PRODUCTION

Valley Agronomics & Wilco-Winfield to Form New Agronomy Joint Venture

Valley Agronomics LLC, headquartered in Rupert, Idaho, is a joint venture between Valley Wide Cooperative and Winfield Solutions, LLC. Wilco-Winfield, headquartered in Mt. Angel, Oregon, is a joint venture between Wilco Farmers and Winfield Solutions, LLC. Both joint ventures have excelled in providing agronomy expertise to their grower-owners. Their growth over the years has allowed the businesses to attract, retain, and develop a team and business partners to help grower-owners succeed.

To remain relevant, both organizations always look for the right strategic partners to continue this growth to help their owners be successful, operate sustainably and remain relevant with the best suppliers in the industry. To achieve these objectives, Valley Agronomics LLC and Wilco-Winfield intend to combine Wilco-Winfield into Valley Agronomics LLC to create a new, stronger agronomy joint venture.

“This is a great opportunity for Wilco members, customers and team members to strengthen the partnership with Winfield and join a talented and successful Valley Agronomics,” says Doug Hoffman Wilco’s CEO.

This new combined joint venture involves only the agronomy businesses of the partners. Wilco Farmers will continue to operate its retail farm stores, hazelnut processing and fuel business outside of the joint venture. Valley Wide Cooperatives will continue to operate its retail farm stores and fuel, propane, and feed businesses outside of the joint venture.

This joint venture will provide both geographic and crop diversity and add more crop advisors, locations and opportunities for growth. It will also provide economies of scale in managing their supply chain. The party’s leadership teams and boards are most excited for the teams to learn from each other and focus on bringing great service and innovation to their combined customer base.
This new joint venture transaction is expected to close Jan. 1, 2017. Upon closing, the new combined entity will be operated as Valley Agronomics LLC.

Dave Holtom is the current CEO of Valley Wide and will remain the CEO of the new joint venture. “We’re very excited for the opportunities that lie ahead for growers and team members with this combination of Joint Ventures. This is great news for our co-ops and supports our strategic growth to better serve growers,” said Holtom.

There will be many questions over the coming weeks as teams go through the details and integration work. As the work is completed, they intend to share this progress to those involved.