Author: Jon Ihler

We are in the midst of an AI boom. I counted over 50 Wall Street Journal headlines featuring AI in April 2024. Artificial intelligence is now used in customer service, predictive analytics, marketing personalization, fraud detection, supply chain optimization, healthcare diagnostics and more. As AI technology continues to evolve, it […]

MFA Oil was founded on the belief that farmers and ranchers would be best served by working with a cooperative. Fast forward 94 years, and that core belief and our purpose remain the same: to drive the success of our customers and communities through exceptional products and services. For us, […]

Farming is one of the most stressful professions with many uncontrollable variables, like this year’s drought. Farmers constantly face situations that pose a risk to their physical, mental, spiritual and financial health.  As a farmer-owned cooperative, MFA Oil knows it’s critical to support the farmers and ranchers in our agricultural […]

If you thought efforts to reduce carbon emissions in transportation were limited to electric vehicles, that would be understandable given the press coverage EVs have received in recent years. The reality is that a broad mix of sustainable energy, including liquid fuels, will play a pivotal role in curbing greenhouse […]

In December 2022, the MFA Oil Board of Directors and management approved the purchase of 13 Big O Tires stores in the Kansas City metropolitan area. You can read more about the acquisition on the next page (5). The deal marks the single largest purchase in the history of the […]

During my time as president of MFA Oil, I’ve had the opportunity to recognize many employees with awards celebrating their service milestones with the company. Some of these individuals have been with the cooperative for 30 or 40 years—a rare achievement in today’s workplace where job hopping is commonplace. I […]

Thanks to a unique convergence of events, including an extended period of near-zero interest rates, pandemic-driven government spending, supply chain disruption, labor shortages and geopolitical unrest, we are dealing with inflation near 40-year highs. Data from the Consumer Price Index showed that U.S. inflation had hit 8.6 percent in May […]

MFA Oil teamed up with MFA Incorporated to Host the Emerging Leaders in Agriculture Conference in January. Both companies have held similar conferences in the past, but this was the first time we combined our efforts. The two-day event brought together enthusiastic young producers from across our trade areas and […]

In late March 2020, we noticed a decrease in our job applications even as unemployment spiked to an all-time high. Fast forward to today and finding talent is still a huge challenge for many companies. The job market is steadily recovering, and unemployment claims are falling. Yet, many companies are […]

Recent news in the energy industry has been dominated by the push to cut carbon emissions. In the second week of May, that debate took a backseat to another issue: the cyberattack on Colonial Pipeline Company. The Colonial Pipeline, which supplies more than 100 million gallons of fuel per day—including […]

In August 2020, we made a couple of big decisions at MFA Oil. The first was to move forward with a new point-of-sale system called Energy-Force in our bulk fuel and propane division. We chose to go with Energy-Force because of its ease of use; its ability to provide daily […]

The start of the new year and new decade is here. It’s now 2020, but are we seeing 20/20? Seeing 20/20 from a co-op perspective is all about our ability to see our businesses clearly in both the near-term and on a long term basis. For MFA Oil, our ideal […]