Ryan Gentle’s Commitment to Helping Farmers Grow Better Corn

With another growing season quickly approaching, Ryan Gentle’s days will soon be filled with a lot more windshield time as he works fields and visits farmers from as far south as St. Louis to as far north as Galena, Illinois.

Gentle is an agronomist based in west central Illinois. A University of Illinois alumnus and former farm kid, Gentle is a contributing agronomist for Successful Farming’s coverage of the U.S. Department of Agriculture Crop Progress report. He works for Wyffels Hybrids, with a territory encompassing a large chunk of his home state. 

Gentle spoke with Successful Farming about how he ended up working for Wyffels, the challenges of covering such a large territory, what he loves about his job, and even a bit about his favorite college basketball team.

SF: What brought you to your current role?

RG: I’ve always been involved in agronomy and farming. I grew up on a farm in west-central Illinois. We raised corn, beans, and calved out quite a few beef cows. My dad was actually a contract seed grower for Pioneer, and I kind of got interested in how inbreds work and the production side of the business. I spent about 16 years of my career moving around to Indiana, Michigan — different Pioneer corn production plants — and learned how all that worked.

Then, I got an opportunity to take a sales role in western Illinois. I did that for a few years, and then got the opportunity to switch companies and start working for Wyffels Hybrids, which is a really great family-owned company — third generation in Geneseo, Illinois. I got out of the corporate world, which was a good breath of fresh air. 

I just love agronomy. I love working with farmers, trying to help them grow better corn.

SF: At your busiest point in the season, what does a day in your shoes look like?

RG: It can be different depending on the time of the season, but we usually get pretty busy two or three weeks after planting — after that first big rush of corn planting in Illinois — especially if the conditions are kind of challenging: evaluating stands, seeing if there’s seedling blight issues, stuff like that.

Moving into the summer, it gets more into helping guys make fungicide decisions — if they should be spraying for tar spot, gray leaf, or whatnot.

I also do a lot of training. Our direct sales managers (DSMs) are our first line of defense with agronomy. If they can’t handle it, or they don’t feel comfortable and aren’t sure what they’re looking at, then they’ll call me in and I’ll come meet with them and/or the customer a lot of times. I have a huge territory. I’m basically the whole west half of Illinois. 

It’s a lot of driving, a lot of truck windshield time during the growing season. 

SF: What’s special about the territory you cover? 

RG: I live almost smack dab in the middle in west-central Illinois between Canton and Macomb, so it’s great. I can be north or south pretty quick. 

We don’t go farther south with Wyffels than the St. Louis area, so you get to see a wide range of farming techniques, practices, and different maturity hybrids. When you’re talking St. Louis up toward Galena — about I-88 is as far as I go north — it’s a huge difference in maturity and crop practices. When you get into northern Illinois, there’s a lot more corn on corn; southern Illinois, a little more cover crop usage. We dribble over into Missouri a little bit, too, so things change drastically over there, with different soil types and how they achieve yield.

It’s always a new adventure. I never know what I’m going to see.

SF: What do you love most about your job? 

RG: Probably helping corn growers grow better corn and recommending great hybrids to them. I work for a company where one of our mottos is, “We give a care,” and we really do. We’re proud to be fiercely independent. We’re not owned by anybody else. The Wyffels family are still the owners and presidents and vice presidents. It’s great to be able to pick up the phone and talk to President John Wyffels right now, and he’ll answer the phone. That’s pretty cool, something you don’t see in a lot of other big companies. 

We’re really growing. We’ve grown 12 years in a row. We’re building a new plant in Ames, Iowa, so it’s really exciting to work for a company that’s building production plants and not closing them down, because it’s kind of a rarity in the industry right now – growth and building. 

SF: What’s something about your job that you wish more people knew? 

RG: The amount of research and work that goes into all the breeding and the selection of new hybrids, and all the hours spent rating and looking at plots and deciding what’s the best hybrid to bring to growers. We just released them at the end of January, so we’re already planning for 2026. 

You’ve got to be forward-looking a long way out, and there’s just a lot of time and effort that goes into that. I don’t know if a lot of customers realize that. For a lot of our hybrids, before they get released commercially, we might have looked at them for five, six, seven years. 

Another thing I love about Wyffels, too, is it’s corn only. That’s all we sell. We don’t have to worry about selling chemicals or fungicide or beans or wheat or seed treatment or any other thing. We just focus solely on corn and try to put the best corn hybrid out there in the industry. So, that’s really nice — to be able to really focus in on one thing. 

We’re not tied in with any major fungicide company. We try to do completely unbiased research. We do fungicide plots at the University of Illinois, University of Minnesota, Iowa State University, several different locations every summer. We evaluate different products, different timings. What we’ve found and what the university data suggests — and a lot of the pathologists — a dual or triple mode of action fungicide is the best out there. Some of your generics are a lot cheaper, but they’re only one mode of action. They only have one active ingredient. We simply say, use a dual or triple mode of action. There’s probably five or six different fungicides that are pretty equal on the market that are dual or triple mode, and then it just comes down to timing and application. 

SF: What’s your favorite thing to do in the “off-season”? 

RG: Non-work related, my daughter’s really picked up snow skiing. That’s her new thing. I’ve taken her snow skiing four or five times this winter. She really likes that. 

I’m a big Illini fan, so something I love to do in the off-season, as well, is go to basketball games. I try and go to three or four games in the winter. My daughter really likes doing that, too, and my nephews. 

Work-wise, probably one of the most exciting things that we do at the end of January is our hybrid release, which would be our new hybrids that we’re promoting out to 2026. Then, we do a podcast biweekly, “Keeping It Independent,” with a couple of other agronomists in Iowa and Minnesota. That’s fun.