Glen Taylor's Golden Egg

Glen Taylor considers himself a farmer.

Though better known locally as a billionaire who built a multinational printing company and as the owner of the Minnesota Timberwolves and Lynx pro basketball teams, the easygoing and soft-spoken Taylor says, “I have no problem getting on a tractor or going to town and talking to farmers, talking the language.” He grew up on a diversified farm with chickens, milk cows, pigs, and crops in Comfrey, Minnesota, during the 1940s and ’50s.

Lately, farming has become a lucrative side business for Taylor. Particularly his newest agriculture venture—egg production.

It may seem like a curious direction for one of Minnesota’s best-known businesspeople to take. But it does connect with Taylor’s career and history. While serving as a Republican senator in the Minnesota Legislature from 1980 to 1990, Taylor witnessed firsthand the need for rural development. “I was asked so many times to go out to the smaller communities in the state and talk to them about how might they bring more business to their community,” he recalls. “They had seen these small communities go down, smaller and smaller, and the suburbs grow, grow, grow.”

Motivated by both the idea of revitalizing rural communities through business and his ongoing investment in farmland, Taylor began developing partnerships with farm families several decades ago. His most recent, Rembrandt Enterprises, has become the third-largest egg producer in the United States, growing at a clip of about 30 percent per year from 2001 to 2008, both in terms of annual average revenues and chicken numbers. This spring, it doubled in size through a major acquisition.

How has the company succeeded in such a tight-margin industry? By thinking outside the shell.

Laying the Egg

As a kid, Taylor raised his own chickens. Even now, on an almost daily basis, he collects eggs from about 30 birds housed at his hobby farm just outside Mankato and shares them with employees at Taylor Corporation, his Mankato-headquartered printing company and the foundation of his fortune.

“I loved my upbringing,” he says. “I loved that idea of ownership, having your own land.” In that sense, Taylor finds it easy to walk in the steel-toed boots of the farmers he has chosen to partner with.

Taylor began purchasing farmland as in investment in the 1970s. He now owns 14,000 acres in northwestern Iowa and south-central Minnesota. “You buy 160 acres at a time, sometimes less, sometimes a little bit more,” he says. “So you can see, I’ve done that about 80 times.” It has been a lucrative investment, but one that requires both patience and risk taking. “Prices on farmland go up and down,” Taylor says. “You have to be willing to jump in when prices are low.” Over the years, Taylor has formed partnerships with six families who now farm his land.