MFA Foundation scholar Steven Troesser's journey in agriculture has come full circle. He started at the University of Missouri majoring in agronomy. Now he's back managing historic Sanborn Field and working on a thesis project that soybean growers will find of interest.

Leaving the cropland of northern Audrain County in 1988, Steven Troesser took up in Columbia at the University of Missouri. He had earned an MFA Foundation scholarship from nearby Laddonia, Mo., and was putting its financial award to good use by enrolling in engineering classes. But after a semester of punishing math classes, Troesser reassessed. "I wanted to get back to what I knew," he said, and thus became an aggie. Four years later, he crossed the stage at graduation with a degree in agronomy and a minor in agricultural economics.

Putting his degree power to immediate use, Troesser joined the ranks of the Growmark/FS System, an agricultural cooperative based in Illinois.

After training with Growmark, Troesser went on to manage a Twin County Farm Service Company location in Jacob, Ill., a small elevator west of Carbondale. That's where he got an immediate lesson in the submissive role that agriculture plays to Mother Nature. It was 1993 and the nearby Mississippi bulged with excess water from the season's extraordinarily heavy rains.

"My first job was to get all the grain out of the elevator," remembers Troesser. But in the contest between levies, the one that protected Jackson County, Ill., proved strongest. The Mississippi introduced herself to farmland on the Missouri side. Troesser's elevator and farmer customers suffered from just seep water and anxiety.

In retrospect, you'd have to conclude that the south of Illinois treated Troesser well. Aside from the rich experience of a new job, getting to know the local agriculture and escaping the threat of a century's major flood, it's where he met his wife, Donna.

Shortly after their marriage, Troesser accepted a promotion and joined Illini FS Inc. at Chrisman, Ill. There, in intensely farmed Edgar County, he handled sales for all the cooperative's services and products. He said the job taught him some things about working with farmers.

One was that, "You treat customers with respect and honesty. If we told a farmer we'd be there at a certain time, that was when we were there."

And holding to that devotion was one thing that brought Troesser back to Missouri. His job was a time vacuum.

"In the month of April, before I left, I had one Sunday off for the whole month. That was all the time I had off. At the time Grace (Troesser's daughter) was two and a half."

Family beckoned in more than one way. Aside from wanting to spend more time with his daughter, Troesser hoped to get closer to home.

"About that time, the Sanborn job opened," he said. With an eye on a master's degree, he accepted a position as senior research specialist with MU. The move cost him a pay cut--something he took willingly for the sake of more time with the family. "There's more to life than money," he said.

Now, by taking a small amount of course work each semester and handling the daily operations of Sanborn, Troesser is putting his experience to work in leaving a mark on Midwest farming.

His thesis project aims at a dilemma that farmers somewhere face every year--the difficult decision of whether to replant poor soybean stands. His research will determine what benefit replanting holds in various populations. Over his planned 4 years of research, he hopes to gather enough information to provide an extension guide on the topic.

"People plant soybeans earlier and earlier. Farmers are getting bigger and they have to take those chances. There isn't really a guide right now," said Troesser. "And there's no good way to know exactly how many beans are needed to be used to thicken up the existing stand."

With soybean plots enough to cover three planting dates and four crop years worth of data, he'll do the ground work to help with those decisions.

Whether stands suffer from rain pack, cold soil conditions or other attrition, Troesser wants to know the agronomic and economic variables that will affect a farmer's bottom line.

"If a farmer has 60,000 (plants per acre) and he goes with another planting, the question is whether he's getting an additional pop from those additional beans, or if he's wasting money on extra seed," said Troesser.

That's information that might just help those soybean growers on the fields where he grew up.