Delaney Howell (Ag News Daily, Ankeny, Iowa) grew up on a row-crop and livestock farm in southeast Iowa and never really knew she wanted to pursue a career in agriculture until late middle school when she had a phenomenal FFA teacher. “I didn’t fully understand that there were people who had never been exposed to farms or agriculture, but I knew I was passionate about the industry and wanted to share it with others. I decided to go to college to pursue a degree as an agricultural education major, largely because I had had such an impactful FFA teacher. It wasn’t until my junior year of college that I decided to make the transition to a general ag degree with a broadcasting minor,” Howell said. “After working for two years at local radio station KNIM, it turns out I loved it, and I found a place where I felt I could educate people through the information I was sharing. I also spent a semester studying abroad in Bulgaria, and I came to realize that agriculture was so much bigger than what I had been exposed to in the United States. It sparked a fire in me to learn more about the global agricultural scene.”
“To this day, I continue to take opportunities to travel abroad and learn more about the global system and, so far, have traveled to 21 countries. The summer between my junior and senior years of college, I applied for an internship at Market to Market and was hired. I spent that summer learning more about the show I had grown up watching and fell more in love with writing stories and telling the story of agriculture. Mark Pearson was an icon to me through the role of host for Market to Market. I never knew broadcasting was a career option for me until I interned for Market to Market. That was the biggest moment that changed my career path forever.”
2017 NAFB President
“I continued with my education online through Texas Tech, and it was because of an NAFB Foundation scholarship a couple years ago that I was able to finance part of that degree. For that I am forever grateful. After I graduated from Northwest Missouri State University, I was working part-time at Iowa Public Television as a producer for Market to Market, pursuing my graduate degree in agricultural communications, and I launched my own video company responding to requests from ag businesses to produce videos. About six months after graduating from Northwest, Mike Pearson approached me with a business idea which led to creating a daily agricultural news podcast, Ag News Daily. After we had been podcasting for about a year and half, the idea of a podcast network started to form. We launched Global Ag Network last fall, which is a podcasting platform for originally created agricultural podcasts. We searched through ag podcasts and created a list of podcasts, and people approached us about joining the network. Individuals who host these podcasts aren’t broadcasters, but they’re folks who work in the industry and have such a depth of knowledge in their respective sectors in agriculture. It has been fun to watch them evolve and grow.”
