By Tim Sullivan
 
Agricultural cooperative Farmland Industries filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection Friday. The Kansas City, Mo., company said it will sell non-core assets, but a spokeswoman said it has not decided if its grease business will be among them.
 
“There will be some nonstrategic assets that are put up for sale but they have not been specifically identified at this time,” spokeswoman Sherlyn Manson said.
 
Farmland initially agreed last fall to sell its Kansas City grease plant to CHS Cooperatives as part of CHS’s buyout of their three-year-old Country Energy joint venture. Instead, Farmland entered an exclusive supply agreement to produce grease for CHS.
 
The greases produced by the Kansas City plant are among the agricultural petroleum products sold by Country Energy – and now CHS – under the Cenex brand.
 
“The future of that plant is not known at this point,” CHS spokeswoman Lani Jordan said.

Farmland is one of the nation’s largest farm coops and is engaged in a variety of businesses, with fertilizer and feed supply and grain and meat processing among the most prominent. In announcing the bankruptcy filing, it claimed to have recently reduced debt but said it has not overcome a high debt-to-equity ratio incurred during a period of rapid growth during the 1990s.