In 2020, Rachel Fishback faced a problem she couldn’t work around. She marketed for a livestock construction company, a job that relied on open houses and bringing prospective customers out to see the buildings in person. Then, COVID-19 hit, and nobody could go anywhere. “We couldn’t host open houses for construction projects or bring people on-site,” Fishback recalled to Women in Ag Tech. “I knew I needed to find a new way to showcase our work.” She started filming the barns instead and posting online.
Fishback is a seventh-generation farmer and farms corn and soybeans with her brother Vince on family land rented from their grandparents outside Washington, Iowa, on older equipment they buy at auction. She spent 18 years as a 4-H leader, has served as President, Vice President, and Voting Delegate for her county Farm Bureau board, and held a seat on the Iowa Pork Producers Association public relations committee.
Photo Courtesy Iowa_Farm_Mama
Online, where she posts as Iowa Farm Mama, she is better known for recipes and everyday farm life. She explained to Women In Ag Tech, “I initially started posting on TikTok as Iowa Farm Mama just to understand the app and how it worked. I also realized I was searching how to fix things around my house, and I was gravitating toward video learning to answer my questions. What I didn’t expect was how quickly it would grow into something more — a way to connect with people across the ag world and spark conversations around farming, food, and family life.”
Barns caught her eye for a reason. When she was looking at colleges, she said on Ag Squawk, she loved construction and interior design, which is part of why she was pulled toward showing the construction progress rather than the finished building. She found that almost nobody outside agriculture had ever seen any of it. She calls the pork industry “the busy town,” after the children’s picture books she grew up with, all buses and buildings and people moving around. The pig farmer is one piece of it. So are the livestock haulers, the integrators, the people delivering feed, and the veterinarians, “so many different moving parts that a lot of people don’t get to see behind the scenes.”
In 2024, she turned that into a company. “I just saw a void with video and ag and companies that way,” she said on Dryson Learns Things, “so that’s where the idea came from, taking my roots and my background and expanding it to help others.” People of Ag Media films, edits, and delivers video for agriculture businesses that need marketing and have no dedicated department. She told the trade publication Swineweb that she launched it “to amplify the voices of agriculture and help companies share their stories through video and social media. Agriculture is filled with incredible people and innovations, but not everyone feels comfortable stepping in front of a camera to talk about it.”
Working for herself has its own arithmetic. There are “always those nerves of, wow, do I have enough work this month,” she said on Dryson Learns Things, and the harder discipline of reeling in her own creativity, because she comes up with more ideas than she can finish. That arithmetic behind it is familiar to other farmers. The U.S. Department of Agriculture forecasts median farm income earned by American farm households at negative $1,161 for 2026, against median off-farm income of $92,815. For the typical farm household in the federal data, the farm does not pay the bills. The job away from it does.
Photo Courtesy Iowa_Farm_Mama
She covers a serious economic sector. The Iowa Pork Producers Association reported that the state’s pork industry added $15.4 billion in value to Iowa’s economy in 2024 and supports more than 120,000 jobs across 5,172 pig farms, and that her home county of Washington is one of only three Iowa counties running more than a million pigs. As she told Swineweb, “The pork industry is deeply personal to me. As a farmer in Southeast Iowa and someone who has been both a producer and a customer, I’ve experienced the challenges and triumphs firsthand. My passion comes from knowing how vital this industry is—not just for our livelihoods but for feeding families and supporting rural communities.”
The buildings have also gotten expensive enough to change behavior. Compeer Financial found in January 2026 that annual loan payments on a standard 2,400-head barn have settled into the low-to-mid $40 range per pig space, above pre-pandemic levels. Fishback recalled to Ag Bull Media that 10 years ago, “a hog barn that you see today was $500,000, and today they’re up over a million dollars.” She explained that many producers are switching to remodeling what they already own, swapping gates, feeders, waterers, and fans to keep barns in service.
Photo Courtesy Iowa_Farm_Mama
Her real product, though, is closing a distance. The American Farm Bureau Federation reported in July 2026 that 98% of Americans have no direct connection to a farm, that public trust in farmers has held at or above 80% since 2019, and that trust climbs nearly 20% upon meeting one. Fishback spends much of her time arguing with the picture people carry around. “People are so stuck in thinking that farmers are wearing bib overalls in the 1950s,” she said on Dryson Learns Things. “Just like every other industry, ag has advanced.”
However, farmers tend to live private lives. Fishback runs into that every time she asks someone to sit down on camera, where they express hesitancy about not knowing what to say or having anything to talk about. She pointed out to Ag Bull Media’s Ag Squawk, “They have so much to say. They have so much to teach and share.”
She was not always the one holding the camera. “I didn’t talk on camera. I didn’t do video,” she said in an interview with Dryson Learns Things. What changed was not a business plan. “If you don’t stand up and tell your story, someone else might,” she said on Ag Bull Media’s Ag Squawk. “And I just want to help be a voice to explain things out there to the world.”
Fishback recently attended and posted a slew of content surrounding the Farmfluencers At The Fair event at the Iowa State Fair.
