Crop Quest, Inc., was named the 2009 ESOP Company of the Year during the ESOP Heart of America Region Annual Meeting on August 26, 2008 in Kansas City, MO.
This award was earned by the successes achieved by the employee-owners with Crop Quest, Inc. The company offers unbiased crop production and agricultural production management recommendations to producers in Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Colorado, Nebraska, New Mexico and Utah. Crop Quest agronomists sell no products, only great service. The quest of this network of highly trained agronomists and agricultural professionals is to practice integrity and innovation to ensure Crop Quest’s services are economically and environmentally sound.
Combined with outstanding service, our company culture and phenomenal benefit package helped bring Crop Quest this honor.
Crop Quest, Inc., a full-service agronomic company headquartered in Dodge City, is an employee-owned company established as an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP.) An ESOP is a kind of employee benefit plan, similar in some ways to a profit-sharing plan. In an ESOP, a company sets up a trust fund into which it contributes new shares of its own stock or cash to buy existing shares. Company contributions to the trust are tax-deductible with certain limits, and shares in the trust are allocated to individual employee accounts. Crop Quest contributes up to 15 percent of an individual’s salary into their ESOP retirement plan, and not a penny of that comes out of their individual salary.
All of Crop Quest employee owners participate in the ESOP after their first six months of employment. They become fully vested owners within the company after 6 years of employment. Ownership within the company offers employee-owners a voice in the company in addition to providing an opportunity to generate wealth for themselves. It also benefits our customers since research has proven that employee-owned companies offer excellent customer service and satisfaction since employee-owners show a greater concern for the company’s financial results and apply themselves in more productive ways to reach that goal.
Crop Quest will now compete for the National ESOP Company of the Year. The winning company will be announced during the upcoming National ESOP meeting in Washington DC in May 2009. Congratulations to all Crop Quest employee-owners and customers on this special achievement.
