Soybeans, social services, and the 'Baptist saints'

Bryan Taliaferro was wearing his decorated Virginia Tech Corps of Cadets uniform when he walked into the Baptist Student Union in 1967. He wanted to be more involved in the campus group and was looking for the director. He found Nancy Day.

“So I walked up to this desk and there was this receptionist sitting there, this young lady, and I said, ‘Is John Billington available?’ She looked at me and said, ‘No, but I am.’”

After 55 years of marriage, Bryan and Nancy Taliaferro smile lovingly at one another when they share that story. Their meeting is just one example in this couple’s life that illustrates advice Bryan said has shaped his career: “You’ve got to recognize an opportunity when it presents itself.”

This advice underscores three important opportunities that profoundly shaped Bryan and Nancy’s life together: farming, family resources, and international mission work.

Back to his roots

Bryan grew up on a 500-acre farm locally known as Montague Farm in Essex County, Virginia, near Tappahannock. In high school, he raised steers and used income from their sale to purchase his first piece of land before he ever left home to study mechanical engineering at Virginia Tech.

He had no plan for the land, but the price was good and Bryan though he could sell it later for profit. Farming was certainly not in his career plans.

“I was not going to be a farmer. No, I was getting away from this mess,” Bryan said.

At Virginia Tech, Bryan was a co-op student, working at the Exxon oil refinery in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, during the spring and fall quarters and then attending classes in Blacksburg in the winter and summer until he graduated in 1968. He and Nancy married and spent the summer as student missionaries in Daytona Beach. The following year, Nancy finished her degree in management, housing, and family development, and Bryan earned his master’s degree in mechanical engineering, both graduating in 1970.

The Vietnam War was in its final years, and Bryan was on active duty in the Army after graduation. The couple spent two years stationed in Germany, where Nancy put her degree to work teaching school on the military base.

After Bryan’s tour of duty, he went to work for Exxon and the couple lived outside of New York City, where they stayed less than two years. Working for a large company like Exxon gave Bryan a sense of investment, but he was ready for business ownership.

“Each of the places we lived I knew were temporary,” Nancy said. “We started married life as student summer missionaries with our denomination in Florida, and we went back to Tech and Bryan finished up. We finished that part of our life and then, ‘OK, now we have to do service.’ I just had in my mind that this is temporary.”

Temporary became permanent when Bryan decided to return home to take over the family farm with three of his four brothers. While farming didn’t appeal to him as a teenager, Bryan was ready to plant roots and start a family with Nancy.

The couple had moved many times — Florida for mission work, Maryland for military training, Germany to oversee equipment maintenance, and New Jersey to work for Exxon. Virginia would be their last move. Bryan sold the land he purchased in high school and bought a piece of the farm to build a home.

The younger generation of Taliaferro men moved back to Essex County in 1973 to take over Montague Farms as their uncles entered retirement. Their father stayed on to teach them how to continue the family legacy. The 500 acres had doubled in size since Bryan was a boy. With his brothers, Montague Farms would eventually grow crops on nearly 4,000 acres.

Taking a chance

The Taliaferro brothers started their business by following their father’s grain farming model. He taught them what they needed to know: how deep to plant corn, how far apart to space the seeds, and all the business details they would need to understand to be successful.

They were indeed successful, and the brothers were able to expand the farm. However, the U.S. recession in the early 1980s hit them hard as interest rates fluctuated as high as 22 percent.

“It was a crushing weight that we had to endure, and we had to sell some of the land,” Bryan said. “We watched people around us go bankrupt, but we managed to make it through. It was a real struggle.”

In 1986, an opportunity from the Virginia Department of Agriculture changed the farm’s trajectory.

“An individual from the Virginia Department of Agriculture had uncovered an opportunity for exporting a special soybean to the Japanese,” Bryan said. Japan was interested in a special small soybean, a variety that Virginia Tech agronomy Professor Glenn Buss had created through cross pollination.

Buss started with just a handful of seeds. He took the progeny from those seeds and made them available for commercial production at Montague Farms. Within a few years, Montague Farms had other farmers in Virginia and in other states growing these soybeans. Seeds for newer varieties were even grown for winter increase in South Africa, Costa Rica, and Argentina.

“We shipped our first soybeans from the 1988 crop,” Bryan said. Their first customer was a trading company in Japan, but eventually they sold directly to family farms.

In 1990, Montague Farms established a partnership with the Virginia Tech soybean breeding program to develop specific non-GMO varieties naturally selected to meet customer needs. The business continued to expand operations and was selected as Virginia’s Agribusiness Company of the Year for contributions to and innovation in the agriculture industry in 2008.

Throughout his farming career, Bryan has served on the board of the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services and the advisory council for the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Virginia Tech.

“Bryan and Nancy have been big supporters of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences,” said Alan Grant, dean of the college from 2009 through 2024. “In addition to Bryan serving on the Dean’s Advisory Council, much of their support has been directed to Virginia Tech’s plant breeding program, including soybean and small grains breeding, which has resulted in new varieties of grains important to Virginia’s agricultural industry. The partnership has been significant for the college.”

Bryan and Nancy still live on the family farm, but Bryan and his brothers have retired, passing the family business and its farming legacy to his nephew.

Growing support services

Nancy distinctly remembers marrying a mechanical engineer, not a farmer, but she built her life with one — perhaps reluctantly at first.

