Delaney Howell grew up outside Columbus Junction in southeast Iowa, on ground her father “purchased and started from scratch,” as she described on the AgWarriors podcast. At a young age, she discovered a love for livestock exhibition with the Shooting Stars 4-H club, which translated into holding every 4-H officer post at least once and being crowned Louisa County Fair Queen in the summer of 2012, as the Iowa 4-H Foundation recounted in her alumni profile. She set off to college intending to one day teach agriculture, but eventually found herself on the path to becoming a broadcaster instead.
Starting in 2017, Howell began working as a freelance reporter, and by 2018, she began covering farm policy for Agri-Pulse, filing on trade tensions with China, farm lending gaps, and the World Pork Expo. In August 2018, she reported from the Iowa State Fair on the acting Environmental Protection Agency administrator’s closed-door session with state officials and has been working that fairground in one form or another ever since.
Shifting from reporting to television, she quickly took over Market to Market, the farm business program Iowa PBS first broadcast in October 1975 and that now airs on 21 stations across 16 states. In its 50th-season retrospective, Iowa PBS noted that Howell became the show’s first female host and held the chair through 2020.
In the margins of those jobs, she also built her own outlet. Howell launched the Ag News Daily podcast in 2017, and its Apple Podcasts listing now shows roughly 1,600 episodes across nine years, published weekly in both audio and video; for years, it went out every weekday instead. Her current co-host is Tanner Winterhof, an Iowa ag lender who also co-hosts Farm4Profit, and together they focus on subject matter that is unglamorous but useful. Recent episode conversations include barge and rail capacity with Mike Steenhoek of the Soy Transportation Coalition, the 45Z clean fuel production credit with Mitchell Hora of Continuum Ag, and renewable energy opportunities with former Colorado state senator and fourth-generation farmer Greg Brophy.
Video Courtesy Ag News Daily
The bigger structural idea arrived a year later. Global Ag Network launched in late 2018 to pull independent agricultural podcasters and their listeners into one community and, in doing so, “meet the needs of the changing landscape in agriculture.” In July 2021, Successful Farming took over exclusive advertising sales for it, adding Ag News Daily to the inventory the magazine sold to marketers trying to reach farmers by voice. At the time, Successful Farming reached 8.2 million touchpoints with American farmers each month. Howell added that Global Ag Network “has always strived to highlight thought-leaders,” and that the partnership would carry that goal further. The network’s roster now lists seven shows, including Girls Talk Ag, Ag State of Mind with Jason Medows, The Ag Queen Podcast, Ag on Tap, Midwest Farm Wives, and PigX.
Photo Courtesy Global Ag Network
Meanwhile, Howell’s agency, AgCulture Marketing, aims to “see the world of digital marketing from a farmer’s perspective.” It lists its team of eight people, including an art director, a project manager, a director of operations, and a video and content creator, many of whom “grew up in rural America and understand that the agricultural industry is different from any other.”
Four companies in, she still didn’t have anyone in the same position to ask questions. Howell said that when she started out, she had no peers to ask the ordinary questions of running a business, such as “Hey, how should I structure this contract?” That gap is not unique to her. Rural businesses have “significantly fewer financial, professional, information services, and scientific resources” available to them than urban ones do, as the conference she went on to found noted.
So she built the room she had wanted. On October 24, 2025, her agency presented the first She Creates: Rural at the FFA Enrichment Center in Ankeny, a one-day conference for women running businesses in rural places. The event described itself as an event “for rural women at every stage of business, whether you’re running a thriving Main Street storefront, growing a side hustle, building a service-based enterprise, or preparing to take the leap into full-time ownership. Together, rural women are fueling Main Street, strengthening local economies, and driving change in rural America.” The program split attendees into two tracks, one for founders still shaping an offer and one for owners trying to scale, and moved them through marketing, financial literacy, and business development sessions. Howell sat on the marketing panel herself. It is just one of many successful events that she has run.
Photo Courtesy AgCulture Marketing
Her own industry has been moving in the same direction. The National Association of Farm Broadcasting, founded in 1944 and now more than 800 members strong, elected her vice president for 2025. A year later, the association elected her president-elect on its 2026 board of directors, alongside president DeLoss Jahnke of RFD Radio Network. That puts a podcast host from central Iowa next in line to lead the organization farm radio has run through for eight decades.
Photo Courtesy Ag News Daily
Howell keeps her speaking calendar busy. In March 2026, she delivered the keynote at PennAg’s annual expo in Lebanon County, Pennsylvania, an event that draws about 850 farmers, where she called it “a year to be agile and nimble,” as volatility works its way into every market. She returned to the Iowa State Fair in August, eight years after she first covered it with a notebook. On top of all that, she still farms. She and her husband, Blaine Groth, run a diversified row crop operation in central Iowa that his family began more than a century ago.
Her motto, as she gave it to the Patio Pondering podcast in September 2025, is progress over perfection: start before the moment feels ready, then get better. That is a farm answer as much as a business one, and it is the same instinct that filled a conference room in Ankeny. Rural counties don’t run on acres alone; they run on the people who decide to build something there.
Howell recently attended and posted a slew of content surrounding the Farmfluencers At The Fair event at the Iowa State Fair.
