About Us Declaring Our Independence Every Day The Ottilie family stands committed to independent seed production and marketing. In 1917, on a farm his father homesteaded in the 1860s, our grandfather began selling soybean seed. Today we’re still in the seed business, on that very same farm. Having a long, proud history in this business doesn’t mean we’re old fashioned, though. It does mean we have a clear picture of our role in the food production chain and we build a working relationship with the farmers who plant our seed. Our organization is just the right size to hear you when you want to talk to us. We earn our customers’ trust by being extremely choosy about the seeds we sell. Though we maintain working agreements with national and international plant breeding and technology firms, we’re not in business to rubber-stamp their research. On our seed farm, which is also our working family farm, we evaluate as many as 500 new seed corn varieties every year. And though ours is a company with central Iowa roots, we challenge ourselves to produce high-quality, well-conditioned seed for producers in Wisconsin, South Dakota, Kansas, and Nebraska—wherever you farm. Our staff is larger than it was when our grandfather, Wayne A. Robinson, started in the soybean seed business, back in 1917. And our production facilities are more streamlined than in the 1976 when, under the leadership of our dad, Robert W. Ottilie, we started selling seed corn. But one thing hasn’t changed. We’re still farmers and we’d never sell you a product we wouldn’t plant on our own farm! What Sets Ottilie RO® Seed Apart? The value of family ownership is something we can measure. Steve Ottilie and Jane Ottilie Frimml never forget that the name on every bag of seed we sell is also their name. If a batch of seed doesn’t meet our company standards we’ll discard it! There’s also real value in our regional focus because the hybrids and numbers we produce don’t have to be almost right for every producer. Our products are specifically selected for our customers in two distinct—and different—marketing areas. We offer some products that perform well across the whole of our territory, but we also have many others specifically geared to the needs of either our western region (western Iowa, Nebraska, and Kansas) or our eastern region (eastern Iowa, northern Illinois, and southern Wisconsin). In addition we offer a full range of seed products. Few companies today make that extra effort! We offer corn, soybeans, sorghum, a variety of forages, and lawn grasses, applying identical quality standards to each product line.