Van Pevenage becomes CEO of Columbia Grain

The thread of Jeff Van Pevenage’s career ties together three important trends in the U.S. grain industry: the growing importance of Asia as a destination for U.S. grain; Montana’s rising prominence as a source of high-quality wheat; and the explosive growth of pea and lentil production across the northern tier of the western United States.

After 25 years working for Columbia Grain and three years as senior vice president, Van Pevenage has been promoted to serve as the corporation’s chief executive officer and president. At the age of 48, Van Pevenage now oversees all operations for a company with earnings in excess of $2 billion a year, and which controls almost 25-percent of all the wheat exported out of U.S. Pacific Northwest ports.

He admits the transition away from Great Falls’ small-town atmosphere and into Columbia Grain’s corporate headquarters in Portland is bittersweet.

“We’ve spent 17 years in Great Falls,” he said of his family’s life in northcentral Montana. “It’s a tight community. It’s a good, solid place to raise your children and for them to go to school. It really is a homey place, and we’ve thoroughly enjoyed it as a family. I am going to miss Great Falls.”

Though he and his wife, Annette, raised their four children here, Van Pevenage was not born in Montana nor did he grow up on a farm.

Jeff Van Pevenage grew up in Davenport, Wash., a small town of little more than 1,000 people about 35 miles west of Spokane. His father owned a pharmacy there, where Jeff worked until he was a teenager.

“When I turned 15, I started working on a farm and working in grain elevators in Davenport,” Van Pevenage said. “I worked at the grain elevator during harvest, and also did all the haying at this place called Mielke Brothers Farm where I worked for about eight years to pay for high school and college.”

Davenport sits in the heart of eastern Washington’s “Palouse” grain growing region. As a child, Van Pevenage was intrigued by the farming culture that surrounded him, and “the idea of raising a product to take out for the world to eat.”

His earliest foray into wheat production was encouraged by the manager of the Odessa Union, a farmer’s cooperative in Davenport.

“When I was about 10 years old, I went down to Odessa Union office,” Van Pevenage recalled with a chuckle. “The old manager’s name there was Ed Remilong, and he gave me a glass quart jar full of treated wheat seed. I took that home, and I tilled up a 10-by-10 area of ground. I planted all the seeds, raised the crop, harvested it by hand and threshed it out. I brought back a quart sized jar of wheat when it was all said and done, and Ed Remilong gave me a nickel for it.”

It was Van Pevenage’s first lesson in farm economics.

After graduating from high school, Van Pevenage enrolled at the University of Washington studying for an accounting degree. But the allure of growing a crop to feed the world drew him back in.

“About two years in I decided that I wanted to be in the grain business, and I needed to get an ag economics degree,” Van Pevenage said. “So I swapped over to Washington State University before I graduated in 1991.”

Although he graduated as a Cougar, Van Pevenage admits that at heart he’s still a Husky, and roots for the purple and gold of the University of Washington.

Before graduating, several grain companies already had begun recruiting Van Pevenage. He received employment offers from both Continental Grain and the French-based Louis Dreyfus but settled on a job with Columbia Grain that would allow him to remain close to where he’d grown up.

His first full-time position straight out of college was out of Columbia Grain’s Colfax, Wash. office, soliciting grain contracts for the corporation’s Central Ferry Washington/Snake River barge loading facility. He was a 20-something kid going from farm to farm negotiating with sometimes skeptical, hard-nosed farmers in their 50s and 60s.

Much of the work involved cold calls, which sometimes led to uncomfortable surprises.

“In this industry where there’s a lot of older people, you end up trying to get ahold of some people who have already passed away,” Van Pevenage recalled. “You get a wife who answers the phone and you’re asking for such and such, and she says, ‘Well, he passed away two years ago.’ That was the kind of data we were working with trying to generate farm direct purchasing agreements. That was always the worst stuff.”

Van Pevenage remained undaunted.

“There were definitely people where it took me years to get their business and to gain their trust,” he said. “There were a couple of different important accounts that I wanted to get, and I just called them and called them and called them until finally one day they gave me a chance.”

After little more than a year with Columbia Grain, Van Pevenage was asked to make his first move to Great Falls, where he began buying wheat for the Great Falls elevator. His duties expanded to include trading for oats and durum. After seven years, the president of Columbia Grain, Wayne Parks, asked Van Pevenage to return to eastern Washington to oversee the expansion of Columbia’s pea and lentil business in the area.

