Foulk answers call to serve, protect

SPARLAND, Ill. — Growing up in a small Iowa town, Shay Foulk felt blessed to be raised in such a caring community, and he wanted to return the favor.

“There’s a lot of different reasons people join the military. For some people, it’s economic opportunities. For some people, they feel that they don’t have any other options. Some people are seeking leadership and guidance,” said Foulk, who farms about 1,500 acres of row crops, seed soybeans, non-GM corn and other crops in Marshall and surrounding counties in north-central Illinois.

“I just felt that I had been blessed with so many things in my life of people taking care of me. I was raised by a village in a great small-town community. I guess I just felt that sense of national pride of this is something worth protecting, preserving and standing up for to defend against the terrors of the world.

“I’m sure many people have heard the saying that the only reason that we have a sense of peace is because there are hard men that stand ready in the dark of the night to take violence upon our enemies.

“That’s the barrier between the wealth and prosperity and the freedom that we enjoy in the United States and in other areas of the world. All that’s to say, I just kind of felt calling to serve.

“I had been in leadership roles, such as with the football team and church community, and it just came to me naturally. I thought: If God has given me the blessing of having the ability to lead, I feel that I have the responsibility to use those talents where it matters.”

Answering The Call

A native of La Porte City in northeastern Iowa, his mother’s side of the family produced row crops, and his father’s family raised row crops and cattle.

Foulk was actively involved in farming throughout his youth and wanted to continue in the agricultural sector, enrolling in Iowa State University to pursue an agronomy degree.

As he was wrapping up his senior year, the call to serve was on his mind.

“About halfway through college was about the time the Islamic State was wreaking havoc in Iraq and Syria persecuting Christians, and I just kind of had the feeling that I had the ability to lead. So, I had the responsibility to lead, and I still had that calling for military service,” he said.

He enlisted in the Army in the spring semester of his senior year in 2015 and was heading to basic training at Fort Benning in west-central Georgia nine days after graduating from Iowa State.

“I was on a pathway that they call an Option 40 contract, which meant if you passed basic training and advanced individual training, you would have an opportunity to go to the airborne school, and then you would have an opportunity to attend the Ranger assessment selection program to be a part of the 75th Ranger Regiment,” Foulk said.

“I got through basic training and AIT in good shape and was healthy and all that. Airborne went well. I had no problem jumping out of planes, and then the eight-week Ranger assessment selection program came up. The class started with 150, and I think we graduated 70 or 75. With that, I then stationed with 1st Ranger Battalion at Savannah.”

Once in Georgia, Foulk’s wife, Hannah, was able to move there, as well, and they lived there for nearly five years.

The couple first met at an agronomy conference in Nebraska while Hannah was a student at the University of Illinois and he was a junior at Iowa State.

“With 75th Ranger Regiment, there’s high operational tempo, global war on terror, you’re basically on call all the time, and deployments were four to six months long because of the high operational intensity. I deployed twice with the 1st Ranger Battalion to Afghanistan,” he said.

Foulk’s contract with the military was up in 2019, and he and Hannah had some decisions to make.

“The writing was kind of on the wall. The war was winding down. Hannah and I evaluated what our options were. Her parents, Mark and Karen Monier, were 63 at the time. The farm was smaller at that time, the seed business was smaller, so there was a lot of uncertainty there,” he said.

“I said, if we’re gonna make a change, now’s the time. So, we opted to move back to Illinois and immediately integrated into the seed and the farm.

“We also split time between the consulting business on my other side of the family, about 50-50 to start off with. That’s proven to be a pretty good split, the seasonality on the consulting. Farmers are busy. We farm, and all of us on the consulting side also farm. Then, in the offseason, we’re obviously very busy on the consulting side.”

Paying Forward

Although his contract with the Army was ending in 2019, Foulk felt that it was his duty to pass on his knowledge from his experiences to other soldiers.

“There’s a charter called the Abrams Charter that says it’s crucial for those that are in the Ranger Regiment to take their knowledge and disperse it to the rest of the Army. So, if you stay in regiment, you have to take a two-year assignment to go to another unit and kind of pass on that knowledge,” Foulk said.

He opted to fulfill that charter by joining the Illinois Army National Guard.

“I just felt it was my duty, my responsibility. The Army had invested so much in me, and it was a way to give back. I did that on a trial period for a year and a half and then re-enlisted for another six years. In March of 2027, I’ll be done with the military at that time,” he said.

“I was deployed to Iraq in 2024 with the National Guard’s 178th Infantry Regiment out of Bartonville. That was a nine-month deployment. I don’t recommend being gone from the farm for nine months if you can avoid it.”

Serving Community

Foulk reflected on conversations he’s had with other veterans who served in Korea, Vietnam and other wars about using their experiences and training to serve their communities back home.

“I was listening to a guy one time that said, ‘Your service doesn’t stop when you leave the service.’ I think that’s important,” Foulk said.

“I think sometimes people look at their military service and hang their hat on it. Well, no, you have the responsibility to take what you learned in that leadership into your church, into your local community and to your family and your business and whatever else.

“For the veterans who are out there that embrace that and continue to pour that back into their families and their communities, they have a tremendous opportunity to build the world around them that they want.

“When you look behind a lot of the successful businesses and people that you admire and respect in the community, it’s because they continue to serve. Thanks for all the veterans that came before us, no matter what they did.”