Ph.D.
Agricultural & Extension Education
About Rexanna
The story starts on
a farm in East Texas.
Rexanna deGruy did not learn about agriculture in a classroom first. She learned it in a chicken house in deep East Texas, where her family raised commercial poultry and registered red and gray Brahman cattle alongside commercial cow-calf operations. Feeding out, checking cattle, understanding the rhythms of a working farm. That was just Tuesday.
Through FFA, she showed nearly every species of livestock competitively across the state of Texas. She learned early what it meant to know your animal, know your product, and be able to speak about it with confidence in front of an audience. That skill set turns out to be extraordinarily useful when that audience is a few million people scrolling Instagram.
What followed was more than 10 years working at the intersection of agricultural sustainability and strategic communications, across an unusually broad range of commodities. Rexanna has worked with cattle, dairy, poultry, and pork, but also sugarcane, cotton, grains, and fresh produce. She has operated across the full value chain: from on-farm logistics and food labeling to marketing, policy, and peer-reviewed research. That breadth is not common. It is the foundation that makes Source to Story credible across the entire animal agriculture and food systems landscape, not just one corner of it.
That foundation carried her through a B.S. in Agricultural Communications and Journalism from Texas A&M, an M.S. from Texas Tech, and a Ph.D. in Agricultural and Extension Education from LSU, where she also earned graduate certificates in Strategic Communication and Urban and Community Education. Along the way she became an author of peer-reviewed research, the sole creator of the REAL Model, a novel communications framework she developed from the ground up and grounded in human behavior theory, trust-building ideologies, and consumer purchasing trends, and a recipient of multiple Outstanding Research and Distinguished Communicator awards.
Source to Story Collective is the business Rexanna built when she decided that closing the gap between agriculture and influence was too important to leave to chance. It exists because the distance between what agriculture actually is and what audiences believe about it is real, widening, and fixable. Rexanna is one of a very small number of people positioned to fix it, with the farm background, the Ph.D., the peer-reviewed research, and the Q4 2025 pilot results to back it up.
Source to Story Collective exists because the gap between what agriculture actually is and what audiences believe about it is real, and widening. Rexanna is one of a very small number of people who can stand in that gap with genuine credibility on both sides of the fence.
Ph.D., Agricultural and Extension Education, LSU with graduate certificates in Strategic Communication and Urban and Community Education
10+ years in agricultural sustainability spanning cattle, dairy, poultry, pork, sugarcane, cotton, grains, and fresh produce, across the full value chain from logistics and food labeling to marketing, policy, and research
Author of 5 peer-reviewed journal articles and 30+ popular-press features on food labeling, sustainability, and consumer perception
Sole creator of the REAL Model, a novel communications framework built from the ground up on human behavior theory, trust-building ideologies, and consumer purchasing trends, now embedded in national consumer and professional education programs across the animal agriculture industry