IFBT.Farm

IFBT.Farm is a budgeting and risk management tool for corn, soybean and wheat farmers across the U.S. It allows farmers to easily produce benchmark and customized farm budgets for a crop year. It also allows farmers to visualize the financial risks to their farm resulting from deviations in budgets relating to changes in unknown future prices and unknown actual farm crop yields. The application simultaneously integrates and models the impact of the choices that farmers can make to manage and mitigate financial risk. These include crop acreage allocations, crop insurance choices, title selection, grain marketing, land rental arrangements, among others. Sensitivity analyses provide the farmer a comprehensive view of their financial risk profile entering a crop year and allow the farmer to proactively adjust their decision-making to mitigate and manage financial risk both initially and across the course of the crop year. The application is free for use and can be accessed at www.ifbt.farm.

The IFBT Team

The core IFBT team currently consists of two brothers, Kelley Drake and Dow Drake. Kelley initiated the project by developing a complex spreadsheet-based system over several years to help guide the business and risk management decisions of an Illinois farm that was built and managed by their father. Dow led the development of the IFBT.Farm web application to expand and enhance Kelley’s farm specific tool so that it could be used by commercial corn, soybean and wheat farmers across the United States in a robust online, web-based format. They have worked very closely to refine and enhance the business logic and to develop, implement and test the application.

Kelley Drake - Co-Founder

Kelley Drake is a retired investment banker now living in Ripon, Wisconsin. He received his BA in economics at Swarthmore College in 1987 and his MBA from University of Chicago Booth School of Business in 1992. Prior to his MBA, Kelley was a research analyst performing economic analysis relating to complex litigation matters for consulting firms NERA in White Plains, NY and Putnam Hayes & Bartlett in New York City and London. After a summer associate position in investment banking with Lehman Brothers in 1991, Kelley joined investment banking firm William Blair & Company in 1992. He had a 20 year career at William Blair & Company in Chicago before retiring from investment banking in 2012. Over his career he completed over 120 M&A and Equity transactions and formed and led two successful groups (Financial Sponsors and Commercial Services). After retiring from Blair, Kelley was involved in a variety of consulting and personal investing projects through his firm Marquis Partners. Prior to co-founding IFBT.Farm in 2023 with his brother Dow, Kelley worked with his father’s farm for three years on a variety of matters including farm budgeting, farm risk management (including crop insurance, title decisions, and grain marketing), refinancing the farm’s debt, and estate planning. For more information, see Kelley’s
LinkedIn Profile.

Dow Drake - Co-Founder

Dow Drake is a freelance web developer living in Portland, Oregon. He has studied mechanical engineering at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and more recently, mathematics at Portland State University.

Over the past 20 years, he has built numerous custom applications for web and desktop for various clients as a freelance developer. He has also been an employee of American Heating, Inc. in Portland, where he performed IT functions and developed custom web and desktop applications. Before that, he co-managed, with his father, a farm in Illinois. For more information, see Dow’s
LinkedIn Profile.