From Backyard Patch to Insurance Empire: How Terren Moore Built a First-Generation Legacy
Terren Moore signed up for an FFA elective in high school just to get an easy A. His friends were always out of class, showing livestock or heading to some event, and it looked like a simple way to pad his GPA. That single decision changed his life. Today, he runs MFI Agency, a farm and ranch insurance firm serving clients across 15 states.
Between the FFA class and the agency, he built Moore Peas Company from a backyard patch, sold onions on the side of the road, and learned that leadership matters more than sales skills.
Moore did not grow up on a farm. His father was a truck driver who just retired. His mother is a nurse. He grew up in the country, so farming was not unfamiliar, but it was never the plan. The plan was to coast through high school, pick the easiest classes, and move on. FFA changed that.
"It was one decision that changed it all for me," Moore says. "It's crazy that in life, you're truly one decision away from changing your life, and it's your choice to make sure that that's either a good decision or a bad decision. Thankfully for me, FFA was a slam dunk. Great decision."
The first time Moore saw someone eat the produce he grew, he felt something he had never felt before. It was pride in ownership. He went to the feed store, got the seed, put it in the ground, fertilized it, watered it, and made sure there were no pests. It took 50 to 60 days to get those crops out of the ground. When his friends, his ag teacher, and his parents ate the food he produced, something clicked.
"To see something from start to finish and to reap the benefits of the end product, once I got a taste of that, I said, I never want to go back," Moore recalls. "I always wanna have serious responsibility and accountability. That was a really transformational moment in my life. Getting to see my friends eat food that I produced."
Moore Peas Company started in his grandmother's backyard. He did not have land. He did not have capital. What he had was an old Massey Ferguson tractor sitting behind his grandma's house that had not run in years. He asked his father if they could get it going. They found a mechanic at their church who helped them out and never charged a dime. Another man from the church, Jerry Francis, taught him how to operate a disc, showed him the proper depth to plant seeds, and walked him through the basics.
"Mentorship was truly what changed the game for me," Moore says. "People say that I built this thing on my own, and I was 15 years old, and I started it from scratch, and that's all very true. It was God who gave me the idea and the passion, but nothing happened until someone who had experience stepped in and said, Terren, here's the way to do this."
He never built a massive farming operation. It was always small. But the relationships he gained from farming opened doors he never imagined. He met farmers who were at least 60 years old. They became his friends. He learned how to communicate with people who were older than him and from different generations. By the time he was 21 and launched his insurance career, talking to older producers felt easy.
Terren Moore Built a First-Generation Legacy from a backyard pea patch to a thriving insurance agency.
During college at Tarleton, Moore would drive three hours back to East Texas to tend to his crops. One day, he set up a sign on the side of the road and tried to sell onions. He waited 30 or 40 minutes without a customer stopping by. He looked at the bundles of onions he had planted, picked, and tied by hand and thought, "What in the world am I doing?"
"That day, I did not have a good revenue day," Moore says. "But the day that I realized that this farming deal was more than a hobby was honestly when someone reached out to me, and they asked for me to share my story. That's when I realized that what I'm doing is much bigger than myself."
Farming taught him patience. It taught him hard work. It taught him that you can pour hours and hours into something and walk away with very little. When he got into the insurance business at 21, a lot of his peers wanted everything fast. Moore knew he was playing the long game.
"Farming is a slow game," he says. "It doesn't happen overnight. So thankfully, whenever I got into business, I knew that I was in it for the long game, and I knew to be patient. To work hard. Those two things are what farming taught me, and it's what's given me success in my endeavors today."
At 21, Moore took a job in insurance in a town where he did not know a soul. Most people would find that terrifying. He leaned into it. He had already spent years selling onions to strangers on the side of the road. He had already learned how to shake a man's hand, look him in the eye, and communicate with people twice his age. By the time he walked into his first client meeting, the hard part was already done.
In 2021, Moore made another decision. He met a guy at a brewery who owned his own insurance agency. Moore looked at him and thought, "He's not any more special than I am. I think I could go out and start my own deal."
He was single, had no debt, and had a little cash saved. He knew if he was ever going to take the leap, it had to be then. He went to what felt like a hundred Starbucks meetings, did the research, and launched MFI Agency.
"If you're gonna start a business, now is the time," he says. "I knew it was honestly lower risk doing it when I was single. It was lower risk."
Starting the agency did not feel like starting from scratch. A wise man once told him that you never really start from scratch because you bring everything you have learned with you. Moore had been playing drums at church since he was seven years old, shaking hands with deacons and elders, learning how to communicate. When he turned 15 and wanted to start a farm, he already knew how to look a man in the eye. When he left Farm Bureau to start his own agency, he already had relationships, experience, and skills he had built over years.
"You really never start from scratch," Moore says. "Whenever I sell MFI and when I'm 56 years old, however old I am whenever I sell it, do something different, it won't be from scratch. It could be a whole new industry. But I've learned things along the way."
Today, MFI Agency operates across 15 states with a lean team of four. They specialize in farm and ranch insurance because that is where Moore has the edge. He cannot compete with the massive national brokers on accounts doing $500 million in revenue, but he can compete anywhere below that. He knows farm insurance because he lived it. His first major account at Farm Bureau was a sizable row crop operation. He learned early, and he has been doing it ever since.
"When we get on the phone with a producer, they can instantly tell that my team, we just know what we're talking about and what we're doing," Moore says. "We just nerd out on that stuff. I get on YouTube, and I watch farming videos. This is just what I do."
Moore eventually sold the farm. The profit and loss sheet had not been working for multiple years, but he held on longer than he should have. He was married, building a family, and running an insurance agency that demanded his full attention. The farm was no longer sustainable, but letting it go forced him to confront something deeper. His identity had wrapped itself around being a farmer and an insurance agent. When both of those labels shifted, he had to find his footing in something that did not change.
"It's biblical that your identity should not be found in anything but Christ," Moore says. "My identity was starting to get wrapped up in Terren's a farmer, he's a vegetable farmer. Oh, Terren's a Farm Bureau agent. He's the insurance guy. Both of those things are gone. I'm no longer Farm Bureau. I'm no longer farming, and so it forced me to truly find my identity rooted in Christ. If MFI dies today, it's okay. My identity is in Christ."
Today, he operates with the knowledge that if MFI Agency shut down tomorrow, he could start over. He knows the switch he has to flip. He knows how many calls to make, how many doors to knock on, and how many hours to grind. That confidence comes from planting onions in his grandmother's backyard when he was 15 years old, sitting on the side of the road waiting for customers, and learning that hard work and relationships build something that outlasts any single business. You are one decision away from changing your life. Moore made that decision when he signed up for an FFA class just to get an easy A.
