Rocky Mountain Supply traces its history back to two predecessor cooperatives, Gallatin Farmers Company in Belgrade, Montana, founded in 1931, and Coop Supply of Dillon, established in 1938. Both companies emerged from the Great Depression era, when farmers and ranchers across Montana banded together to gain better buying power, particularly for the gasoline and diesel their operations depended on.

“A lot of coops were formed coming out of the Great Depression era,” says Brad Gjermo, Chief Executive Officer. “They were looking for ways to enhance their buying power and to purchase things more competitively, and it did generally start surrounding the petroleum industry.”

Over the decades, the two coops merged to form Rocky Mountain Supply, expanding well beyond fuel to serve the full range of needs facing modern producers. What began as a way to secure better prices on petroleum has grown into a company with a presence across nearly every corner of rural life.

The agricultural landscape Rocky Mountain Supply serves today looks markedly different than it did 90 years ago. According to Jason Rorabaugh, Chief Operating Officer, agriculture is far less labor intensive than it once was, and the number of individual farms and ranches has fallen dramatically as the industry has consolidated. Total farmed acreage has held relatively steady and livestock numbers remain comparable to where they stood in the 1930s, but the operations working that land today are much larger than their predecessors.

Gjermo points to two forces behind that shift: consolidation and technology. Some acreage has been lost to urban development over the decades, he says, but the producers who remain are operating at a scale that would have been unrecognizable to the coop’s founders. Machinery and equipment have advanced accordingly, and Rocky Mountain Supply has had to keep pace, adapting its own facilities and equipment to serve fewer, larger operations rather than a high volume of small ones.

“We like to look at ourselves as kind of a business partner,” Gjermo says. “We’re here to help them succeed in what they’re doing, and we try to play our role in providing them what they need to be successful.”

Rocky Mountain Supply operates as the only cooperative in its trade territory, a distinction that shapes its entire business model. The company is owned by its members, and its mission centers on serving them rather than external shareholders.

“The customer is the company,” Rorabaugh says. “It doesn’t really benefit Brad or me per se; we’re just employees of the company, but the members are the owners. So, when Rocky Mountain Supply is successful, we return dividends and patronage back to the members.”

Each year, the coop distributes its earnings back to members in a combination of cash and equity. Retaining a portion as equity allows the company to reinvest in its own operations without relying entirely on outside borrowing.

“That equity portion that we retain helps finance the company and reinvest back in it, replacing and adding assets,” Gjermo explains. “Instead of us distributing everything that we make back to the membership in cash, we retain part of it, so we’re not having to borrow to reinvest back in the company.”

Governance follows the same member-first model. Gjermo reports to a seven-member board of directors elected by the coop’s voting membership, all of whom are working farmers or ranchers. As a producer cooperative, only agricultural producers may serve on the board or vote on governance matters such as director elections and mergers. Membership itself remains open to anyone, and all members share in the company’s profits regardless of voting status. The distinction, Gjermo explains, is purely about governance—anyone can be a member and benefit from the cooperative, but shaping its direction is reserved for the producers it was built to serve.

While Rocky Mountain Supply’s producer members remain central to its mission, its customer base has diversified considerably over the years. At least half of the company’s business today comes from non-producers, including a growing roster of commercial customers in construction and excavating, alongside a large volume of retail business through its farm supply and convenience stores. The company’s product range has expanded well past its agricultural origins to include clothing and sporting goods, categories that did not exist within the coop’s offerings in 1931.

Gjermo frames that growth as a natural extension of the cooperative’s role in rural America. Because Rocky Mountain Supply operates primarily in small agricultural communities, it has taken on the job of providing goods and services that might not otherwise be available locally. “We play the role of providing goods and services that others may not be able to, or are not providing in the community,” he says. “That’s what’s driven us to be more diverse than we were when we were formed almost 100 years ago.”

That diversification has required real investment. Serving customers across agriculture, commercial, and consumer segments takes far more product knowledge than the coop needed in its early decades, and the company has built out its staff and expertise accordingly.

