Hometown: Bennett Spring, Mo.
Family: Wife, Taressa; and sons Cuylar (11), Camden (6) and Canyon (1).
In Town: Chais Rankin has been a Realtor since 2013, and started his own agency, High Standards Real Estate Company, in 2019.
“About 90 percent of everything is done on the run or in the truck,” Chais said of his real estate career. “I work with people from all over Southwest Missouri to find them a house other property.”
In the Country: Chais has a strong background in agriculture, being involved in the industry most of this life. He and his parents, Curt and Dawn Rankin, also own a company called Garden 4 Life, which specializes in weed-free, soil-less raised bed garden systems and natural fertilizer.
“The concept has been around for about 20 years, and we bought the company known as Gardening Revolution in 2017. After rebranding, we are Garden 4 Life,” Chais said. “It’s a less labor-intensive way of gardening, more production on less space and controlled growth of plants.”
“It’s a system you put in place that almost guarantees success,” Chais said. “Here in Missouri, you can buy land, but you don’t know if there is anything in it. You can till it up, but it’s full of rocks, there’s no nutrition in your soil or maybe your soil doesn’t hold moisture. If you’re a new gardener and your plants don’t grow, you think, ‘This isn’t for me,’ and you move on. With a system like ours, you have good, strong plants and at the end of the day you have plants that are more disease resistant, grow bigger and healthier, and grow more produce, and get the most benefit.”
He added that the soil-less system works well for all types of plants, from potatoes to tomatoes.
Future Plans: “We would like to get into some mom and pop stores. Right now, we have a few places we sell in, and we would like to get more regional; we want to reach more customers. We have customers in Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, in Minnesota, the East Coast and the West Coast, but we would like to expand the business and get into those garden centers at those mom and pop stores, and we want get out there and teach more people that they can be successful in gardening.”
