Growing Together

There’s no reference to the Bullard family anywhere on a bag of MorSoy soybean seed, but their name is as much a part of the brand as the MFA shield itself.

In fact, Bullard Seed Company in Ashland, Mo., has been intricately involved in the production of MFA’s proprietary soybean line since it was launched more than 35 years ago. Today, the family-owned-and-operated business processes around 50% of MFA’s MorSoy seed and nearly 80% of MFA wheat seed, all from a small but mighty complex just 15 miles from MFA Incorporated’s home office in Columbia.

“The Bullards have been with us from the very beginning, and they’ve grown with us through many seasons of change,” said Hadlee Swope, MFA’s MorSoy product manager. “They’re honestly an asset not only to MorSoy, but to MFA in general. They make my job very enjoyable, and I can’t say enough great things about them.”

Joel Bullard, the family patriarch, established what would become the modern-day Bullard Seed Company with support from his father, Guy, who opened his own seed-cleaning operation in 1946.

“I was born in ’49, so I’ve been around the seed business my whole life,” Joel said. “I always enjoyed it—enjoyed trying to put the very best product that we could in the bag.”

In 1979, the move and expansion of the family’s seed enterprise from its small, original building in downtown Ashland to its current location along Highway 63 was the fulfillment of his father’s dream to see his son succeed, Joel said.

“My dad and I made several dollars on a bunch of cattle we sold, and he asked me what I wanted to do with my half,” Joel said, emotion overwhelming him at the memory. “I said, ‘Well, I have a family now, so I need to build a house.’ And Dad said, ‘What do you want to do with the seed business?’ I said, ‘We either need to get bigger or get out.’ And he said, ‘I’ll build you a building. You put anything you want in it. We’ll go from there.’ That’s how it started and grew to what it is now.”

The Bullards were longtime customers of MFA for their farming inputs, and they also worked with MFA Incorporated to clean forage and row-crop seed. That partnership hit a turning point 1988, when Bullard Seed was asked to help to expand inventory for the first two MorSoy products, a 4.2 and a 4.4 maturity bean.

“When we started working with MFA, we were primarily cleaning red clover, lespedeza, grasses, wheat and soybeans,” Joel recalled. “The MorSoy product line was just getting started, and they needed somebody to increase the seedstock. We grew them that year and the next, and by 1991, we were doing MorSoy pretty much full time.”

He and his wife, Janet, raised their two children on the family farm and in the seed plant, much like Joel’s own childhood. Their son, Matthew, and daughter, Sarah, learned how to drive forklifts and tractors before they could drive cars and helped wherever they were needed. The siblings were preparing for what would eventually become their future careers—although that fact wasn’t fully established until much later.

“There were a lot of conversations about whether we were going to join the business while I was in college and even high school,” Matthew said. “We were spending money here to expand and improve the plant, and the question was, ‘Would it be worth it?’”

It was, indeed. Matthew came back home to the farm and seed company in 2001 after graduating from the University of Missouri in Columbia. In 2006, Sarah’s husband, Ryan Garrett, also came on board, and Sarah followed a few years later, putting her Mizzou business management degree to work as chief financial officer.

“It means a lot, to be carrying on something our dad and granddad started,” Sarah said. “I hope that we can do as good of a job—or even better.”

The Bullards and Garretts not only serve in key management roles, but they are also immersed in all other aspects of the operation—processing, production, shipping, customer relations—with the help of only a couple other employees.

“When the core of the business is made up of hands-on family members who all have skin in the game, it makes a big difference,” Joel said. “We have to make things work. It’s our livelihood and our future on the line.”

“We don’t pay attention to titles. We just do what needs to be done,” Matthew added. “If we’re working here in the plant, and a truck shows up to get loaded, we go load the truck. You see something needs to be done, you don’t wait for someone else to do it.”

Despite these shared responsibilities, the family does divide duties along certain lines. Matthew handles much of the family’s own crop production, while Ryan works with the contract farmers who grow MorSoy and MFA wheat seed.

“MFA tells us how many acres and what varieties we need, and we find the guys to do it,” Ryan said. “We look for people who take a lot of pride in what they do, because seed production takes more work and attention. They have to clean out equipment between each variety and be very timely as far as planting and harvest. Of course, there is incentive for them to do that. And we’re lucky. We have a lot of really good growers who have been with us for a long time.”

Those growers, like the Bullards, have witnessed many significant changes in this business through the years, including how seeds are measured and packaged as well as the evolution from public varieties to highly regulated licensed traits.

“When Roundup Ready soybeans came out, that was a huge shift for the industry toward all the patented varieties,” Matthew said. “Another big change was the transition from 50-pound bags to 140,000-unit bags, which required us to do seed counts and figure out the weights. I also remember filling the first bulk bags, and now we’ve added the pro boxes, too.”

Embracing such innovation has long been a hallmark of Bullard Seed Company. In 2002, it was one of the first processing plants in the United States to install a Satake optical sorter, which uses computerized camera technology to distinguish and discard off-color beans. Other high-tech upgrades include vision-based seed counting, a rotary spiral sorter to separate flat or oblong material from perfectly round seeds, and a robot stacker and automatic palletizer in the plant to make processing more efficient and less labor-intensive.

“We’re proud of our facility. It’s not large, but we have the best equipment available at any seed plant in the world,” Joel said. “When we first started working with MFA, I said our goal was to be the best grower, the best conditioner, the best shipper and the best warehouse that you have working for you. That was our motto then. And still is. We want to be the best.”

Achieving that goal takes an unwavering commitment to quality, Matthew emphasized.

“It’s a matter of paying attention to everything that comes in and goes out of our plant,” he said. “It means watching what’s going in the bag, looking at the gravity table, seeing how everything is running. Quality is number one. Everything else can fall in behind it.”

“Farmers want good seed, and we know, because we are those farmers, too,” Ryan added. “We plant the same seed that we’re processing. So, yeah, quality is definitely a priority for us. At a bigger seed plant, I don’t know that you’d have the owner or the manager filling the bag and looking at the seed quality because they’d be busy doing other things. In that way, I think being smaller is an advantage.”

Such accountability is just one more reason MFA customers can trust MorSoy seed to perform on their farms, Hadlee said.

“What I love about working with the Bullards is that our customers not only get varieties that were selected and tested locally but also produced and processed by people who care about the quality of that seed,” she said. “They’re truly the heart and soul of MorSoy, and they’ve been a big pillar of our success.”

As for the future of Bullard Seed, Joel says to look no further than the next generation surrounding him.

“I recently helped them purchase some new equipment, and they kept telling me I didn’t have to,” Joel said. “I know I don’t. But my dad helped me. He gave me a chance. And I want to help them. That’s where I get my joy, seeing them succeed.”

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Click here to view more articles from the October issue of Today's Farmer magazine.

Click here to learn more about the MFA MorSoy soybeans grown by Bullard Seed Company.