Rocky Mountain Supply employs agronomists and energy specialists who provide education and support alongside the products the coop sells. The company holds regular customer meetings throughout the year to share information with its membership, a practice Rorabaugh ties directly back to the cooperative model.

Technology plays an increasing role in how that support gets delivered. Rocky Mountain Supply has used remote fuel tank monitoring for several decades, improving delivery efficiency while giving customers visibility into their own inventory levels. Its agronomy team has adopted drones for field scouting, allowing staff to survey a 300-acre field far faster than would be possible on foot. On the administrative side, the company has begun implementing artificial intelligence and Power BI tools to strengthen its accounting and decision-making.

Rorabaugh expects the shift toward AI to accelerate. “I think AI is probably the biggest thing that’s come along in technology since probably the invention of the internet,” he says. “I don’t even think we’ve scratched the surface of what’s going to be possible.”

Rocky Mountain Supply currently employs between 160 and 180 people, depending on the season, and Rorabaugh attributes the company’s employee retention less to any single program than to the overall environment it has built for its team. Wages and benefits are competitive, he says, but freshly remodeled stores, a modern administration building, a newer vehicle and delivery fleet, and a generous approach to paid time off all contribute to turnover rates that run significantly below national averages across every part of the business. “Providing a good, comfortable workspace and a good culture is really what sets us apart,” he says.

One of the more distinctive pieces of Rocky Mountain Supply’s community role is its foundation, established roughly a year and a half ago. Its origin traces directly back to the cooperative’s ownership structure. When the company distributes patronage and equity payments to members, a portion of those checks occasionally goes unclaimed. Rather than let those funds sit idle, Rocky Mountain Supply created an informal foundation to redirect that money back into the communities it serves.

The foundation’s mission centers on three priorities: supporting agricultural education, particularly for young people considering a career in the industry; funding resources for fire departments and other first responders to better serve their communities; and awarding grants that improve overall quality of life in the areas where Rocky Mountain Supply operates. The company has built a formal application and evaluation process for the program, with the board of directors making final decisions on which requests to fund.

To date, the foundation has distributed roughly $50,000 in grants, with another $25,000 planned over the next six months. The program is currently structured to distribute up to $50,000 annually, a figure Rocky Mountain Supply expects to grow over time. For Rorabaugh and Gjermo, the approach is simply an extension of the cooperative’s core purpose: channeling profits back to the people and places that generate them.

The foundation is only part of the picture. Over the past decade, Rocky Mountain Supply has reinvested close to $50 million into the company itself, upgrading assets, remodeling stores, constructing a new corporate office in 2017, and pursuing acquisitions. Looking at the broader 10-year picture, patronage dividends and equity retirement have returned close to $25 million in cash to the communities the coop serves.

“That all goes back to the people that we serve and the communities that we serve, that is ultimately reinvested back in those communities,” Gjermo says. “We plan to continue to do that well into the future, and hopefully those dollar amounts each year will continue to grow.”

Rocky Mountain Supply is continually investing in new ways to serve its members, and a new online shopping platform for its retail stores is still in the early stages, with more products being added regularly. A retail rewards program is set to launch this winter, returning cents per gallon on fuel purchases along with rewards on retail spending, an offering Rorabaugh describes as a natural evolution of the patronage model the cooperative has run for decades.

The company is also eyeing expansion into new communities, though leadership isn’t sharing specifics at this time. “We feel like there are some areas that we can grow into,” Gjermo shares. “We want to be able to expand that reach so the company can grow, but also so those communities can enjoy what we do the same as the communities we’re currently present in.”

For Rorabaugh and Gjermo, the message they hope readers take away is straightforward. “As a cooperative, our entire purpose and mission and passion is to serve our members,” Rorabaugh says. “Providing our agronomists and our livestock experts and our fuel experts and our people here in the office with what they need because at the end of the day, it’s all about customer service, and they’re our owners. Our goal when we come to work is to provide excellent service to them and provide them what they need to be successful.”

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