Our Story — Built in the Field. Rooted in the Midwest.
LAYSON — Co-Founder
Layson’s mom didn’t plan on changing his life the morning she put him in that stand. He was eight years old, and a year-and-a-half-old six-pointer walked into the clearing. It wasn’t a trophy by any score sheet’s measure. But something shifted in him that morning that never shifted back. Whitetail deer hunting stopped being something he did. It became something he was.
His dad had been making the trip to Illinois for years before Layson finally got to go. Nine years old. Late-season muzzleloader. Cold ground. Cut cornfield. Deer materializing out of the gray like they owned the place. That trip became a tradition, more than two decades of them. Father and son. Midwest Novembers. Year after year. And somewhere along the way, the focus shifted from the deer to the land they were coming out of. What made this ground so different. Why the Midwest kept producing animals that didn’t exist anywhere else he’d hunted.
He drew his first bow at eleven. Bowhunting became the center of everything it could. But the more time he spent in the field, the more he found himself thinking about what was happening outside the stand – the habitat, the food sources, the edges and transitions that told the whole story of a piece of ground. Some properties had it. Some didn’t. The ones that did weren’t accidents.
For more than eleven years, the answer to “what if I could just do this for a living?” was a job as an industrial electrician. But he never stopped learning. He studied Environmental Horticulture at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College. He spent time in nurseries, on landscape teams, around cattle operations – building knowledge that doesn’t come from a seminar or a YouTube channel. He learned to read land the way a hunter reads sign. Slowly. Carefully. With an eye for what’s there and what’s missing.
Eventually the math stopped adding up. He made the decision. Nearly five years into marriage with his wife Morgan, Layson is doing exactly what he spent two decades preparing for. He knows what good ground looks like. He knows what it takes to get there, and what’s standing in the way when it hasn’t. Outside of the work, they share a love of dogs, backyard chickens, fishing, and getting people outdoors for the first time. Morgan gardens, renovates, and designs their home in Fort Madison. The same care they bring to their own place is what they bring to every piece of ground they touch.
Taylor — Co-Founder
Taylor’s dad didn’t give him a choice about the outdoors, and Taylor has never once been grateful for anything more. Anything with fur, feathers, or fins was a way of life growing up – not a hobby, not a weekend thing. A way of life. Outside of school, work, and church, this is what they did.
He shot his first deer at nine years old. He didn’t know it at the time, but that hunt changed the entire trajectory of what his life was going to look like. It lit something inside him that grew into a full commitment to wildlife and land, not the idea of it, but the actual work. Food plots and tree planting as a kid. A career in agriculture with family. Eventually working his own ground in Illinois. Taylor has never been the kind of person who studies land from a distance. He tends it. With everything he has.
His first trip to Illinois was over fifteen years ago. Within days, he knew. The Midwest was where everything he loved, whitetail deer, land management, agriculture, conservation, could exist in the same place at the same time. He’d hunted enough places to understand what made this ground different. The way it was managed. The way a well-cared-for farm could produce season after season in ways that had nothing to do with luck and everything to do with the work that went into it.
Within a year of marrying Jordan, they bought their first farm in Illinois. That fall, she arrowed her first deer with a bow. Taylor has killed a lot of good bucks. That hunt meant more than every one of them. Watching someone you love experience that feeling for the first time, the accomplishment, the connection to the land, the moment it gives something back, that’s when he understood what God had put him here to do. It wasn’t just about the animal. It was about what the land could mean to the people standing on it.
Taylor and Jordan made the move. Some properties reach everything they’re capable of. Most never come close, not because the land isn’t there, but because the right hands never got to it. Taylor has spent his entire life becoming those hands. That’s the work. That’s the purpose. That’s Westorlee.
Casey — Co-Founder
Casey didn’t choose the outdoors. It was handed to him before he was old enough to make a choice, passed down the same way it had been for generations in Southeast Georgia. Not a sport. Not a weekend thing. What the family did, how the family thought, the rhythm the whole calendar moved around.
His parents gave him his first gun on Christmas morning. An H&R Topper single shot 410, a gun that scared him half to death the first time he pulled the trigger and then refused to leave his hands after. His dad took him quail hunting nearly every weekend. He started as the bird carrier. Sears Roebuck hunting jacket. Somebody else’s birds. He earned that 410 in time. Around ten years old, his uncle put him in a stand and a solid six-point walked into his life. Casey still owns that gun and that jacket. Some things you don’t let go of.
He spent most of his career in row crop farming. Started driving a tractor before his legs could reach the pedals. Over twenty years, that work grew into managing seven thousand acres- learning the way land responds to patience, the way it punishes shortcuts, the way a well-managed farm produces results that look like luck from the outside and aren’t. He carried that same instinct into the woods. A man who tends land at that scale doesn’t look at a property and see what’s there. He sees what it’s capable of.
His first trip to the Midwest was over fifteen years ago. He knew within days. Season after season, he kept coming back and somewhere along the way, he stopped just hunting the land and started reading it. The way it held deer. The way certain farms produced year after year while others sat at a fraction of what they could be. He’d spent his whole career learning why that happens. He couldn’t come to the Midwest and not see it everywhere.
Casey is married to Jada, and they have three daughters. His family and his passion are the reason they’re making the move. To slow down, to raise their girls the way he was raised, to trade the noise for something that actually lasts. Some land reaches everything it’s capable of. Most never comes close – not because the potential isn’t there, but because nobody with the right set of eyes ever got to it. Casey has spent a lifetime developing those eyes. That’s what he brings. That’s Westorlee.
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