After they moved to Montague Farm, Nancy said she spent three years crying and then realized nobody cared, so she stopped. She laughs about that now and is grateful for the life they’ve made.

While Bryan raised soybeans, Nancy raised their four children. After most of their children had left home for school — Nancy was 37 — she saw an opportunity to use her Virginia Tech degree to build services for unwed mothers in their community.

“I was the executive director for a family resource center for low income, disadvantaged kids in Richmond County,” Nancy said.

Levi Strauss was manufacturing in Richmond County and wanted to create an early education center, so the company provided grants to fund social service programs.

“We were really starting out from zero, but social services and the health department both desperately wanted to offer resources primarily to unwed young mothers, so we offered a free preschool — but the hook was if you wanted your child to come, you had to come to the parenting class,” Nancy said.

In addition to being the executive director, Nancy was the parent educator and she wrote grant applications for funding opportunities. For more than a decade, the family resource center received funding from Levi Strauss as well as from the Virginia Department of Social Services.

Nancy’s reputation led to new opportunities through the school system. School administrators in the county wanted to take advantage of new state funding for a preschool program, but only if Nancy would agree to run the program for them.

“It was called the Virginia Preschool Initiative, and it is public preschool but I operated it in a nonprofit for 18 years,” Nancy said. Her family resource center grew to include space for the Head Start program, the parenting program, adult literacy classes through the Department of Education, and then English as a second language classes.

“I had a ready market with all these women coming in,” Nancy said. “And we had job skills classes going and so it was a good deal. I was there for 32 years and actually worked past retirement.”

If there was funding available for programs that helped the community and they needed someone to run them, Nancy said yes. She was an important advocate for the community, and her dedication grew life-changing opportunities for underserved communities in Richmond County.

Nancy’s career provided opportunities for the couple to help others in ways beyond social service programs. Over the years, they’ve paid electric bills, helped people find subsidized apartments, and furnished homes when the occupants had nothing.

“We have operated Bryan and Nancy Savings and Loan for a long time with some families, and he has never said, ‘You’re not going to do that. We’re not doing that,’” Nancy said.

The “Baptist saints”

Throughout both of their careers, Bryan and Nancy have heard that calling to help others.

A friend who was a missionary invited Bryan to join a trip to Ghana to distribute mosquito nets to combat malaria in 2007. Bryan agreed until he learned the trip was in June.

“I can’t go in June,” Bryan told his friend. “That’s the busiest time of year. We’re spraying different crops and putting fertilizer down and planting soybeans and harvesting wheat.”

 Nancy intervened. If Bryan said he was going to go, she told him, he needed to go.

“I got over there and there were other people that could distribute the nets. I got to whining with myself and with God and I said, ‘Why are you sending me over here to do this?’” Bryan said.

The reason soon became overwhelmingly clear. A ministry in the north needed a tractor for farming and Bryan was the only person on the trip who knew anything about what its volunteers were doing.

Bryan returned home with a clear vision for how he could make a difference in the lives of fellow farmers.

“Nancy picked me up at the airport after that first trip and asked how it went, and I started weeping,” Bryan said. “I finally said, ‘I can’t tell you, but next time, I’m going to take you so you’ll know.’’’

Six months later, Bryan had procured and shipped a tractor to Ghana.

Bryan and Nancy have since returned seven times together. Nancy used her experience to help the village establish a school, writing the curriculum and sending resources for students and teachers.

“The first year in Ghana, I think there were 24 children and the next year there were 150,” Nancy said. “Now there are more than 750.”

Bryan and Nancy don’t travel to Ghana anymore, but they do pay for others in their church to go. The village invites the team members to name churches that they help start in Ghana, and the first year that Bryan and Nancy couldn’t be there, the group chose the name Saint Taliaferro Baptist Church.

“Several people said, ‘How does it feel to be a saint?’ Baptists don’t have a lot of saints, so that’s a little different,” Bryan said, honored but insistent that had they been on that trip, the church name would certainly be different.

Emmanuel Mustafa, their partner in Ghana, worked with Bryan and Nancy’s minister to raise funds to put the church under roof, an offering the Taliaferros weren’t aware of until after the fact.

“Everyone in the church and all four of our children who live in many places contributed, so they were able to put the church under roof,” said Nancy.

The Rev. Adam Tyler ’04, who shares the Taliaferros’ passion for mission work, has traveled to Ghana with the partnership Bryan and Nancy helped build. Tyler said all Hokies learn the Ut Prosim (That I May Serve) motto, but Bryan and Nancy live it out each day.

“Bryan and Nancy don’t just say that their faith is important, they show it through their actions,” said Tyler. “Their love for other people and desire to help those in need shines through every conversation they have and every mission they support.”

Life lessons

There have been many moments in the last 55 years when the couple could have quit or taken easier paths, but Nancy says they share a stubborn streak.

“I think it never occurs to either one of us that you quit on something, particularly on a commitment,” she said.

Looking back, Bryan said he learned that success in service and in business always requires one important thing: “Set goals and have a strategy to get there, a strategic plan.”

That commitment — to business, to service, and to each other — continues to drive the couple. Their journey inspires others, including John Haile ’67, who has been Bryan’s friend since high school.

“I most admire Bryan’s interest in helping others,” Haile said. “He is the finest example of Ut Prosim.”