Taylor Kerner grew up six feet tall and 210 pounds by eighth grade, playing varsity football, baseball, basketball, and track at Newton Community High School from his sophomore year on. "I never knew what it was like to not be busy." He graduated in 2011 and figured that would be his default setting for life.

He was right.

An academic scholarship carried him to Lakeland College, where Mark Neimerg — a Jasper County man who taught production agriculture and soils — became one of the most influential teachers he'd ever had. From Lakeland, he transferred to the University of Illinois and earned a bachelor's in crop sciences with a concentration in agricultural business. During his junior summer, he took an internship with Valent USA, a chemical company that sent him from Milwaukee, WI to Carbondale, IL.  to Dayton, OH with a truck and a credit card and enough autonomy to sink a less self-directed 20-year-old. The following summer, not wanting the same line on his resume twice, he specifically asked Valent to create a sales internship — something they'd never offered. They went through the necessary hoops and built it for him.

Along the way, a market development specialist named Eric Ott wrote Taylor a letter he still keeps on a shelf in his office. The closing advice: keep your priorities — God, family, school — and you will do great not only in school, but in life as well.

Valent offered him a full-time position with a six-figure starting salary. He'd have to move to Wisconsin. The company executive took him out on his boat on Lake Winona to make the pitch. Taylor thought about it.

"I just didn't want to move from home."

He came back to Jasper County and met a man named Jason Mosbey — owner of Mosbey Seed Sales, one of the largest Pioneer dealers in Illinois — at the Newton bowling alley over a casual meeting arranged by Derek Meinhart. The connection had actually started earlier: Taylor had once pitched a Valent wheat seed treatment product to Mosbey before either of them knew the other would matter. Mosbey offered him a deal: create an LLC, start a Pioneer seed business in Jasper County, come under his umbrella as an employee for a salary while building his business, and use his equipment at cost for the first four or five years. "If not for Jason Mosbey, I'm probably not where I'm at as quickly," Taylor said.

A detail worth knowing: Derek Meinhart, who became Taylor's Pioneer district sales manager and has been his boss for eleven years, was the catcher on the opposing Effingham baseball team when Taylor played high school baseball.

The business built itself through side-by-side field trials. Taylor set up 25 comparisons across Jasper County farms, splitting planters between Pioneer's hybrid P1197AM and whatever the farmer was already using. He won 21 of the 25 side by sides. Some margins were five to ten bushels. A couple hit 21 or 27. One farmer had told him he seemed "extremely desperate" and agreed to a trial just to get him to stop coming around. He's now nearly 100% Pioneer on his farm. When the seed business outgrew his shed, Taylor bought the long-vacant Marshall Brothers Furniture building on the south end of Newton  — frogs in the loading dock, stagnant water, nobody had touched it in 20 years. He bought it in 2021 and renovated it in phases. Total investment: approximately $1.4 million. He applied for a USDA Rural Development loan of $847,000 at zero percent against 50 other applicants — and started the renovation before the loan was approved, because he was certain he'd get it.

He got it.

Today, the building houses the University of Illinois Extension office for Jasper County, an electrical contractor (Rowdy Electric LLC), ran by Doug Bierman, an agricultural grain bin business (Automated Agri-Systems) run by Kevin Radke — himself a Jasper County native who owns and has helped built one of the largest GSI grain dealerships in North America — and Frank Dhom, an agricultural banker for Rabo AgriFinance who works out of Taylor's conference room. The open house he had this past March, drew more than 200 people from throughout the community. Meanwhile, Taylor farms 900 acres, having bought out his father's share of the family operation in a large buyout, and carries a full book of crop insurance clients alongside with the seed business.

He is 33 years old, and married to his wife, Kourtni. His children, Kallum and Eila, are one and three.

His mother made him finish his homework before he could go outside. His father worked a factory job, farmed, and raised hogs, and never seemed to stop. On the wall of Taylor's office, a chalkboard reads: I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. Philippians 4:13.

He knew it would work out. He just didn't always know how.