Jackie Tee Manager’s Savvy, Tenacity Keeps Grain Marketing Business Growing Strong

At a time when agricultural cooperatives have been collapsing like wood barns in a tornado, Fairfield Grain Growers has been fortified by record profits and money in the bank.

Much of that can be traced to FGG’s bluntly honest manager, Jackie Tee.

Tee, a native of this community of 500 people, has guided the grain cooperative through six consecutive years of profitability. This at a time when cooperatives have had to adjust to reductions in wheat, pea and lentil production and a dramatic decline in government grain storage payments.

With one eye on the grain markets and another on the bottom line, Tee has forged a reputation as one willing to lose friends for the sake of making FGG a survivor in an increasingly shrinking industry.

“Jackie has done a real fine job with that company,” says Art Grewe, retired manager at Rockford Grain Growers, once a neighboring competitor. “All the farmers in her area respect her.”

Raised on a wheat farm outside Fairfield, 25 miles south of Spokane, Jackie (Hahner) Tee and her ancestors have been members of FGG since it opened in 1945.

A cheerleader at Liberty High School, Tee married high school sweetheart, Bill Tee, and settled on a wheat and lentil farm five miles south of Fairfield.

While raising three boys, Tee became a self-described “little office girl” at a local farm implement dealership before joining FGG as secretary in 1983. From FGG headquarters, located two blocks down the street from the doctor’s office where she was born, Tee learned the grain storage and marketing business from managers Bob Pollock and Vern Hooper.

By 1988, Pollock had retired and Hooper had died of cancer. The 220 members of FGG drafted Tee as their leader.

“I always felt that when the guys asked me a question, I had better give them the right answer,” says Tee, dwarfed by FGG’s towering row of grain elevators. “That was the only way to keep my credibility because you can’t fool them.”

Tee is equally careful about what she says about herself. She won’t tell you her age or her handicap on the golf course, her favorite sport. She dismisses the fact that she’s one of only a half dozen women managers of Pacific Northwest agriculture cooperatives, but will brave eight inches of snow in dress shoes rather than be caught in an ugly pair of boots.

At FGG, the largest company in Fairfield, none of that really matters. What’s important is that Tee oversees 10 employees and operations that reach from grain elevators in Waverly to Chewelah. The cooperative this year will handle about 1.9 million bushels of grain. At its plant near Oakesdale, FGG will process and package bags of lentils for export. In Fairfield, the company also operates a gas station.

FGG earned a record profit of $251,000 for fiscal 1994, which ended May 31. A scant $4,000 in revenue came from government storage, down from $100,000 in 1986, Tee says.

The company has amassed $550,000 in working capital - enough to enable FGG to quickly move into proteinsegregated grain markets or whatever changes are demanded by the marketplace.

“We did good,” says Tee, a Washington State University graduate who musters up the backwoods slang.

While competing grain cooperatives in recent years have attracted farmers by cutting margins, Tee has refused to bid for business. She lost some friends that way, and became known as a tough operator.

“It was hard to tell those farmers to take their grain elsewhere,” says Tee, who during harvest spends lunch hours driving grain trucks. “But I know what I need to make a profit here.”

Tee’s stance now seems brilliant in light of the financial collapse of two competing cooperatives - Rockford and United Grain Growers Inc. in Harrington, Wash.

But Tee says she’s not one to gloat. The same thing could happen to FGG if she’s not careful.

Tee focuses on the things that FGG does well and exerts friendly persuasion where it counts. Dispatchers at Union Pacific Railroad Co. know that when Tee demands 25 railcars, she really needs them.

“I once told them that if they don’t get me those cars, I’ll jump out the window,” Tee says. “I didn’t tell them that my window is only six feet off the ground.”

Tee, who serves on the board of directors for three grain industry groups, also has become astute at hedging FGG’s inventory on the future’s market. The company doesn’t speculate, but locks in prices to guarantee certain returns.

Dave Ostheller, chairman of FGG, says he’s reluctant to talk about Tee because he’s afraid she may be discovered and offered a better job somewhere else.

“We’re very dependent on a good manager,” Ostheller says. “She’s a detail person. A take charge kind of person. For a small cooperative like ours, you’ve got to have that.”