Veteran wears multiple ag hats

SPARLAND, Ill. — Since transitioning from the U.S. Army to the Illinois Army National Guard and settling on the family’s farm in 2019, the Foulks have expanded into three primary businesses and a spinoff.

Veteran Shay Foulk and his wife, Hannah, operate Foulk Farms and its accompanying century-old seed business, Monier Seed, along with her father, Mark Monier. The Moniers and their ancestors have farmed at the same location since the mid-1840s.

“The farm operation continues to grow with good partners that we work with, and I’m excited about the future there,” Shay Foulk said.

The family seed business was established in the early 1920s.

“It was when seed companies were establishing open-pollinating seed corn and then transitioning to hybrid seed corn. Monier Hybrids did the same thing. They were in business until 1964, and then they sold the hybrid business to the Burris family,” Foulk said.

Today, Monier Seed focuses on seed conditioning and packaging, seed treatment, grain cleaning and separation and retail seed sales of Monier Brand soybeans and small grains.

“The seed business continues to grow. We have a primary operation facility at Henry, and we still do conditioning and packaging at the home farm,” Foulk said.

Consulting

His other “hat” is as a consultant and an owner of Ag View Solutions, working with farm operations that are managing specific challenges or opportunities in their business.

Ag View Solutions consulting services include profit management, equipment and machinery analysis, business structuring, transition planning, farm collaborations, peer groups and team health.

“Ag View Solutions was started by my stepdad about 30 years ago. He took an idea around cost of production and, instead of doing it longhand, put it in the old DOS computer system and then transferred it over to Excel. He then basically started working with farm operations on how do you take this complex business and make it simple yet comprehensive to dial in what are your costs on a per-bushel basis,” Foulk said.

“In the early 2000s, that naturally led to other things. You start getting your cost of production figured out. You realized, hey, we’ve got to think about transition with mom and dad. We have to think about how we structure our business, what growth opportunities do we have and what other farm operations are doing things like we are.

“So, we facilitate peer groups. We have an annual executive business conference where we have 150 operations come in.”

The Ag View Solutions consulting team recently developed a spinoff, Farm Profit Manager.

“Ag View Solutions’ original cost-of-production tool was Excel-based. This year, my brother and cousin who are at Iowa State University, one is in ag engineering, one is in ag business, said that with the development of artificial intelligence, now is the time to turn it into a software,” Foulk said.

He asked them to develop it independently.

“We’ll bring it together, find the best idea, best model, and then we’ll move forward,” he said.

“From that we created our spinoff company, Farm Profit Manager, which is now a software application you can get on your phone or anywhere else. We have about 2.5 million acres across the U.S. enrolled in the system, with about 1,500 independent users. As we move into 2027, we’ll be doing a global release on this, as well.”

Farm Profit Manager is a web-based platform designed to assist farmers in managing their costs and profits effectively. It integrates various tools for equipment costs, marketing and decision support, enabling users to analyze field-level costs and optimize their farming operations.

Never Boring

Between his farming, businesses and helping raise his and Hannah’s children, ages 5, 3, and 7 months, Foulk runs in high gear.

“I always joke with people that 50% of my time is the farm, 50% of my time is the seed business and 50% of my time is consulting others. That’s 150%, but they all have good synergies. It’s always interesting. I never have a boring day. I’m doing something with all the businesses every day,” he said.