but that's the very, very important part of what you're doing. You've been handed the keys. When you sit on the board or if you're in top management, you've been handed the keys to that co-op and it's up to you to make sure that you got something left to hand to the next generation. And so you gotta take those responsibilities very, very seriously and there's legal ramifications if you don't. So it's serious stuff. You need to understand the business. You just need to understand it. I was elected as a farmer but you need to learn to understand the real electric business or the financial business of coal bank for example. You need to understand that to be a good director because you got the keys and you gotta make sure you got something there to pass on. And you gotta make sure you're providing value to the membership and you can get that by training. I'll say it again, Burnett Center, they've done a great, great job in director training. They're getting programs set up as we speak and they've done programs and they've helped others do programs and they're director training. Now you might think, oh geez, I gotta drive all the way there to get some training or I gotta fly someplace, heaven forbid to get some director training. That is so, so critically important that you do those things because not only are you learning something about the business or you're learning some lessons and whether it's accounting or economics or what it is, the main thing you're learning is the hallway talk. After the sessions, you visit with people in the hallway and you might find there's somebody from a co-op long ways away, they're going through the same problems you're going through or maybe they have done it and they've solved it and you can find that out. You can talk to them. And then like I say, you develop these relationships and the more involved you get, the more friends you make. And so it's just something you need to do. It can be fun, it's really valuable for you to do it and it's necessary that you do it. Do things that are good for the long term on governance. Don't worry so much about the day to day. Make sure that you got co-op there for the next generation. Hire the best management you can find. You can't cut corners. Hire the best. Be strategic thinkers. In other words, see the whole picture. Look at the future. You know, you got to do that. If you can get all that, you'll make your job will be a lot easier if you have good diversity on the board. And by diversity, you can mean a hundred different things there, but I'm talking about ethnic diversity is important. If you can get it, a gender diversity is important. Even just different ways of thinking is important because otherwise if you're all thinking the same and doing the same, you might as well have a board of one. So, and what's the fun in that? So, all right, so that's governance. Strategic planning, before I quit, I got to say how important strategic planning is. You need to have a formal plan. A formal session. You need to devote time just to look into the future, making strategic decisions. How else can you adapt to change? Those that have done that well are still doing well. So, also when you make these goals and strategic plans, look at them once in a while. Don't just put them in a file cabinet and wait until next year. Look at them, probably every month or every board meeting, put it that way. And then sometimes the M word comes up. The M or I call it M and A word, mergers and acquisitions. You might find that you're just not able to do, to keep up. To keep up with what's going on in the marketplace, you just don't have the resources and you don't have the scale. And so you're gonna have to maybe do a merger. Well, if you do one or an acquisition, create the we, not us and them. So many times I've seen mergers where, well, us and them. No, no, the minute that document is there, it's the we. You're all the same. So I'm gonna leave it there and now we'll open it up for questions. I'll just skim through a couple of, I just wanna give you guys a pat on the back. You guys are the ones that I really are gonna have the keys to the next generation, hire and keep great people. And I just wanna quickly show, this is that same view of where that thrashing machine was. And I'm out checking Durham. Now, of course, you take a drone out there and X-rays it and tells you how wet it is, but you gotta turn it over to the next generation. But be careful, the next generation is watching you and that's how they're learning. They're watching you. So there's the second of two pictures of, this is a different grandchild now and she's between those two, they're the best between those two, okay? So watch what the next generation is doing because they're looking at you. This is thrashing on the same point of view of where those other pictures are coming from. This is, they're not thrashing. They're plowing up soil here. They're breaking sod. This was back in 1914. They didn't break all their homestead up in one year. They probably broke it up in period of three years or something like that. But again, she'll see all the different people there. They're working together. You couldn't run one of those by yourself. That plow, you gotta have somebody walking along the gangs adjusting it. You gotta have somebody stirring it. You can't do it alone, so you learn to work together. There's the three generations of mine. I got my dad on my right or on my left and my son on the right. And we were all farming that day. We were all working. And there's the fifth generation. That's that little girl that I was holding at the end of her annual meeting. She's kind of growing up now. And we're hoping she could be a fifth generation farmer, but she wants to be a medical doctor. And I told her, you're so smart and so good. You can be anything you want. You could be a farmer. Don't have to settle. So we'll see. All right. So now I think I've got a couple of minutes left for questions. Sorry, I went on