Thurston Manufacturing

Thurston Manufacturing Does its Namesake Proud

Thurston Manufacturing

1708 H. AveBox 218Thurston, NE 68062

Tel: 402.385.3041

www.blu-jet.com

www.BuyCircleR.com

http://digitalmediamarketing.com/

Powered by:

FIND OUT MORE >>

Looking back at the formation of Thurston Manufacturing, Chief Marketing Officer Nick Jensen describes a

business grown from a simple idea and the support of the close-knit town of Thurston, Nebraska.

“In 1971, my grandfather Wayne Jensen started tinkering around with ideas like providing customers with equipment that was efficient and effective,” he says. “He made some modifications to his own farm equipment, went together with five investors total, and started a manufacturing company here in

town. They started it in an old grain building down the hill from our current location, and played around with a lot of different products in the beginning – at one point they were trying to make and sell an automatic card shuffler – but they did repair work and fabrication for farmers around the local area.”

Today, Thurston Manufacturing trades in fertilizer injection application equipment, conservation tillage equipment, and side dump trailers, reaching nearly every agricultural state in the United States and most provinces in Canada. But while the automatic

Written by: Sasha Orman Produced by: Ken Dion >>>

Thurston Manufacturing

Does its Namesake

Proud

Thurston Manufacturing

Meeting the needs of the agricultural market while giving a nod to land stewardship, Thurston Manufacturing does good by its Nebraskan namesake

2 3

Thurston ManufacturingThe Needs of the agricultural market

4 5

card shuffler may not have stuck, a few things remain in place to this day: hometown pride, family leadership, and that dedication to giving clients in the agricultural industry a more efficient and effective user experience.

Meeting the Needs of the Agricultural Market “You can’t ignore how strong the agricultural market has been in the past five years,” says Jensen.“Farmers have been doing a very good job in responsibly managing their soil, technology has gotten to where they’re growing much better yields, and food demand is up significantly – I believe we will continue to see that rise as the population density of the world goes from where it is now to about 9.2 billion by the year 2050.The reason agriculture is such a great industry to be in right now is because farmers are actually rising to meet that challenge– to take the same land area that our grandfathers were farming and grow three times as much food on the same land.”

With such an important job to do, producers in the agricultural industry need all the help they can get. Thurston Manufacturing aims to meet those needs with new

improvements to its lines of Blu-Jet fertilizer injection and tillage equipment and Circle R side dump trailers – and its history proves that Thurston innovations will stand the test of time.

“There have been several product innovations that we’ve developed here in Thurston over the years that can be seen as staples of the agricultural market,” says Jensen. “Blu-Jet was the first to build a tall tractor tire model on an applicator, which allows us to reduce compaction and still carry fertilizer on board. Our hitch allows for better trailing as well, and now that’s pretty well the standard in the industry today. We were the first to introduce a 60 ft. wide liquid injection applicator and a 60 ft. wide anhydrous ammonia applicator, increasing fuel efficiencies and time efficiencies by taking our equipment out to wider widths – those kinds of product innovations throughout the years really set us apart from the competition.”

Meeting the Needs of the Land While Thurston Manufacturing products are built to help producers become as efficient and effective as possible, they also pay tribute to good practices and land stewardship.

“Take our fertilizer applicators: they inject the fertilizer into the ground, so it can then be stored there as a resource until the plant needs it,” says Jensen. “This is opposed to flying it on or spreading it over the top, which could result in rain washing it away or it simply evaporating and not being there for a plant to use, which is wasteful in the energy it took both to produce the fertilizer and to get it to the field. Our injection applicators are much more environmentally friendly because they actually take a commercial fertilizer and maximize its use efficiency by putting it into

the ground.”“We also make a strip till product

that puts the fertilizer right under where seeds are going to go,” he adds. “This allows farmers to get the same yield as those who are tilling conventionally, but still maintain an ecologically friendly no-till environment to reduce wind and water erosion.”

But while ecologically friendly products gain a lot of buzzword attention recently, this is no new venture for Thurston Manufacturing. “We were there,” says Jensen of the company’s commitment to land stewardship. “We’ve always

had the application equipment that injected commercial fertilizer into the ground, and we’ve always focused primarily on conservation tillage equipment since we started. It wasn’t a shift in focus as much as it was the market coming around to see it our way.”

Company Pride Means Hometown Pride When Thurston Manufacturing was first incorporated, it was on the strength of the town where it was founded. Thurston’s small town heritage is a unique feature of the company that remains true even today.

“We have 130 employees, and a lot of them come from Thurston or small surrounding towns,” says Jensen. “They are real proud that they can make something that may end up in Ukraine or may just end up in Ohio, something that comes from little bitty Thurston, Nebraska, is going somewhere else all over the world and they’re a part of that and have a piece of that.”

That pride is not something that Thurston Manufacturing takes for granted. “We always try to treat somebody as a name and a face, and not a number,” he continues. “Some of our employees have been with us for 35 years or more.

We have very low turnover here at Thurston Manufacturing because we treat our employees right – they appreciate that and, in return, they put out great products.”

“Our employees take a lot of pride in quality, which is part of where we get our reputation from as a brand,” adds Ryan Jensen, COO of Thurston Manufacturing and brother of Nick. “The other thing that sets us apart is our product innovation. The people and the product is what we always say.”

Thurston Manufacturing

6

STATISTICS

7

Industry: Agriculture Equipment Manufacturing & Construction Equipment

Founded: 1971

Headquarters: Thurston, NE

Key PeoPle/tItles: Layton Jensen – CEO Ryan Jensen – CFO Nick Jensen – CMO Carolyn Jensen – Administrative Vice President Larry Abrahams – Senior Sales Manager

Products: BLU-JET Fertilizer Injection Application Equipment BLU-JET Tillage Equipment Circle R Side Dump Trailers

emPloyees: 130

WebsIte: www.blu-jet.com www.buycircler.com

Visit us online:

The Needs of the agricultural market