View From The Cab

By David Tollefson, Columnist

Driving through farm country and seeing grain bins, I’m sure most of you have noticed the name SUKUP on many bins, on farms and at country elevators.

In the November 2021 issue of Successful Farming magazine written by Natalina Bausch, Emily Schmitt is interviewed.

On their website, Sukup is listed as the largest family-owned and operated manufacturer of grain storage, drying and handling equipment in the world.

Here is the interview:

Emily Schmitt has fond memories of walking to the Sheffield, Iowa, office after school, snacking on caramel rolls from the break room, and playing good-natured pranks on staff members who felt like family. Now, the third-generation leader at Sukup Manufacturing Co. is serving the company as chief administrative officer and general counsel.

Scmitt is the granddaughter of founder, Eugene Sukup, and daughter of the current president and CEO, Steve Sukup. She has been with the family business full-time since 2011. Recently, Schmitt was promoted to lead legal, human resources, communications, strategic planning and other administrative functions of the company.

SF: Tell us about the family members involved at Sukup and how you work together.

ES: I work with my husband on a daily basis.

My brother-in-law, Matt, works here as senior electrical engineer. My father, Steve, is president and CEO. My brother, Nick, also works here.

Charles is my uncle, Grandma Mary, and Charles’ son, Andrew Sukup, work here as well.

My two kids are known as the recycling directors. Before COVID, they would take a wagon around and fill it up with everybody’s recycling and collect some candy along the way. They’ve been missing coming to work.

With my husband, my brother-in-law, my dad – we work together five days a week. Before COVID, we would have meetings every day, sometimes go to dinner on Friday nights, and church on Sunday mornings, all in the same places. There’s a lot of family in this family business, but it’s what makes everything go around.

I think that’s something that resonates with our customer because so many farms are family farms. At Sukup Manufacturing, we are farmers. Steve has his number of acres. Grandpa farmed. That’s something we’re very proud of.

SF: Did you always know you wanted to come back to the company for your career?

ES: I always knew I wanted to be a lawyer, even though I didn’t know how that would fit in. I’m someone who loves to analyze everything. Once I decide something, I’m all in.

Once I got through law school, I figured if I was going to be a corporate lawyer, I wanted to do it for our company. That’s when we decided to move back. It’s been a great opportunity to grow, working with HR. I’ve worked a lot with finance and taxes. I’ve loved every topic that we’ve been able to tackle.

SF: Tell me about the new things you’ll be tackling as chief administrative officer and general counsel.

ES:  There have been a lot of opportunities for strategic planning, especially with the different family members transitioning their roles. We can take a lot more strategic approach to company growth. As others step into their roles, like Steve with CEO, there is a lot of strategic planning. Parts of his other roles I’ll do now looking at different opportunities, looking at strategic alliances that we have out there.

Ag tech is something that’s on the horizon: There are so many opportunities that you need to figure out what you strategically align with.  We’ll be looking at that.

Also, I’ll be working on communications, both internally and externally. I’ll look at how we get everything aligned so we’re having consistent messaging. We want to make sure we’re communicating to both our employees and the outside, as the same family-owned and operated company we want to be.

SF: Sukup is experiencing tremendous growth. What does that look like?

ES: We’ve seen the farm site is ever growing. We’ve seen large bins, such as we have up in Mason City, the largest bin ever – 2.2 million bushels.

There’s also the added technology. In the past, growth has been added through product lines, but next will be technology, as well. We’re seeing all these ag tech start-ups out there.  How do we connect the way that will function within Sukup Manufacturing?

We were the first company to have the QuadraTouch. You can text your dryer and it will text you back.

Our growth is also internal. With the added roles within our office (COO AND CFO), we’re trying to add more of a developmental org chart so that, within our company, we can set up success as much as we can.

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Emily’s background: She and husband Andy are raising their daughters, Wynn and Celia, as the fourth generation to be involved in the family business.

She earned a bachelor’s degree in business management from Iowa State University. She went on to graduate from the University of Iowa Law School.

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What an unusual winter we’re having, coming after an unusually snowy and cold winter last year! Hard to believe there’s so few, if any fish houses left on Minnewaska. As I write this, the temperature is 36, but before the weekend we could see 50, then some rain and possible snow. By the time you read this, the high may be in the lower 30’s, more normal for mid-February.

It’s so unusual for this time of the year to see the barren landscape, compared to a year ago when the entire landscape was covered by deep snow, even the hilltops.

According to Heidi Olson-Manska at the WCROC in Morris, the mean temperature there for January was 15.4 degrees, 6.6 degrees above the average of 8.8 degrees, (1886-2023). The high temp in January was 49 on the 29th; lowest was -16 on the 20th and 21st.

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Please contact David Tollefson with thoughts or comments on this or future columns at: adtollef@hcinet.net