In April, Allen Twedt was lifted into a tractor cab by chairlift, with his wife beside him, to look at the fields they’ve maintained for decades. Twedt has worked the ground outside Story City, Iowa, for decades, and he had been in hospice care since Easter. His grandson, Zach Twedt, had arranged the whole thing, and the video he posted afterward traveled widely across Iowa. Zach told KCCI the day was meant to honor what his grandfather built over a lifetime of farming.
Photo Courtesy Zach Twedt
Zach describes himself as “a 4th-generation farmer who grew up in small-town Iowa,” and, as he told the Talking Hawks podcast, “Farming is fun. I love it. It’s something I’m going to do for the rest of my life.” He knew how to drive by the time he was six; he took his babysitters out for tractor rides while his father worked shifts at the fire station. By high school, he was waking up at 4 a.m. to finish chores before morning workouts. Allen told The Gazette that his grandson was ambitious in ways other children were not, pointing to the snow he cleared around town, the neighbors’ lawns he mowed, and the livestock sales he attended with his father, Seth, to learn how the money side of farming worked. Wanting the farm and being able to afford it, however, are separate problems, and the second is the problem he has worked on since he was eighteen.
Iowa State University made him an offer to play football after his freshman season of high school, and with Twedt’s home only about fifteen minutes from campus, he gave a verbal commitment. However, by his junior year he ended up switching his commitment to the University of Iowa, as he told Hawk Fanatic at the time that it was “the best place that reflects the culture of the state of Iowa,” and framed the work itself in terms his neighbors would recognize: “Not many people grow up having the hard work ethic of a farmer. Having to do the daily tasks and work around Mother Nature is something that not many can do, and I feel like Iowa is great at recruiting people with this style of background and work ethic.” He signed his letter of intent in December 2020 and enrolled early, starting classes in Iowa City that January.
He described to BroadwayWorld, “I also take pride in representing the ANF sticker, which means a lot to me.” The ANF, or America Needs Farmers, sticker, which former football coach Hayden Fry first put on Iowa helmets in 1985 during the farm crisis that bankrupted thousands of Iowa families, has a lot of meaning in a state where, the Iowa Farm Bureau notes, fewer than five percent of residents now farm.
Photo Courtesy Iowa Corn
Zach’s local fame doesn’t stem from his family farm or football career. In July 2022, driving from Okoboji back to Iowa City, Twedt stopped on Interstate 35 for Tina Gunn and her three children, whose tire had deflated on the way home to Nebraska. Gunn did not know how to change a flat and had no cell signal to reach roadside assistance. Twedt, then 19, did it in ten minutes and told the Des Moines Register it was “just the right thing to do.” He traced the skill straight back to the farm. “It builds character,” he said. “It’s turned me into the person I am today.” Gunn’s account of the encounter drew more than 25,000 likes and 7,000 shares across social media.
A year later, he stopped again for two seventeen-year-olds outside an Iowa City Walmart whose car had run out of gas, left, and came back with a full portable tank. He credited the habit partly to his father Seth, a farmer and a lieutenant at the Ames Fire Department: “My old man’s always preaching on me that ‘You think you’re having a long day or a tough day? You never know what someone’s going through,’” Twedt explained.
He said on the Talking Hawks podcast that he made himself a promise at fourteen, the year he got his driving permit, to stop for anyone he found on the side of a road. He says he has changed roughly forty roadside tires in his life, and the ride he arranged for his grandfather came out of the same instinct. He put it this way to the Register in 2023. “Life’s too short. Nobody’s too good regardless of if I’m on the football team or just a farm kid from Story City, Iowa.”
Photo Courtesy Tina Gunn
Meanwhile, the future of Iowa farming is bright. In 2022, Iowa counted just over 41,264 farmers with ten or fewer years of experience, a 32% increase from 2017, and 15,835 producers under the age of 35, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Agricultural Statistics Service reported in announcing census results.
Twedt has an idea of who those producers will be. Speaking on the Farm4Profit podcast, he said the next few decades are going to look like “a completely different demographic of farmer. I mean, you’re still going to have us to get the boots, jeans, and hard gloves on, but then you’re going to have these tech-savvy kids, the Gen Z kids, that are going to be dissecting it from an analytical level, from a plant by plant basis, and, ultimately, making a good chunk of money from it.” He told Farm4Profit that he “is trying to be a voice for the next generation of youth in agriculture.”
He has been working out what that looks like in practice on camera. Twedt appeared in Indigo Ag’s multi-episode series, The Offseason, billed as a future Iowa farmer working through cover crops, soil health, and carbon practices. Twedt has also described the F3: Future Farmers Forum in Des Moines, an event produced by CDM, as a chance to join “conversations on innovation, conservation, and other renewables that will be vital for the future of agricultural success.” Some of what he was looking at is being tested in the county where he grew up. Iowa State and Alliant Energy dedicated a solar farm south of Ames in 2023: 3,300 panels across 10 acres generating 1.375 megawatts, enough for roughly 200 homes, and the first utility-scale project in the state to try growing crops underneath the array.
Video Courtesy Indigo Ag
He was recently interviewed at the Iowa State Fair by Farm4Profit, one of the country’s most-listened-to agriculture podcasts, with more than 400,000 followers across platforms. Stay tuned for the Farm4Profit episode.
