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. 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. By then, Borgerding had spent more than a decade in organic agriculture. Constant had not, but he had evident ambition. Borgerding recently told me, "Randy was an exciting guy to be around—when things were working well."

Constant, then in his thirties, had a degree in agricultural economics from the University of Missouri. Since graduating, he had "worked his way up the agricultural corporate ladder," as his wife, Pam, later put it. 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. Constant became active in Chillicothe's United Methodist church, and later served as president of the town's school board.