Company focuses on helping farmers through quality seed, service

MALTA, Ill. — The way Beck’s Hybrids approaches its business and makes decisions is different than publicly traded companies.

“The differences between what a publicly traded company might focus on versus a privately held company is in the structure and who they are trying to please,” said Scott Beck, president of Beck’s.

“In a publicly traded company they talk about delivering shareholder value in the form of a dividend at the end of the year,” said Beck during a presentation at the 2025 Farm Business Summit: Farm Succession & Business Strategies, hosted by Illinois Soybean Growers at Kishwaukee College in Malta.

“When it is about your purpose, the people doing the work and the ones you are serving, it changes and every decision is not just about the dollar — it’s about the right thing for the purpose we’re serving, our people and what it does to our bottom line,” the company president explained.

“Some decisions we make don’t treat the bottom line very well in the short term,” Beck said. “But long term, it’s about doing business from generation to generation.”

When Scott’s dad, Sonny, graduated from Purdue University in the mid-‘60s, his professor asked him what he was going to do after graduation.

“Dad said he was going to run the family’s seed business, and the professor said, good luck because the big boys will eat you up,” Beck said. “My dad took that as a challenge and started to grow the seed business.”

In 1987, Scott graduated from Purdue with a degree in agronomy.

“I came home and I was the No. 12 employee,” he said. “We were still a very small business, but we were established in Indiana as a thriving and growing family-owned company.”

Beck’s operates in an A-frame business model.

“The foundation of that structure is our culture and that culture is based on our desire to honor God and we have a heart and mind to help others,” the company president said.

“The point is why we are in business, which is to help farmers be better one year after the next,” Beck said.

“In the middle is all the work we do to provide our customers the best seed quality, field performance and service,” he said.

Beck’s offers diverse seed genetics to provide farmers the confidence to plant 100% of Beck’s products on their farm.

“We work with all the major seed companies and we have our own breeding program,” Beck said. “When our trusted and respected dealers show up on a farmer’s doorstep, they have a natural advantage because farmers can get all the diversity they need from Beck’s.”

Based in Atlanta, north of Indianapolis in central Indiana, the company focuses on responsible risk taking for making decisions.

“It’s not about the next quarter or sometimes the year-end financials,” Beck said. “We have financial objectives, but if we have an opportunity to buy or build something at pennies on the dollar, then we’re going to figure out how to fit that into the budget.”

Recently, Beck’s purchased a large processing facility in Nebraska.

“That wasn’t in the budget, but it was the right thing to do because it sets us up for the future,” the company president said.

The seed company strives to provide exceptional brand experience to its customers in many ways, including events such as Becknology Days, Practical Farm Research results and customer trips.

“FARMserver is our digital platform that is free to any customer,” Beck said. “It is a platform for farmers to collect, store and utilize their farm data for decision-making.”

Beck’s offers access to a lodge located on a serene property in Michigan.

“We call it Journey to the Well and this is where we host business, church and marriage retreats to help people grow in their relationship with God and others,” Beck said. “We’ve had families schedule their vacations and celebrate key milestones like anniversaries.”

Land ownership is an important aspect of Beck’s business model.

“Land is our lowest cost of production,” Beck said. “We can produce our seed at a 20% discount to what it would cost if we had to hire it to be done.”

In addition, quality is also a benefit to farmland ownership.

“Our employees care about what they do and they want to do a good job,” Beck said.

Planting on their own land gives the company control, stability and the opportunity to produce hybrids that are difficult to produce.

“Sometimes products have a high cost of production so other companies will decide to terminate them because they are focused on the return to the shareholder,” Beck said. “But they’ll give us the opportunity and this has happened multiple times.”

One example is a hybrid that Beck’s sold over 1 million units during its eight-year life cycle.

“It was hard to produce, but it was the right hybrid for the farmer,” Beck said. “Our customers got the benefit of a hybrid that was rejected by one of the major suppliers.”

Beck’s divides its capital investments into six categories — seed boxes, office equipment, machinery, processing equipment, buildings and land.

“Land is the only asset that has appreciated and that is helpful as a stable asset in times of stress,” Beck said. “We have been fortunate that we have never had to go through a period that was really difficult and we had to make huge changes such as lay off a bunch of employees.”

Although, the 2019 growing season was a challenge for the company.

“In our area, it rained all spring and it was the end of May and we had almost no seed planted,” Beck recalled. “Then we saw God’s hand step in because we got some windows of opportunity to plant in the next few weeks of June.”

In addition, September of 2019 was the second warmest September on record.

“We needed that heat to finish the crop out,” Beck said. “That year could have been a year we lost millions of dollars, but it turned out to be OK.”

The Beck family is large and growing.

“We have over 30 members in the family now and as our kids have gotten older, we’ve been very intentional about having conversations on things that matter to them,” Beck said. “We’ve talked about the requirements if you want to come back and work at the company because you don’t just get to work at the company because you have the same last name.”

“We want the kids interested in our business, so if they think they want to work for Beck’s full time, they must have a couple outside experiences such as a summer internship or work part time or even full time,” the company president said.

“If you want to manage at Beck’s, we strongly recommend the kids get a full-time job at another company for a period of time,” he said. “Our three boys have done that and now they’re working in different parts of our company.”

The Beck family is not unlike any other family, the company president said.

“We have our ups and downs — times when we’re not getting along quite as well,” he said. “We have times where we have to work through difficult conversations and the key is to be purposeful.”

It is a strong sign, Beck said, for the fifth generation of the family to be involved in Beck’s.

“In 1972, the seed we sold to farmers was probably planted on less than 100,000 acres,” he said. “Today, our seed is planted on over 12 million acres.”

In 2001, one of the exercises the company’s leadership team did at a retreat was to write down what they wanted people to say about the company in 50 years.

“You might want to think about that for your own farm,” Beck said. “Think about your vision and the people to support that.”