Better Landlord and Contract Management

Shay: Welcome back, everyone, to another episode of the Ag View Pitch. Today you have Shay Foulk and Ron Dunker with Oaken. Ron, where are you joining us from today?

Ron

Dunker: Hey, good morning, Shay. I'm in central Iowa, the great state of Iowa over here. Yeah, right. In central Iowa, just north of Des Moines.

Shay: Is that home or are you traveling?

Ron

Dunker: No, I'm home today, actually. I'm home this week, but travel in the next 2 weeks. So yeah, just getting some office work done. Yeah.

Shay: Well, good. Ron, we've run across each other, you know, at a few different events here. And I think what we're going to talk about today is so pertinent around lease management, kind of what Okin does on the digital efficiency side of that piece and how we can really help farm operations moving forward. But what I'd love to do is get a brief background on your history and how did you get to kind of where you are today with Okun?

Ron

Dunker: Yeah, you bet. Yeah, thanks for this opportunity, Shay. Yeah, I'm a farm kid, grew up in southeast Iowa, went to college in southeast Iowa and graduated from there with a degree in biology and started right away 2 weeks later after my graduation date with Monsanto and spent 30 Monsanto and then subsequent Bayer, purchased Monsanto in 2018 and spent my entire career with, with in the industry learning from them. We still have a small farm in, in eastern Iowa that we actually lease out. And yeah, and so spent over 30 years with them and did just a lot of different things. I was a small little bit of the Roundup Ready technology when I was in their chemical manufacturing division. And then I was a lot of the rollout of Climate to the industry. I did a lot of the due diligence work, bringing Climate on board, rolling it out to the industry.

So I was quite a substantial part of that and always have enjoyed technology. But what I enjoy most is, you know, learning from our customers, learning from our growers and whatnot out there in the industry. And I feel like I've at least been a consummate learner over those 32 years. And then, yeah, had a departure from Bayer. They went through some reorganization. Last 10 years, 11 years, I guess it was, worked in their large grower division, working with some of the largest ag producer, ag influencers in North America, and ran that business for them. And yeah, Bayer went through a reorg. And they basically said, thanks for your years of service. And yeah, you know how that goes, right? It's corporate America. They have to do that sort of thing. And yeah, I did the corporate ladder climb, did all that, did all those learnings. And I decided I didn't know anything about startups.

I still wanted to stay in agriculture and saw what Okin was doing. I found this company called Okin. Saw what they were doing, came out of Purdue University. And I basically reached out to some early adopters of the technology. Before I even reached out to the company, I said, now tell me how this is helping your operation and what it does. And they went through the efficiencies, the cost savings, you know, the ability to build relationships with landowners in a digital format. And I reached out to 3 people that were using the technology already, and they had nothing but glorious things to say about it. So I reached out to the, basically the CEO of the company, Shay, and said, I like what you're doing. I love technology that helps the industry, helps growers, makes their lives easier. And I want to learn about startups and I want to help you grow this business.

I said, I think I can help you grow this business. And a year later, a year and 4 months later, here I sit talking to you on a podcast, right? So there you go.

Shay: Well, that's great. And I think that central focus and kind of the diligence that you did in your process to say, how's the experience been? You know, is this a viable need and is this something that's worth pursuing is really cool. So I'm going to give you my layman's understanding of Okin, but what I would love you to do then is to say, no, that's wrong, or here's how it's different. So kind of what I see from Okin, my understanding is you look at all the leases, all the contract management that we have as farm operations today. You know, whether that's a true rental agreement, lease agreement, crop share agreement, and everything from land to maybe some other business transactions too. But we're doing this in a way that's, it's very choppy. And it's like, oh yeah, you know, we got rent coming up, or, oh shoot, we missed that rent check.

