SBA

SBA Helps Seed Company Grow Globally

Lynnville, IA ... The Seed Company, Inc. has quietly joined the ranks of Iowa's successful small business exporters with the hard work and dedication of Harrison and Grace Copper, and with assistance from the U.S. Small Business Administration's Export Working Capital Program (EWCP). The company's "Supreme Soy" brand of food grade soybeans may not be a household name in Iowa, but it's in high demand overseas.

The seed company has been a part of the central Iowa community of Lynnville, population 366, since 1935. It was the home of "Riverside Brand" seed and a facility where soybeans, corn, oats and many other food grade grains have been conditioned for many years. In 1975 improvements were made to the facility to handle food grade soybeans, but the company did not take advantage of the international demand for U.S. soybeans.

In 2002 Harrison Copper, who was a soybean broker for food grade soybean exports, along with his wife Grace, purchased the Seed Company. They made many additions and improvements to the facility, notably a color sorter which vastly improves the quality of the soybean output. 

The Seed Company is one of a few conditioning facilities in the United States with a color sorter. They have a Satake brand 80 channel pneumatic color sorter which can accurately remove off-colored soybeans. This removes soybeans which have unclean seed coat as well as soybeans with mosaic virus and other seed coat diseases. Immature soybeans with a green tint can easily be removed as well. In addition, they are one of the few conditioning facilities in the nation with an aspirator. Aspirators act as giant vacuum cleaners  which siphon off dust from the soybeans. This is a critical measure in providing a clean, low bacteria environment and a very essential step in providing food grade soybeans. The greatest advange of the aspirator is that it pre-cleans soybeans effectively without damaging the soybeans' skin coat as gravity tables do. Aspirators also remove immature grains which are too light.

Harrison and Grace positioned the company as strictly export-based, and it began to grow. In 2003, they received an order from a customer in Japan who needed longer payment terms than usual. The Coppers weren't capable of financing the order on their own, so they turned to the EWCP.

"We really got a large order from this customer, but they needed extended payment terms, which we hadn't dealt with before," Harrison said. "I checked into some possibilities and that's when I got in touch with John Blum, who worked with our bank here in Lynnville to finance the deal.

Designed to provide short-term working capital to exporters, the EWCP is a combined effort of the SBA and the Export-Import Bank. The two agencies have joined their working capital programs to offer a unified approach to the government's support of export financing. The EWCP uses a one-page application form and streamlined documentation with turnaround usually 10 days or less. A 90 percent guaranty is provided on the loan, which is made by the exporter's lending institution.

With the help of John Blum, International Trade Specialist with the U.S. Export Assistance Center in St. Louis, and Steve Russell at the bank in Lynnville, the Coppers were able to get a $250,000 EWCP guaranteed loan to finance the deal with the new customer. The deal's success lead the Coppers to use the EWCP to finance more and bigger deals in 2004 and 2005 and a new $1.5 million deal in 2006.

Harrison said the EWCP has helped the Seed Company expand its business in ways they might not have been able to otherwise, adding new customers from China, Japan, and the Philippines. It's also helped the compnay grow from 3 employees in the first year to 13 employees and over $6 million sales in 2006.  

"We've been able to add customers who need extended payment that we wouldn't have been able to add before," Harrison said. "It's a nice program and it's safer for us to use than standard financing."