too long. I'm sorry. You did great. You did great. Questions forever. I'll start it. I only got one. All right. So you have had the opportunity to serve on a lot of different boards and a lot of different capacities. So what do you see as the difference between those boards and cooperatives that were very successful versus those that struggled? I'm going to blame it all back to the board. I don't care. You might say, well, it could be management. Well, but it's up to the board to you trust but verify your management. Kind of like what Ronald Reagan said. And you got to do that. And so if management goofs up, that's not on him. It's on her. It's on you. So you need to, I'm going to say it's boards. You just aren't paying attention. Maybe you didn't take enough training. Maybe you didn't take your fiduciary responsibilities quite seriously enough. Maybe nobody told you how important this all was, but you just got to keep a handle on all that. That's what the boards are for. By the way, I didn't help him write this. So there's more training stuff. That's all on him. I just invited him to make sure he got here on time. So thank you very much for all the education talk. Absolutely. Everybody else has. This is for you guys. Great. I have a question in terms of, how did you build trust? Because over time, you have some members that says, you know, I'm done with this. And how did you make sure everybody stayed together and built that trust over time? Yeah, and you're right. It's over time. And you know, when you give your word, you give your word. And if you don't, that's not going to work over time. But again, I think it goes back to education. Let them know what you're doing, be transparent. You know, they don't, you don't want your members to hear about what, at the coffee shop, what the board's doing. You know, you want your members to hear from you. So have some kind of a communication plan. And maybe it's, nowadays with email and so on, maybe it's just an email from the co-op once in a while. But keep them up to date. What's going on? What's happening? What you're doing? What the pitfalls might be. Not everything is without them. That's all. Other question? So I have one more. All right. I'm going to ask you to look into the crystal ball. Okay. And so what do you see as the greatest challenges and opportunities for co-ops as we look forward? But we, we have a tremendous history. There's a lot of longevity. There's a lot of things we can lean on and say, look at all the good things we've done. But you know, that's history. How do we move forward? What are the things that you see as, again, greatest challenges and greatest opportunities? Okay. Well, the challenge I think is keeping loyalty. If you can keep your membership engaged and loyal, I think you can meet most of the challenges because if the members are still believing that you're, you know, surpassing their needs, well, then you're doing something right, but you, they need to know that. And so there's that. If you can, if you lose the loyalty, if you can't keep your co-op relevant enough to fill today's needs, you might've been wonderful 10 years ago, but if you can't fill today's needs, are you really gonna be relevant? And if you are, how are you gonna have an engaged membership? As far as going forward on the positive side, just think of all the things we talked about of the needs of the farmer today. There's so many things they need. And the co-ops can just as well serve that void. I wouldn't say it's a void, but they could, they could, because they're probably already doing a lot of it, but they could be a big part of technology and all of that going forward. All right, anybody else? Yep. So, Edward, you obviously got involved as a young person in addition to what, who helped you do that, what after dues to a few days, leaders need to help you in the field? Well, like in my case, somebody's there in your face saying, why don't you run for the board? And I think John, you and I both knew who that somebody was in my case, but you need a, you know, you're a young person, you don't say, well, you know, what could I offer? Well, so other people see things in you and you might not see them yourself, but I was, I think about this a lot. Actually, I was so thankful for John's dad who urged me to start to run for quad boards. And also I worked at one time, I worked for a law firm in Minot, North Dakota. I worked in the winter time doing income tax work. It was partly of one way to supplement or my habit of farming, you know, but because I didn't have livestock, but one of the lawyers said the same thing, you know, why don't, you know, Herb Meschke knew him. And so that's what, that's, I think that's good. I think somebody, look out for that. Those of us that are in this age of turning stuff over, look out there and start encouraging people to get excited and to get motivated to get involved. Other questions? The difference, you talked about your generation passing on the keys and now there's another generation passing on the keys. Do you see a key difference between those generations that you noticed in the cloth world about how to better on the rings I get? Would I see in that, the generation below me like my children's generation, your parents' generation or, you know, whatever? I think they're more pragmatic. I mean, they're, show me. You know, I wanna see it. And so they have a different view of it, different take of it. I don't know why exactly that is, but I'm not saying that's good or bad or indifferent. It's probably all three of those. It's, I think there's some good in it and probably some things not quite so good in it, but, cause they're not gonna give you blind loyalty. But that's okay. Cause that's up to you then, as the co-op. Make them loyal, figure it out. Does that work? Okay. Other questions? If not, thank you very much, Everett. We really appreciate you coming. Thank you. Thank you and you young leaders of tomorrow, I'm gonna be watching. Okay?