Now I got to call the, call the landowner and say, hey, I'm, you know, I'm sorry, we just got busy. You know, I just had a baby and, you know, whatever it may be. So how do we create maybe a system of record around that and kind of emphasize some of the digital efficiencies that we have as we record here in 2026? And my understanding is that the team at Okin has done a fantastic job of streamlining that process, building in some awesome functionality so that you can kind of better manage that as a farm operation. Is that a pretty decent overview?

Ron

Dunker: I honestly don't think I could have described it any better, Shay.

Shay: Well, we can just put that on the record.

Ron

Dunker: Yeah, we'll just end it right here. No, absolutely. And, you know, because the company came out of Purdue, they reach out to industry and say, hey, what do you need help with? Where are your concerns? Where are your pinch points? Where do we, you know, need to really have some things focused? And they bring those concerns and those pinch points back to the university and have individuals work on them like our founder did. Work on these. And what came back was, you know, we have the largest wealth transfer that is happening in the United States that's ever occurred in basically in 250 years, right? In the amount of funding. I mean, we're talking, you know, the contract management business is over $3 trillion in payments that, you know, we've come to figure out that goes on every year.. And so, now you have all this land that's changing hands.

And, you know, you and I were talking about this earlier, but, you know, all these people have great relationships with their landowners, right? But those landowners are getting into a point where they're going to transition it to another entity, whether it be their family members or, you know, someone else is going to pick it up, an investment company is going to pick it up or whatever. But what we do is we are trying to help them. Facilitate a current relationship with their landowners digitally. And you mentioned it, we remind them of when all the leases come due. So they should never miss a lease. They should never miss a payment. We remind them, our system technology reminds them of when the payments are due. So they technically should never miss a payment because both of those are really bad days. That's not me saying that.

That's our customers telling us that I've missed, you know, I've missed a lease, I missed a pay. I was at one of your meetings. And, uh, one of your, uh, executive meetings, and someone told me that when I was sitting at the table with them, right? That, hey, that was a bad day for us, that didn't go well, right? Or I lost acres because I didn't, you know, uh, facilitate the relationship correctly that I needed, so it impacted my farm by tens of thousands of dollars. And so we do that digitally on the front end, and then we do it, uh, I, I think our technology actually brings people closer in the fact that they can create those— the way they've done things, like you said, choppiness or siloed. Here's where our leases are, here's how we do our payments, whether that's Excel or we're doing it manually or however they're doing that. We bring all that together in one efficient platform.

And then on the back end, the relationships piece, it allows those growers to create a unique experience for those landowners wherever they are by putting in the lease information, by putting in all the payments that they made. Oh, and by the way, they can put financial reports like you guys create and all those other— whatever they want to share, they, meaning the growers, want to share with the landowners, they can do that to include 1099 forms. Well, man, how many— I mean, I've had— if I've had one, I've had 30 people, say, of our customers, they— I'm always getting asked for 1099 forms. Well, you put it into the Oaken platform and it'll be there whenever they want to log into it because it creates a login from, say, XYZ Farms, creates a login for the landowner. They can access that information.

They can be sitting in their hot tub in Florida and looking at everything that that, you know, Shay Foulk is doing on the farm.

Shay: I want to emphasize that because that is a phenomenal piece. And I had forgotten that until you just triggered that in my memory. So what you're saying is the landowner of someone that I'm working with in a rental agreement, I choose what I share with them or kind of whatever our arrangement is, right? They can be in Cabo or Arizona or Northern Illinois and they can say, you know what, I've been thinking, when is that contract lease payment due or when are we up for renewal or when should I expect payment coming in? And there's a login portal for the landowners to go in and check all that out.

Ron

Dunker: Yep, that the growers are 100% control of, to include, and they get notifications that they, meaning the landowners, get notifications when information is put into their portal. Like, you know, Shay Foulk Farms put something into your portal, you know, go check it out, right? And so it's, it's huge. It's huge. One, you don't have to send things through snail mail. Things don't get lost in email or buried. You know, I know my inbox currently is at 4,000. Right. So things get buried pretty fast. And so that just doesn't happen. And what's nice about it is, and I'll say this right now, you don't have to use Oaken. I want you to use Oaken because it's going to make your life easier. You're not going to forget those front-end lease renewals, the payments. Oh, and by the way, we can break out all the percentages of the payments to over 12 individuals. Right.

