LAYSON — Co-Founder
Started at Eight. Built for a Lifetime.
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.
