He is the son of a farmer who was a son of a sharecropper. And today, Paul Freund owns the land his grandfather once labored upon, using a portion of it as an outdoor classroom for visiting producers and industry. Every year, Freund, who also grew up on that once-rented land in Needville, Texas, hosts a field day. Initially, he started working with Monsanto on herbicide trials in the mid-1990s. A decade ago, that same crew proposed an annual field day.