So maybe you've got a couple parcels of land, or maybe you've got one parcel of land that's under that lease. That you're making 12 payments to. We currently have one that's making payments to 10, and we can break all those percentages out. Takes all the calculations and math out of it for you and does all that. But my— I mean, if you take away one thing from here, because when you and I were talking before we jumped on this podcast, I've been out, I'm basically across the countryside meeting with growers and learning from growers. I am a— I hope when they put me in the casket, they say that guy was a consummate learner, right? And so I listen and learn and. And I hear this all the time. I hear growers or individuals say, I've been working with this lease for 20 years, and we're good. We're excellent. You know, our relationship's good. And I'm like, that is so fantastic that you do that.

And you have built that relationship because it's hard work. And but then I say to them in the next breath, and I try to say as humbly as I possibly can, because you could probably come off like a real jerk. But I say to them, what's your plan for the next 20, right? You're— I mean, we've got people on our platform that their daughters are coming back to run the farm, their sons are coming back to run the farm. You know, do you have a plan so that those acres stay in your control? Right. And as soon as I say that, they're like, ooh, no. And so with Oaken, because of that sharing capability, you can start to say, hey, Shay, would you mind if I start sharing this information? You know, would you be okay if I started sharing this information with your daughter, your son, your niece, your nephew, whoever that entity is, is going to take that land. At least it's a plan.

But if you don't use Oakton, I mean, one takeaway is here, just please have a plan and start talking about it. Maybe it's part of your overall succession planning conversations, but it's probably you should have it now instead of when succession happens. Obviously. But those are the things that I hear so routinely in the industry. And of course, we can do that digitally. One of the other things that our customers— we have over 75 customers on the platform and we're processing right at $300 million in contracts right now, just to give you an idea of what we're doing. Yeah. And, you know, we've got over 10,000 like different workflows that we're tracking. Across all those customers. So, you know, it's, it's, it's been very well received.

And what I, what I, what I, what we hear routinely is the other piece is in succession and in that next generation, well, they're not going to go into a filing cabinet and look at paperwork. They're not going to, you know, they may go into a spreadsheet, but they're probably going to want to do things and look at things digitally. And farming operations can put all this information into Oaken. And we don't, we don't do lease negotiations, we don't do any of that. This is a pure cloud-based and now mobile platform that they can put all this information into. And whoever is going to take over that farm, or it's a new employee or a new person on the farm, they can go in and see all the contracts in one place or all leases in one place, all the payments, who's who. I mean, who, who is the family, who do I need to, you know, work with, and all those, all that is in one system.

And they can create that land asset portal experience. So it's just been a huge benefit to farms that are working on those transitions that those individuals could go in there and look at that digitally and see all that information in one spot and they get up to speed very quickly. The other thing that was just shared with me, Par, so sorry I keep rambling here. No, you're good. This is super cool and I had never thought of this. They said our office caught fire. And we lost all of our paperwork. You know what I mean? And I never had even thought of that aspect of it. And they were like, it took us, you know, a whole entire year just to recreate and get all the leases and all that information back in the, you know, because it was in filing cabinets somewhere. Yeah. So I mean, amazing. That's just another, just another reason to have it digitally now.

Um, and what's nice is for the, for the grower that's, that's that's using this, uh, that has all these leases digitally, well, they can also be in, um, Cancún or wherever they may be and log into the system and see all that stuff. So they can also manage it from afar, or if they have multiple entities or farms around, they can manage it all in one spot. So it's, it's just a, a really efficient technology in that regard.

