Agriculture: NEIL A. HOUFF

Houff likes to say his company is “an important spoke in someone else’s wheel.”

Based in the Shenandoah Valley, Houff Corp. started in 1975 as Houff’s Feed and Fertilizer, a family dairy farm turned fertilizer service provider. Neil Houff has been the company’s president since the early 1990s.

Houff Corp. is owned by a family holding company, Railside Enterprises Inc., which also owns IDM Trucking Inc., a company run by Houff’s brothers and for which he serves as a board member. Railside, which is 49% employee-owned, provides a variety of services, ranging from liquid and dry fertilizer application and seed sales to biosolids management and transloading (moving products by multiple transportation modes, such as ship, rail and truck).

Serving the agriculture community is an important part of their business, says Houff, a 1985 Virginia Tech alum. It’s a community from which the company draws much of its workforce of 100 employees, including truck drivers, warehouse operators, dispatchers, managers and clerical personnel.

Houff also is vice president of the state Board of Agriculture and Consumer Services and serves on the boards of the Virginia Crop Production Association, CNI Ag Independent Retailers and Bridgewater Retirement Community.