ATLANTA, INDIANA – Beck's, the largest family-owned retail seed company in the United States, hosted their second annual 5K on June 5, at their headquarters in Atlanta, Ind. Beck’s 5K promotes health and wellness among Beck’s employees and their families, customers, seed dealers, and the community.

The pinnacle of Christianity is the Resurrection of Jesus Christ!  It is the hope of eternal life that makes us want to believe, but how do we know it really happened?  Let’s take a look back at how all the people reacted at that time:

When Clayton Stufflebeam isn’t working as PFR Location Lead at our new PFR site in El Paso, Illinois, you might find him playing with his toy tractors. In 2013, Clayton picked up the hobby of weathering toy tractors. Weathering is a specialization of customizing these tractors, where the finished product looks like it was just put up after harvest after years of work. The end result is a life-like, and often sentimental, representation of a tractor the way it once was.

This new year will begin a new chapter for two Beck’s employees as they embark on their retirements. These two men have helped Beck’s grow from 25 employees to 606 at last count. Tom Wallace, Fleet Associate, and Terry Shirk, Warehouse Manager, each just celebrated 24 years of service with Beck’s and will retire on December 31.

Beck’s follows the hiring philosophy of “get the right people on the bus,” and then “get people into the right seat on the bus”. It isn’t unusual for employees to enter new roles in various departments as they grow and change throughout their career. Employee development is one of the six defining objectives for 2017 set forth by leadership at the State of the Company address last spring. Bill Freitag’s recent move closer to his family in Minnesota, and transition from production to sales, is a great example of an employee finding the right seat on the bus with Beck’s.

When most Midwesterners think about Hawaiian agriculture, pineapples and coconut trees leaning out over calm, blue water are about all that comes to mind. Many would be surprised to know that there are corn breeding facilities in Hawaii. During the six months of the year that corn doesn’t grow in the Midwest, the Beck’s breeding team doesn’t just sit idle. Every day, progress is made to advance new genetics and to improve seed for our farmers. For years, Beck’s used winter nurseries in Chile and Mexico to grow corn in the North American off-season until 2016, when there was an opportunity to invest in U.S. soil where corn can grow year round. Beck’s just celebrated one full year and three corn crops at our new Beck’s Hawaii Facility in the town of Kekaha on the island of Kauai. Last winter, when most folks in Indiana were shoveling their driveways, Beck’s employees made over a million hand pollinations in the corn breeding nurseries. Each pollination is a new chance to create an inbred line that could be a part of the next hot hybrid.

This year, as a way to give back to the community of Kekaha on the island of Kauai, the 11 full-time employees at the Kekaha facility planted about an acre of the farm in pumpkins to be given away.