Shay: So, you know, a few things that stood out to me there when I think about the the assets under management or kind of the contract, that $300 million or whatever, regardless of what the overall number is. When you think about the leases that you're managing in your farm operation, as a, as the farmers listening to this, you know, a lot of people are paying $500,000, $1 million, $2 million plus in rent. And to not have a systematic way of managing that, plus contractual lease agreements that your attorney is going to come in and look at or can come in and look at if there's any dispute or negotiation vacations or you have a loss or whatever it may be. You know, I think sometimes farms don't understand, uh, especially those with owned land or that are operating at scale.

You are essentially a family office with tens of millions of dollars of assets, and any business that's running that way has systems in place like this, like contract management, attorney integration. They have You know, one thing I wanted to ask you about is like, you know, a CRM, a customer resource management tool that says here's all of the landowner contact information. Because again, if you're, you're the dad or the mom in this situation and you know, you're managing 17 different landowners and then you got their kids' numbers or whatever, can, can the next generation or can, you know, if you get hit by a beer truck today, can they go through your phone and find all that contact information? Do they know when, you know, Uncle John's birthday is, or do they know, you know, when the lease agreement comes up? I mean, all those things.

And my understanding is you have kind of a CRM portion built into that, correct?

Ron

Dunker: Yeah. Yeah. So our, our, our platform is 100% ag, right? So everything that we did to include the CRM component is, is ag-focused. And so not only does it have the workflow tasks like a CRM would have, like to include your lease where you get an email of the leases that are coming due and the payments are coming due. And also there's multiple times that it reminds you, so again, you shouldn't forget. But then we also can track other workflows on the farm as well, so to include when taxes are due, when insurance is due, when you should be getting your paperwork to the FSA office. Oh, and by the way, you can send that paperwork to all those different entities through our system, and we have DocuSign and all of that linked be able to link all that.

But, you know, to your point around the relationships piece and the CRM, again, yeah, I mean, I've walked into offices just to give you a real-life example, and the spouse has said to me, everything is in that person's head right there. And this was a major, like, 20,000-acre, you know, well-run, successful farming operation, right? And, and so, yeah, so everything that we track, so we, we put all that. So how we work is we put all that information in. We'll put all the leases that we call it the white glove treatment. That's part of our services, right? Because we know if you see your own data in there, you're going to be like, yep, I like it, I'm going to keep using it, right? And I'm going to keep using it. So not only do we put all the leases in for you, We'll put all your contacts in. And like I said, based off of our customer feedback, most CRMs are tracked like line by line.

This is who Shay is, this is who Ron is, blah, blah, blah. Kind of goes down. Well, we've actually said, okay, here's the lease. And from that is a family tree to include here are the main contacts, here are all the children, here are all the, you know, the lawyers and the financial people associated with that family that I need to be in contact with. So our minds visually, because we're so used to the family tree structure, you can log into the system, pull up that lease, click on relationships, go right into it and see that family tree structure. So, so, you know, whoever steps into the operation, it's not in that person's head. It's right there in a family tree that we can relate to as humans and say, okay, yep, this is how it all ties together. And I need to call them.

I'll click on it, pull up their information, give them a call, or We now have it on mobile and you can do all that from mobile now.

Shay: That's amazing. Talk to me a little bit. You had mentioned offline and I didn't— I made a note here, but I didn't quite understand, like contract intelligence. So I'm assuming you're writing hundreds of contracts. You know, there's probably things in there that I wouldn't think about as a farmer. But hey, you know, we have these hundreds of thousands of contracts to pull on. Yeah. Help me understand that a little bit better.

