Several area businesses utilize the recycle facilities in Burwell. One such business is Thoene Farm Service Inc., a business that has been providing agricultural equipment and services since 1983. Staff at Thoene’s provide customers within 150 miles with hay equipment, irrigation power units, feed wagons and tractors along with replacement parts and services. Major equipment lines that Thoene’s carry are McCormick and Vermeer and Cummins and Isuzu Power Units but they do carry parts from many other brands! Thoene Farm Service staff are happy to help any farm/ranch customer find and/or repair any piece of equipment they have. They pride themselves on excellent customer service and work very hard on making sure the customer has everything that they need to have their operation function easily!!

Many of the supplies that are delivered to Thoene Farm Service arrive in cardboard boxes surrounded in packing paper. When cardboard recycling started being offered, via semi-trailer, at the Loup Rivers Scenic Byway Interpretive Center during Nebraska’s Big Rodeo in 2014, Thoene’s decided this would be a perfect avenue to dispose of the clean cardboard and packing paper properly. Since July of 2014, the staff at Thoene Farm Service has taken collected cardboard to the recycle trailer roughly twice a month. Sometimes the length of time varies due to parts delivery orders. Sue Thoene, was and is integral in the recycling strategies at Thoene Farm Service as she is very passionate about the environment and reducing unnecessary items from entering the landfills. As a result of adding recycling cardboard to their protocol at Thoene Farm Service it has drastically reduced the amount of products that are placed in their dumpster. The dumpster is now no longer overflowing on garbage collection day, which is once a week, and rather has room to spare.