At first, Van Pevenage declined the president’s offer.

“I didn’t want to be in the pea and lentil business, I wanted to be in the wheat business — and so I told him no,” he said. “Then he asked me two more times, and I finally decided, ‘OK,’ this is probably going to be bad for my career if I don’t do this.’ So I did it. That’s where I began to learn more about the pea and lentil business.”

Peas and lentils had been an important secondary crop for Washington grain growers since the 1940s but were only small marginal crops in Montana at that point. After learning the ins and outs of the legume business in eastern Washington, the Van Pevenage family returned to Great Falls just as Montana wheat farms were beginning to embrace adding peas and lentils to their crop rotation.

“They looked at me and said, ‘You’re the one who knows something about peas and lentils because you were out on the Palouse, so you run that,’” Van Pevenage said.

Once again he was thrust into the position as a point man for crops he’d never anticipated promoting.

The job took Van Pevenage all across the world, looking for new markets for Montana and North Dakota peas and lentils. Though he does not claim all the credit, Van Pevenage’s success in these efforts can be measured by the fact that Montana now ranks as the No. 1 producer of field peas and lentils in the United States. From near zero production in the 1980s, Montana producers now plant more than 680,000 acres into pulses each year — a crop now valued at more than $140 million annually, nearly all of it for export.

“It started in India,” Van Pevenage said of the growing demand for Montana pulses, “and over the course of 11 years, I slowly developed a different region every year. The goal was to have full access to the entire world so we would always know where the best markets are for these peas and lentils — which also meant developing our high-tech processing plants to provide high quality.”

In 2013, the longtime chief executive of Columbia Grain, Tom Hammond, passed away unexpectedly.

Van Pevenage described Hammond as a personal mentor to him, who came to Colfax, Washington in 1990 to interview him for his first full time position with the corporation.

“He was an incredibly smart, generous man who ran a very good company,” Van Pevenage said of Hammond. “He did a lot to build Columbia Grain.”

Following Hammond’s death, the position of president and CEO of Columbia Grain fell upon the shoulders of a Montana native, James “Mike” Wong.

“He’s a product of Bainville, Montana (eight miles from the North Dakota border),” Van Pevenage explained. “When Tom passed away, he was the second man in the company. Mike’s been the longest employee with the company. He started back in 1978.”

The corporation is a subsidiary of the giant Marubeni Corporation domiciled in Japan.

“They’ve always had Japanese placed as chairman,” Van Pevenage said of recent corporate history.

This past year Wong announced he would be moving into the position of chairman of the board for Columbia Grain. Van Pevenage now becomes the fifth president and CEO for Columbia Grain in the corporation's 38 year history.

He admits that the learning curve for the position has been incredibly steep.

“As CEO and president, I oversee the entire company and make decisions as to where we want to go strategically,” Van Pevenage said. “I don’t trade anymore, I don’t transact business, I just do my best to run the company. I hire good people and keep looking for opportunities for growth and make sure that our people are working hard to provide good markets for Montana, North Dakota, Washington, Idaho and Oregon farmers.”

Though grain prices have been low in recent years, Van Pevenage is optimistic about the future for Montana farmers, and points toward Asia and the Pacific Rim as the leading region of opportunity in the years and decades ahead.

“We do think that the grain industry in general is going to be a very difficult business for the next three to five years,” Van Pevenage said. “There has been too much capacity built throughout the industry, both in the export side and for domestic consumption, and until some of the consolidation that has to take place does, it will be a difficult business to be in — but it will reverse itself.”

“A lot of what’s taking place in wheat markets today is about economics, and the strong U.S. dollar that is enticing producers in other parts of the world to grow the commodities that Montana growers have been producing,” he added. “But if you look over the longterm, the world’s population is going to continue to increase, and there’s going to be a growing need for food.

“The future of the American grain industry is definitely pointed toward China. American wheat will continue to be in great demand as the highest quality grain for the east/southeast Asian market and the Pacific Rim. The producers across the northern tier and the Pacific Northwest do as good a job as anybody in the world, and they do it in the most cost-effective way as well.”