Ron

Dunker: Yeah. So, you know, You know, AI, of course, is the rage, you know, and it's certainly a phenomenal tool. And so we're currently working on a closed-loop AI system that looks at contracts. It'll be out in our next iteration, but it'll— you can put in like your cost per acre and it'll kind of go through and tell you which leases are healthy and which leases could be potentially unhealthy, right? So it helps you with that. You can certainly do the doc searches and all of that. We have a very robust doc search standpoint. So really you only have to I can put in 3 letters, 3 syllables, and it'll pull up everything that has those 3 syllables in it. So no more looking through filing cabinets or looking, you know, through file folders. It not only looks in the document itself or the file type, it looks in the document.

So we also now have incorporated the ability for you to see things at field level. So all your leases, let's say you have leases in multiple counties. Well, now there's, there's a mapping system that shows, okay, here's, here's all of Shay Foulk leases and, you know, they're in McLean County and, you know, all these different counties in Illinois. And you can look at it and then click on it and drives you right into everything about that lease. So we are, there is a lot of other functionality associated with that. But what we do, we don't, not only do we have bank-level security on our platform, because people always ask us that because we do work with some financial, we do work with financial entities.

But we also don't want— and, you know, you can relate to this with some of the technologies that's been out over the last 10 or 15 years— we don't want your rent information and my rent information, people to know that information. We are very sensitive to that. It is a peer management platform for the individuals that use Oaken. And, you know, we don't want it anything open sourced in that regard to under, you know, so that there's no, you just don't want hard feelings in the countryside, right? And it's bad for business. So we're very sensitive to that as well. So there is a lot of functionality in that that allows you to, you know, do things quickly. We're looking at, you know, also using AI to, like I said, search in, you know, create documentation as well as, you know, be able to search through and, like I said, find out which leases are healthy and whatnot.

So we've got a whole robust engine behind that that we're putting in place. But again, we have probably been slower to the fact of AI adoption and those sort of things and those AI insights because we got to keep it very secure for our customers because they're so important to us.

Shay: Yeah, that's awesome. You know, as we, as we kind of wrap up here, I think, I think this is a much needed idea in the space. And I know, I don't know of any others that are doing it. And that's why I wanted to make sure that our audience here on the Ag View Pitch kind of understood what was out there. Because it's one of those things that's like, you don't know that you need it until you need it. Yeah. And then when you hear it, it's like, man, how— because in— Ron, you and I have talked to so many people that Okay, if you're managing 5 relationships, that's one thing. But what if it's 20 or 50 or 100? You know, you look at all these different leases and people and like you said, you start mapping out that family tree. It's like, it's not just are we managing them sufficiently right now? Are we managing them efficiently? And do we have growth opportunity?

And are we being proactive? And are we being the best tenant and the best customer to our landowners that we can be. So such a, such a tremendous opportunity. If people, people want to learn more about Oakn, I think you guys have done some podcast stuff. I know you guys have articles, website. What, how do people reach out or like, you know, dive into this a little bit more themselves, Ron?

Ron

Dunker: Well, yeah, you can always certainly reach out to me at ron@oakn.ag or we are on, like you said, we're on YouTube, which where we have, we're blessed to have customer testimonials. We do a podcast called Knowledge and Time. Because those are the two most valuable things that, you know, any individuals can do with each other, share both their knowledge and their time spent. So we have a Knowledge and Time podcast on YouTube where we have customer testimonials or customers talking about how they're, you know, leveraging and using and expanding their businesses on Okin. Yeah, we have an Okin website, okin.ag. And so, yeah, there's just lots of different avenues. And you— can I share one more little tidbit of— bit of information because you prompted something that reminded me.

So, you know, you, you know, we have folks that have 5 leases on our platform and we can consume all the different lease types and do all the flex payments and figure all that out for, for you. Right. Our system will do that automatically. So, but we have people that have 5 and we have people that are— we have entities that have hundreds of leases that they're managing and like putting whole farming operations so that they can manage it all from one spot. Right. Maybe it's in a whole nother state. They're putting all those into Oaken, and they're managing from their headquarters where they're at. But I, I, I, I, you know, I love learning. I have reached out to the person that has 5, and I'm like, why 5, right? You can do 5 on a napkin. You know, that's, that's a little bit of an exaggeration, but you can manage 5 on a napkin.

