Published: March 22, 2006 05:27 pm            

Service the key to Johnston Enterprises’ success

During the 1940s Dale Johnston, then head of W.B. Johnston Grain Co., decided his nephew needed some work to do after school, so he put him to work sweeping out a company warehouse.

That nephew, Lew Meibergen, today is president and chairman of the board of Johnston Enterprises, which encompasses Johnston Grain, Johnston Seed, port facilities at Inola and Muskogee and an elevator facility in Shattuck.

Meibergen joined the company full time in 1955 as an elevator manager in Fairview. He spent eight years with the company, then ran his own packing plant, served as Oklahoma’s Agriculture Commissioner and went into the banking business.

In 1976, he bought the company established by his mother’s father. His son, Butch, and grandson, Joey, have since followed him into the business.

“I was always hopeful I’d be with the company,” said Meibergen. “I never once dreamed I’d own it.”

The firm was founded right after the Cherokee Strip Land Run in November of 1893 when W.B. Johnston, a former school teacher, bought a feed store located near where the Security National Bank Service Center sits now.

“Of course back then he didn’t handle any wheat,” said Meibergen. “It took three or four years to break the prairie out and plant it.”

Instead, Johnston’s firm handled commodities like coal, flour and animal feed. The company moved to its present location, 411 W. Chestnut, in 1897. A present-day seed building on the Johnston property used to be a coal warehouse.

“They moved up here in ’97 because of the rail,” said Meibergen. “He’d load the wheat out and send it to Kansas City.”

There has been a Johnston Grain Co. just as long as there has been an Enid.

“Uncle Dale always said we’re just as old as Enid,” said Meibergen.

Today, Johnston Enterprises has grown into a multi-faceted company. Johnston Grain has an estimated 10,000 producer customers and handles about 20 percent of Oklahoma’s annual wheat crop. Johnston Grain is the oldest grain elevator firm in the state.

Johnston Seed offers a wide variety of agricultural seeds, turf grasses and wildflowers to customers all over the world. Through its partnership with Oklahoma State University, Johnston was the first to perfect a line of cold-tolerant Bermuda grasses.

Johnston’s Port 33 near Inola, purchased by the company in 1983, sends and receives more than two million tons of material each year up and down the Kerr-McClellan Navigation System, including grain, fertilizer, pig iron, coal and petroleum coke. Johnston also has port terminal facilities in Muskogee and in two locations in Louisiana.

Johnston Grain of Shattuck is an elevator and rail shipping facility that can load or unload 50,000 bushels of grain in an hour.

“We’ve grown into areas we never were located before,” said Meibergen, “where there was a need.”

The company employs some 350 permanent employees, taking on temporary workers to help at harvest time. The employees, said Meibergen, are the key to the company’s success.

“We don’t offer any better prices or anything than anybody else,” said Meibergen. “I attribute our growth to our employees who are very dedicated to giving good service to our customers. We’re a service-oriented business and if we can give them better service than our competitors we’ll get them.”

The future of the grain business, said Meibergen, will not be easy.

“There are fewer and fewer of us standing in the grain business because of transportation and different things happening,” said Meibergen. “It seems like there used to be a country elevator on every corner in these small towns. Any more it’s not the case.”

The firms that survive in the future, Meibergen said, “are going to have to be efficient operators and give good service. That’s no different than it has been in the past.”