If the knickknacks that decorate a businessman’s office tell the story of every moment that has collectively shaped him, Brady Sidwell’s office in Enid, Oklahoma, could be a novel.
This young entrepreneur has already accumulated a full lifetime of travel and work experiences that has taken him from the family farm outside of Enid, to college at Stillwater, Oklahoma, to the halls of Washington, D.C., to studying and then working in Hong Kong and all over Asia for large agribusiness companies.
Sidwell spent much of the late 1990s and the early 2000s in Asia working in business and government fields and then joined the OSI Group out of Chicago, Illinois. There he worked in strategy, mergers, acquisitions and starting up joint ventures. It was a dream job, he said. But there was still an itch to come back home and be closer to his family in Alfalfa County.
When his father died in 2013, the choice was clear—come home and use the knowledge he had gained through his travels and his work to help his family and his community.
“I left that job and moved back here,” he said. “And I enjoyed it and it was a dream job, but I came back here to be an entrepreneur.” Today, Sidwell’s using the knowledge he gleaned from working in the global marketplace to put together a portfolio of businesses with one overarching goal—to bring profits back to Oklahoma farmers through capturing value of their products.
It’s ambitious to be sure, but calculating risks and rewards and keeping sight of the main goal is what Sidwell does best.
“Understanding the big picture helps you see all of the pieces fitting together,” Sidwell said. “There’s no doubt my background in seeing the bigger picture and what is possible has definitely helped me. And, also, made me a little bit bolder in what we’re doing and taking the steps. Lots of what we’re doing is a bold move, but it’s the right move.” He added that he’s creating a business model that’s more adaptable to the quickly changing evolution of agriculture.
“We are working on building a model that will fit the future that will see advancements in technology and more in agriculture,” Sidwell said. “A lot of times I get questioned, ‘do you think that will work?’ and I tell them that we aren’t just setting up a model of business and committing to the path and staying on it no matter what. We will evolve with the industry.”
Seeing the pieces of the bigger picture
Going down the list of business entities of Sidwell’s portfolio can be daunting at first. There’s the family farm near Goltry; the certified seed business; the Enterprise Grain Company elevator facility in Kremlin, Oklahoma; Sidwell Strategies in Enid, an independent commodity trading and brokerage firm; Enterprise Grain Malt, a new grain malting supplier; the Enid Brewing Company that will open in 2019; three retail locations called 81 Feed and Seed; and Sidwell Transport. There are plans to also go into precision agriculture, but that’s for the future, Sidwell explained.
So how do all of these businesses help farmers improve their marketing strategies? It’s all about looking at opportunities and putting the farmer first, Sidwell explained.
“There’s a lot of things going on and they’re all inter-related, there’s a lot of inter-linkage among them,” he said. But if you look at each business and how it works with the others, you can quickly put together a larger picture of how Sidwell is able to capture value for his farmer clients.
For example, when Sidwell continued his father’s certified seed sales business, he needed a warehouse facility. There was one for sale in Kremlin, but it happened to be connected to an elevator. He ran the numbers and it made sense to expand into the elevator business in 2016 and start Enterprise Grain Company.
Then he saw a trend in farmers of the area wanting to diversify into specialty crops for agronomic reasons for their farms, but they faced the challenge of finding a nearby delivery. The market potential is there, it’s just the logistics weren’t, he explained. Sidwell now uses the elevator business as a delivery point for producers who want to go into specialty crops, such as canola or sesame, and help them capture the added value of their crops.
“In this area, there’s a lot of wheat on wheat on wheat, which we know has thinner margins than other opportunities that are available,” he explained. Looking ahead he saw that sesame offered wheat farmers a drought tolerant crop that could diversify their concentration of labor at planting and harvest and diversify their market exposure. In the process he became the main distributor and delivery point for Sesaco in the Enid area and he’s got an eye to the future of other crops that might complement wheat production.
“We want to become the local delivery point for other crops in the area that might make sense and aren’t commodity crops,” he said. That also extends to higher quality wheat that has added value beyond the commodity market.
“The wheat market is our biggest commodity, and we have been one of the main sponsors of protein premiums in the state of Oklahoma in this area,” Sidwell said. “We started a couple of years ago, bringing value to farmers who want to spend the inputs to create a higher quality product.” As an independent trader and broker Sidwell is better positioned to look at a wide variety of bids and match a producer’s production to the market to get the best value beyond the commodity market. He sees this quality commodity and specialty crop business as a great opportunity for his business and for local farmers.
What lies ahead?
Despite his many business interests, at the end of the day Sidwell’s passion is grain marketing. He said he wants to use his expertise to help his neighbors, the same people who supported him as he traveled the world earning those skills, be successful on their farms.
“First and foremost, I take care of farmers and their marketing strategies and I hire great people to do the rest of all of those things,” he said. “I spend my time watching the markets. I focus on the markets and helping farmers to protect their interests.”
The biggest opportunity he sees ahead for farmers like his neighbors is using the market to protect their exposure.
“The biggest opportunity for the grain in their bins may be farther away than their local terminal,” he explained. “We check bids and have the transportation arm to pick up their grain.
“The exposure we have in our grain marketing is unique from other brokers because we understand basis,” he continued. “The connection between the cash and futures markets is central to the farmer’s true exposure.” Because Sidwell is independent, he looks at a wide range of competitive bids and can find the right market for the grain a farmer has in his on-farm storage. Competition is good, and Sidwell advised farmers to look at bids from as many places as they can.
To farmers just entering the business, Sidwell advises them to have their marketing strategy figured out since they have so much invested in equipment and loans but not a lot of land.
“What happens in the futures marketplaces has a direct impact on farmers—it determines their fate,” he said. “Somehow farmers don’t feel this connection, but the convergence of the cash and futures market means there are opportunities every day in this market.”
On-farm storage will become even more important for farmers now and in the future, Sidwell predicted. By storing their grain on the farm, farmers can better time the market to when it needs their grain versus when they need to take it to market, he said.
And precision agriculture and being able to quickly understand the data and make real time production decisions is the next opportunity for farmers to capture, Sidwell predicted.
“The labor of crunching the data is a huge deal,” Sidwell said. However, there’s value in the data if farmers can make real-time decisions. It’s a point in the production chain that intrigues him.
All of Sidwell’s business interests have the goal of putting the farmer first, and he said this goal comes from an epiphany he had while working in China.
“The farmers in China aren’t farmers because they want to be but because they have to be,” he said. “Our farmers can choose to do something else. That’s an amazing thing. They aren’t farming because they have to but because they want to. Who else would you want to produce your food ingredients?”
As the son of Oklahoma farmers who traveled the world, Sidwell said he’s been blessed. And he sees his business interests as investments in the neighbors who do their very best every day to feed that world.
Jennifer M. Latzke can be reached at 620-227-1807 or [email protected].
