Mike Striegel was Chloe Zittergruen’s first agriculture teacher, who “encouraged me every step of the way and is still pushing me to be my best even after his retirement,” she told Iowa Farmer Today. Beyond mentorship, he gave her the foundation to start her own business. Striegel offered her what the two of them called a “floral internship” the summers after seventh and eighth grades, and Zittergruen recalled spending those hot days “planting, watering, weeding, and caring for his dahlias,” earning in return the chance to show flowers at the Iowa State Fair through FFA. “At the time, it just felt like a fun project, but it actually became the very beginning of my FFA Supervised Agricultural Experience (SAE).”
That project is now 140th Street Blooms, a cut-flower and dahlia-tuber farm in Keswick, a southeast Iowa town Zittergruen has called “a little speck on the map.” She grows more than 1,700 dahlias a year for cut-flower and tuber production, selling the flowers locally and the tubers nationally through the farm’s website. Speaking at the 2026 Iowa State Fair on the Barn Talk podcast, she put the field at “about a quarter plus acre of just straight flowers” and said she sells tubers “to over 45 different states throughout the winter.”
Photo Courtesy 140th Street Blooms
The ribbons came before the revenue. Zittergruen lists multiple Grand and Reserve Champion dahlias, a Grand Champion Gladiolus, a Grand Champion Zinnia, three Grand Champion Showmanship titles, a Sweepstakes win, and an Award of Excellence for the top flower out of 767 entries. “That SAE quickly became more than just a record book entry,” she reminisced. “Each ribbon carried a story of hard work, patience, and pride in the blooms I grew.”
The market she sells into runs on imports. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Foreign Agricultural Service reported in March 2026 that Colombia’s cut flower industry has grown into a $2.4 billion export sector supplying approximately 60% of the flowers sold in the United States. American growers are adding ground anyway. USDA’s Economic Research Service found that about 10,800 commercial farms grew flowers and greens for florists in 2022, up more than 50% from the 2017 census, and that more than 31,000 acres of flowers were grown in the open that year, up 33%.
Iowa is part of that shift. Dan Fillius, a field specialist in horticulture for commercial vegetables and specialty crops at Iowa State University Extension and Outreach, wrote, “In the past five years, I have noticed a large increase in the number of farms that grow and sell cut flowers.” He elaborated, “One of the reasons for the speedy rise in flower farms is that a person can grow a lot of flowers on a small amount of land.”
Photo Courtesy 140th Street Blooms
Zittergruen is studying agricultural communications at Iowa State University and plans to graduate in May 2027. The Iowa FFA Association elected her state president at its 97th convention in Ames in April 2025, and the officer team’s largest responsibility that year, per Brownfield Ag News, was to conduct the 98th Iowa FFA Leadership Conference for more than 7,000 FFA members, advisors, parents, and guests.
Her leadership in the role quickly earned her state and national recognition. Brownfield Ag News named her the 2025 recipient of the Cyndi Young Scholarship, one of ten awards totaling $77,500 that the National Association of Farm Broadcasting (NAFB) Foundation presented that year. The outlet noted that she “leads and inspires student members across the state while advocating for the future of agriculture.” She was also one of four state officers who traveled to Washington, D.C. to promote agricultural education on National Ag Day in March 2026 through the National FFA Organization’s SpeakAg Pioneer program. “We need the 2 percent that are feeding us every single day,” she told Brownfield Ag News there. “Our food does not come from the grocery store. It comes from a family farm, and that family is farming to feed themselves, but also everyone else at the same time.”
Zittergruen’s term ended in April. “It is truly a remarkable experience that is hard to put into words. The impact you are able to have on people, but also the moments that you get to spend with your teammates in those long hours putting in time, but truly pouring into the members and giving back is what we are here for,” she described.
In August, the National FFA Organization named her one of 41 candidates for national office, one nominated by each state association and Puerto Rico, competing for six seats on the 2026-27 National FFA Officer Team; a nine-member student nominating committee runs the interviews, and the result is announced at the final session of the 99th National FFA Convention & Expo in October in Indianapolis. Meanwhile, she worked as a marketing and communications intern at Landus in Des Moines this summer, with plans to work in agricultural marketing, communications, advertising, leadership development, or public relations.
As a freshman, Zittergruen refused to be her chapter’s creed speaker because standing in front of people frightened her. She has since given a speech during the Iowa FFA State Leadership Conference in the Hilton Coliseum to more than 7,000 people “because I chose to get out of my comfort zone and do something even when it scared me,” she explained. She offers that lesson to other students thinking about getting involved in the FFA. “It might be nerve-wracking and scary, but do it scared and get out of your comfort zone. Because you have no idea how much good could come from something if you gave it a try.”
Video Courtesy Iowa FFA Association
Zittergruen told the National FFA Organization what she hopes the next wave of members carries forward, and reached for the language of her own field. “We plant seeds in gardens we never even walk through,” she said.
