Minor, John W.

• John Minor

John W. Minor, a Kansas State University alumnus, worked in both local and regional cooperatives, taught Vocational Agriculture, and provided educational programs for regional cooperatives as an employee of FAR-MAR-CO and Farmland Industries.  He grew up on a farm a mile west of Bloom, Kansas in Ford County, and his grandfather was a board member of the Bloom Cooperative Exchange (which later merged with the Mineola Cooperative Exchange).  He taught Vocational Agriculture in Abilene and Scott City, Kansas, the latter for four years.  At Scott City, he so impressed Roderic Simpson, a FAR-MAR-CO fieldman, that he was recruited at the end of his tenure by FAR-MAR-CO.  FAR-MAR-CO arranged a subsidized internship at the Scott City Cooperative, during which he moved across departments for training.  At the end of ten months, he became the coordinator for the new Careers in Cooperatives education program for FAR-MAR-CO in Hutchinson, Kansas.  Following the 1977 FAR-MAR-CO merger with Farmland Industries, he moved to Kansas City and the Farmland Educational department.  In 1983, he returned to general management at a local cooperative, the Producers Cooperative of Girard, Kansas, for a span of four and a half years, after which he returned to Farmland.  In 1998 he joined new special projects group called One System Group for Farmland Industries, in order to re-design all of their business enterprises and departments and create a new business model built into a Y2K initiative compliant software package.  In 2001, One System Group became an equal partnership between Farmland Industries and Ernst & Young, an accounting firm.  Later in the new millennium, One System Group became an independent company when Farmland’s share was bought out, and subsequently changed hands several times before John W. Minor’s retirement in 2005.

Creator Source: Local Authority File
Biographical/Historical Note Author: Patrick C. Dittamo