Faces of Farming

Thad Becker has worn many MFA hats in his agricultural career. He worked as an intern while attending the University of Missouri, became bulk plant manager at Macon Agri Services after graduation in 2001 and then joined MFA’s fledgling Precision Agronomy Department in 2006, where he stayed until leaving to farm full time with his family in 2022. He’s been an MFA member since 2014 and is currently the newest member of the MFA Incorporated Board of Directors, elected in 2024 to represent District 7. 

The journey has been all about serving farmers and agriculture, Becker said.

“After coming home to the farm, I knew I wanted to stay involved with MFA,” he said. “I still have the desire see the cooperative and its farmers succeed. After spending 21 years trying to help build something, I wanted to keep it going.”

Becker and his wife, Kellar, are raising three children—Gus, 8, Hank, 6, and Miriam, 3—on their family farm in Mexico, Mo. In addition to producing 1,800 acres of corn, soybeans and wheat with his father, Dennis, Becker and his brother, Ross, operate a tractor-restoration business.

Becker took time away from one of those restoration projects to share these thoughts about his agricultural career and MFA leadership.  

What led to your decision to leave MFA and farm full time? 
My dad farmed with his brother, Phil, who retired in 2017. My brother and I bought out his half of the operation in 2018, and I helped on evenings, weekends and during time off while I continued working at MFA. When dad turned 70, we had gotten to the point where we were going to have to start giving up ground or someone would have to come back full time. It just made sense for me to be the one. I’ve been happy with the decision, although I really miss the people and farmers I worked with at MFA.

Did you always plan to farm full time at some point?
Growing up, I was never pushed either direction, but the idea was always there. When I graduated from college, there wasn’t room for me on the farm. Nobody was ready to retire yet. I was encouraged to get away and develop other skills outside the farm. There was a lot of value in that. I had this strong desire to help farmers, and my first career goal was to be an Extension agent—but I didn’t want to get a master’s degree. I was able to fulfill that desire to help farmers through MFA, because serving farmers has always been the cooperative’s goal.

You helped develop MFA’s precision program early on. How has this technology evolved and how does it benefit farmers? 
When I joined MFA after college, precision was just getting started. It was new and exciting. Yield monitors, lightbars and autosteer were what everyone was talking about back then, and I could see the potential for it to make farmers better managers. And that’s what it’s done. Fertility is no longer considered just an expense. It’s something we can manage to make farms more profitable. As precision has evolved, computing power is the most drastic difference I’ve seen. We went from an extremely slow process of mapping field by field to being able to manage thousands of acres pretty quickly. The technology is rapidly advancing, and automation is the big change I see coming. Ten years from now, I’m not sure we’ll be driving tractors—they’ll be autonomous. Whether that happens, I don’t know, but it sure seems more likely than it did even a few years ago.

What is it like to see MFA from a board member’s perspective?
When I was an MFA employee, I was pretty zeroed in on how to improve our precision ag services, not necessarily how that affected the overall picture. As a director, you’re looking at things on a lot larger scale and trying to make decisions that affect the overall health of the company. The beauty of the board is having farmers with lots of different talents, ideas and backgrounds. I think we’ve got a good group of directors who aren’t afraid to express their opinions and debate about what we need to do, but we still get along well, respect each other and walk out of the boardroom agreeing we’re going to support our decisions and serve the farmers to the best of our ability. 

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