And he said, Ron, he goes, it's extremely competitive for rented ground in my area. And he goes, if I have Oaken in my back pocket it totally separates me from the individuals that's offering the same kind of management system and probably not going to be as successful with the landowners because they're all over, you know, the United States or the globe. I, you know, we're even Steven on, on cash, you know, our prices per acre. We're even Steven as an operator. But I can go in and offer Oaken and totally show up differently than the person that's trying to get that land.

Shay: And I would say—

Ron

Dunker: and I win the ties, you know, he said I win the ties.

Shay: And I would say too, Ron, I agree. I didn't mean that as a bad thing because I think that person with 5 leases certainly needs it. And you know who I think actually even needs it more? I think families need it. And I think if you're renting a bunch of family ground and you don't have a contractual lease in place to where the heirs understand it, to where it's legally binding, you have a clear form of communication. And I'll give an example. You know, we're renting some ground from my wife's aunt, and she likes to be informed and she just wants to know what's going on. And so if you put in, hey, we went out and mowed waterways, or hey, we got the lease agreement coming up. One thing that I built into the background is just like an annual— here's the operations that we do throughout the year.

And so when we schedule our monthly call, say, hey, this is what we got going on, here's any issues, we're all good. Um, and it's just a conversation piece that we're touching base once a month. There's so much power in that. And so I would encourage people that, you know, even if you have 20% of your ground that's rented to non-family members and then the other 70, 80%, whatever, is to family ground, that's probably an even more important reason to have that in place.

Ron

Dunker: I never thought of that, but that is an excellent— I mean, we do have people that have their family contracts on our system. But that is an excellent call out for sure, Shay. I mean, that is absolutely excellent. Yeah, they, and, you know, whether you're— because our, you know, growers are good and they want to, you know, champion the land and keep its sustainability, whether it's leased land or their own land. I mean, they know the, you know, it's ultimately the beginning and end for their operation. And they do so much like sustainability work or even simple things like mowing the road ditches.

And I've had, I've had entities that are using Okanogan and they're like, I just want them to see imagery of the excavation work that I did or the tiling project I did, or, you know, show them that the road ditches are kept up and we're keeping the driveway graveled and all, you know, we don't charge them for that stuff, but we want to make sure that they're seeing everything that we're doing to be stewards to their land.

Shay: Right. By the way, there's a difference there because I can message my 80-year-old landowner and, and send a text and send videos and that's great. But there's no historical proof of that. Whereas you have the history. If the next generation takes over, they can now go in and look, hey, Shea's managed this since 2021. Look at everything that he's done.

Ron

Dunker: Exactly. And they're like, we just, you know, we're just going to keep it with Shea. You know, and we're just going to keep it as an investment because that's really what, you know, a lot of the ag ground, the 44 million acres that they say is changing hands in the next 3 to 4 years, um, that's a USDA statistic that, you know, at least it gives you the high opportunity for that land to stay in your ground. Again, I want you to be on Okin. I, I, I, I— it's a fantastic technology. Having spent my entire career working with fantastic technologies that help growers, you know,, you know, make their lives a lot easier and help them be more productive and more, you know, more profitable, which is extremely important. And, you know, just have a plan for that next, next generation. You got to start today.

Shay: Yeah. Well, thank you so much for the time on that, Ron. Again, check out Oaken— is it Oaken Ag is the website?

Ron

Dunker: Yep. Oaken.ag. Pretty easy, right?

Shay: And then Ron@oaken.ag. Appreciate your time. Appreciate what you're doing for the industry, Ron, and thank you.

Ron

Dunker: Yeah, likewise to you, Shay, and everything you're doing.

Shay: Appreciate it. Thank you everyone for listening to another episode of the Ag View Pitch. We will catch you next time.