![]() More than in most retail transactions, the organic consumer is buying both a thing and an assurance about a thing. Heinecke recalls replying, “Tell me what this organic deal is.” He then explained that he wanted to farm it organically. Heinecke mentioned a nine-hundred-acre farm, owned by a relative, a section of which hadn’t been tilled in years. Then, around 2000, Constant asked if Heinecke knew of any pastureland that wasn’t being used. That was their business relationship for the next few years. Heinecke remembered him as “a smooth talker, one of these guys you have to worry about.” Constant enlisted Heinecke to become a local seed salesman for Pfister. Heinecke used to have a sign at the end of his driveway which read “ i shoot every third salesman.” Constant, pitching for Pfister, came to the door. “I probably had forty farms or so,” he said. By the time he met Constant, in the mid-nineties, he was enjoying a period of success as a contract farmer, working fifteen hundred acres for various owners. Heinecke first went bust in the mid-eighties, when he was farming rented land. Now and then, we had to shout over the straight-pipe speedboats screaming down the lake’s main channel. Heinecke, who is in his early sixties, was wearing a sleeveless T-shirt and a fentanyl patch he talked of spinal injuries related to a lifetime of agricultural lifting. We spoke on his screened-in porch, which had a view down to his dock and his motorboat. He screwed me over to fucking death.” Heinecke was about to drive to his weekend house, on an inlet at the Lake of the Ozarks, and he agreed to meet me there a few days later. When I called him to ask about Constant, he said, “That cocksucker. John Heinecke lives and farms near Paris, Missouri, a hundred miles east of Chillicothe. I felt that we had a very unified vision of what we wanted to accomplish.” In 2001, they founded a company, Organic Land Management. ![]() “I had a lot of trust in him,” Borgerding said. He probably was a deacon.”Īfter the soybean-farm collaboration ended, Borgerding and Constant discussed starting a business together. Barnes, who told me he used to think that Constant missed his calling by not selling real estate full time, said, “He came across like a deacon in the church. Hector Sanchez, who once worked for Constant in Chillicothe, recalls his former boss’s solicitousness: “He always asked me, ‘Do you need anything? Are you good ?’ ” When Constant met Borgerding, he had recently become licensed to sell real estate, and he occasionally sold a farm on behalf of Rick Barnes, of Barnes Realty, in Mound City, Missouri. ![]() “Straightforward, healthy, wholesome.” Constant wore button-down shirts his hair was always neatly combed. Constant became active in Chillicothe’s United Methodist church, and later served as president of the town’s school board.Ĭonstant appeared to be “the epitome of the Midwestern guy,” Ty Dick, a former employee, said recently. In the eighties, a time of collapse in America’s farming economy, he had taken a series of sales and managerial jobs across the Midwest, before returning with Pam and their three children to live in Chillicothe, Missouri-a town of about nine thousand residents, ninety miles northeast of Kansas City, where he and Pam had grown up. Since graduating, he had “worked his way up the agricultural corporate ladder,” as his wife, Pam, later put it. Borgerding recently told me, “Randy was an exciting guy to be around-when things were working well.”Ĭonstant, then in his thirties, had a degree in agricultural economics from the University of Missouri. Constant had not, but he had evident ambition. By then, Borgerding had spent more than a decade in organic agriculture. Borgerding, an agronomist from Minnesota, took soil samples and made recommendations about fertilizer and weed control Constant, a Missouri native who had a day job as a regional sales manager for the Pfister seed company, ran the farm’s day-to-day operations. Glen Borgerding met Randy Constant in the late nineteen-nineties, when landowners in northern Missouri hired them to help set up an organic soybean farm. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
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