Member Profile: Bryan Stobaugh, Missouri Soybeans

Bryan Stobaugh kicked off his collegiate career majoring in biology and chemistry at Arkansas Tech. But fate led him to a graduate assistantship in soybean breeding at the University of Arkansas-Fayetteville.

“In essence, I was pre-med, but I ended up falling in love with genetics,” Stobaugh said. “I applied to every genetic course that offered graduate school in all the surrounding states.”

Today, Stobaugh is the Director of Licensing and Commercialization at the Missouri Soybean Merchandising Council.

Missouri Soybeans first heard about the Specialty Soya and Grains Alliance (SSGA) through their contacts at Minnesota Soybean. After a conversation with Minnesota Soybean CEO Tom Slunecka, Stobaugh and his colleagues took the leap and Missouri Soybeans became a member of SSGA.

“Gary Wheeler, our CEO and Executive Director, is always interested in and looking at what the added benefit is and what could be done differently,” said Stobaugh. “SSGA was an opportunity for us to expand our portfolio.”

Two years ago, Stobaugh applied for an SSGA board position. Though he wasn’t elected to the board, he was asked to chair the agronomy action team because of his strong background in agronomy.

“We worked on deciding what the plan could be for an organization that had never had an agronomy action team before,” Stobaugh said.

A year later, he resubmitted his application and earned a spot on the board.

“It’s been a learning experience because there are avenues that we don’t touch in our normal realm that SSGA can,” said Stobaugh. “SSGA represents that opportunity for the farmer to continue in their conventional space but add an extra premium to their bottom line by doing something different than their normal day.”

SSGA performs multiple roles, but in Stobaugh’s eyes one of the most important roles is helping farmers make sense of the complicated world of specialty soy by providing resources that they wouldn’t normally have access to, making the process a little less daunting, especially for prospective growers.

“SSGA has a network for people to learn how to grow the crops and use the chemistries,” said Stobaugh. “And then all the way through to harvest to know how to have it cleaned and packaged and who they’re going to aggregate the crop to at a specific delivery point. It’s just a big learning process.”

Looking ahead, Stobaugh is excited for the potential of large seed trials. Though he recognizes that large trials have logistical issues and take years to plan, he knows how important they are to farmers and wants to use them as a chance to show seeds’ diversity.

“Large trials don’t mean varieties are competing with each other,” he said. “They’re saying look at the variety we have in specialty soy.”