Harvesting Our Region’s Seeds Of Change

What is a Cheney Weeder, anyway?

A college student from Eastern Washington University who pulls weeds for tuition?

A new kind of vegetarian sub sandwich?

A company in Eastern Washington you have heard about but whose products are a mystery?

The last comes closest to the definition for most people.

For 87 years, Cheney Weeder built dryland farming equipment in Cheney and, since 1956, in Spokane.

Its most famous farm utensil, still known in farming circles as the Cheney reel, serves as a large rake on the front of combines at harvest time.

But big rakes on the front of combines are not the future of this longstanding company.

So a few days ago, Greg Paulus, the retired Air Force pilot and lifetime motorcycle rider who bought Cheney Weeder in 1993, took down the Cheney Weeder sign and put up the new company name, Metalite Industries.

“The new name represents the true capabilities of this country and the direction we want to take,” Paulus said.

The name change at Cheney Weeder is one small detail in a very big regional shift under way across the Inland Northwest. It is a shift away from a resource-based, rural economy to something new.

“Today, our niche now is snowmobile trailers,” Metalite Industries CEO Paulus explained.

“We’re building the best snowmobile trailer in the country. We’re expanding that market in the I-5 corridor and back east.”

The company also is building the only handicapped-accessible pontoon boats in the country.

They are producing highly stable, low cost floating docks for lake places.

True, their combine reels will continue to be manufactured and marketed through three new distributors across the U.S. and Canada.

But the company’s future is pegged to recreation and customized metal fabrication and has moved a long way from being a business built around dryland tillage machinery popular back when everyone farmed.

Other signs of companies changing to meet a very different future abound.

Two weeks ago, the Jacklin Seed Co. in Post Falls dropped a bombshell by announcing a pledge to phase out field burning on bluegrass seed fields near Spokane and Coeur d’Alene over the next 10 years.

Jacklin Seed is the biggest grass grower and seed processor in the region. It looked at its future and decided burning grass fields in an increasingly urbanized environment wouldn’t work much longer.

As Glenn Jacklin explained, “Our company didn’t get here without planning for the future and we’re not going to get into the next century without planning for the future. Obviously, it will be difficult for us, but we must be determined to find a way to develop an alternative to what we had been doing.”

Looking for alternatives, using ingenuity to fashion new business from current strengths, being willing to reshuffle the deck when the future isn’t all that clear, are characteristics of each of these companies.

Neither thinks the path ahead will be altogether smooth or familiar.

At Jacklin Seed, for example, future growth is pegged largely on China and other Asian countries.

The Chinese are building golf courses for foreigners and Jacklin Seed hopes to open an office in China this fall. “We think it’s possible our China business can triple in the next few years,” Jacklin said.

Others surely will try to sell grass seed to the Chinese, just as others will build pontoon boats and snowmobile trailers.

And, along the way, there always will be those who don’t like the changes, or alternately, wish the changes were being made more quickly.

So, it didn’t surprise Paulus when some of his employees decided they didn’t want to work in his new company because he wasn’t doing things the way they always had been done.

It has not surprised Jacklin that some farmers have complained bitterly that Jacklin Seed has given up the fight for field burning.

And when your friends, associates, or family members start getting queasy about change, it doesn’t make it any easier to press on.

“This decision (to support a phase-out of field burning) has been the most difficult decision I have made in 12 years at the company,” Jacklin said.

At the old Cheney Weeder, Paulus believes some people aren’t up for the challenge of coping with change.

“I was a test pilot,” Paulus said. “I have been riding motorcycles since I was 13. I went out and bought a bankrupt business. After all that my wife said to me that I must like the risk, that risk is a part of who I am. She’s probably right.”

And, she likely has put her finger on the reason Jacklin Seed and Metalite Industries will be around in the 21st century.

, DataTimes MEMO: Chris Peck is the editor of The Spokesman-Review. His column appears each Sunday on Perspective.