Member of Iowa’s Oldest Black-Owned Family Farm Talks History, Family, and Finding his Mission Moment

Todd Western III’s ancestors were born into slavery in Virginia, bought their freedom, then settled on a farm in Mahaska County, Iowa. His father expanded the operation, buying another farm near Waterloo, Iowa. Today, Western farms with his family and is the co-founder of Iowa Farmers of Color.

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Meet Todd Western III

Western splits his time between his home in Minnesota and the family farm in Iowa, and also actively volunteers with many non-profits, including serving on several boards of directors. Western Family Farms is an Iowa Heritage Farm, meaning it has been in the family for more than 150 years. It is believed to be the only Black-owned farm with that designation.

Western is a co-founder of Iowa Farmers of Color, which held its second annual conference in November 2024. More than 120 farmers from across the country came together to network and attend educational sessions. “The ultimate goal has been to share cost-sharing programs with farmers,” he said. “We’ve bridged the gap between farmers and state agencies.”

Episode Highlights

• It’s difficult to track how many Black-owned Iowa Heritage Farms exist, but Western believes his is the only one. “I hope there’s more than just me,” he said. “I want more company.”
• According to the census, there are 86,000 farms in Iowa, and 59 of those are owned by Black farmers. “My ultimate goal is to find all 59,” Western said.
• Western’s mother, Barbara, a trained opera singer from Chicago, took over managing the farm when his father died. Western’s brother and son are also involved in day-to-day operations, with other family members helping as needed.
• The farm is shifting to regenerative agriculture, utilizing cover crops, minimizing fertilizer use, and switching to no-till.
• The second Iowa Farmers of Color Conference included sessions on markets, youth in agriculture, and business strategy.

Links and Resources

Transcript

Please note: This transcript has not been edited.

Lisa Foust Prater: Welcome to the 15 Minutes with a Farmer Podcast from Successful Farming, I’m your host, Lisa Foust Prater. My guest today is Todd Western III. He splits his time between Minnesota and the family farm in Iowa, and also actively volunteers with many non-profits, including serving on several boards of directors. Western is the co-founder of Iowa Farmers of Color, which just held its second annual conference.

In each episode, I have a quick 15 minute conversation with a farmer to hear their story and share their experience, expertise, and life lessons. 

Todd Western: As we can tell, you know, I hope there’s more than just me. But I believe that we’re the oldest unofficial Black farm family in Iowa. And I hope there’s more than one heritage farm. But as of right now, we’re the oldest and only heritage farm.

Lisa Foust Prater: Well, I hope you’re right. mean, maybe they’ll, if they’re listening, maybe they can let us know. know, absolutely. you know, in the future, you know, those numbers will rise hopefully. you know, it’s a thing where, you know, your family’s been doing this for so long. Especially when, you know, their neighbors, they didn’t look like their neighbors. And it was the kind of work where,

Todd Western: Yes, please call in, please contact us. It’s lonely here. I want more company.

Lisa Foust Prater: They weren’t the stereotypical Iowa farmer, but they just kept at it for all those generations and were successful enough to pass it on, which is just amazing. That’s such incredible heritage.

Todd Western: Yes. I couldn’t imagine, starting a farm in 1864, in the middle of Iowa during that time. And you gotta remember that’s right smack in the middle of emancipaiton proclamation and the civil war. And so I, but the testament to Iowa, you Iowa is a wonderful state, friendly people, loving people. And, and, and, as far as I can talk back into my family, they always said that their neighbors down in New Sharon, Iowa, treated them with respect and they helped each other and it was a great community.

Lisa Foust Prater: That’s amazing. And I mean, if there’s one thing that farmers admire and respect, it’s another farmer who’s doing good work. And if they see that, that’s really, you know, that’s what counts. So I’m happy to hear that. So your family farm today, you’re you’re still going strong. And your mom is is the head of the farm since your father passed. I was doing a little reading about your family and your father, of course, grew up farming in the family farm, but your mom was a trained opera singer? 

Todd Western: Yeah, she’s a five-foot black woman from the city of Chicago who met a farmer from Iowa. They met and she was always out there helping and then holding flashlights, making dinner runs, making part runs. And then unfortunately, when my father passed, she was already retired. She had just gotten her doctor degree in statistics and music theory years prior.

And she had retired after she got her doctorate. And then when my father passed, she jumped up and, and, you know, she, she was a little mighty mouse that could she like five foot four and she walks eight foot tall. And so, so she quickly merged herself into farming and learned about programs and learn and met all the state agencies and they put their arm around her and really helped her out.

Lisa Foust Prater: That’s amazing. What a beautiful way to describe your mother that she walks eight feet tall. I can’t imagine a better thing. That’s, that’s, yeah. Well, she means business. So that’s, that’s, that’s beautiful. And so it’s yourself and you have two brothers and you and one other brother are farming. Is that correct?

Todd Western: Sometimes that’s good, sometimes it’s not good. Yeah, she does mean business. Yeah, so me and my brother, Chris Western, and then my son, Todd the fourth, and my mom, we manage the day to day and then occasionally my wife comes down and she helps out. so we have, you know, we have Todd the fifth, who is two years old, who we’re to have to start acclimating to this. And then I’m having a granddaughter on Friday who had to get her up to date. And then I have a nephew that’s 11 and I have a daughter that’s 12. And so I got plenty of help that are going to be in training here.

Lisa Foust Prater: Well, it’s a good thing you have all those planning genes because it sounds like you definitely need it. And, you know, it’s good that you take a look at the way things were always done isn’t necessarily the way that it works best now. And it’s no slight to your father or the way things were done before. It’s just things are different and you need to do things in a way that, you know, that suits you now. So talk to me a little bit about, you know, the way that you’re farming and how that’s changed with any regenerative practices or anything else that you’re doing differently on the farm.

Todd Western: Well, like, you know, most generational farms, you know, a lot of times you do what dad did and he did what his dad did. but due to our circumstances, we had to be a little bit more efficient. So thanks to my mom, who once she came out of retirement and started to really acclimate herself with the farming industry, the farming way of life and, and creating those relationships with the state agencies like that, you know, the USDA, NRCS, FSA, she learned a lot about cost sharing programs and a lot of those cost sharing programs had regenerative practices tagged along with him. You know, after so about 2015, we started doing some regenerative agriculture. And so today, from 2015 to today, you know, I’m happy to say that, you my mom has gotten us very well acclimated with all these programs. So today we do no till, we do restrictive fertilizing into the ground, we do cover crop, things of that nature. we try to do, and we do prairie seeds on different parts of the farm. So we, yeah, and we’ve seen some results from, we’ve seen, you know, especially the farm at Waterloo, the soil is not very good at all. And so it also was a necessity for us to try something new. Now, I will tell you that, you know, the no-till is not my favorite part because part of a farmer is, you know, tilling up some ground, putting some horsepower in the ground, letting that John Deere blow some black smoke. But I do miss that.

But I don’t miss the fuel bills and fixed non-implements and things of that nature. So it is what it is. It saves us time.

Lisa Foust Prater: Yeah, and I would imagine, you you definitely learn a thing or two about hard work when you’re growing up on a farm and how the end of the work day doesn’t necessarily mean the end of the work.

Todd Western: This is true. This is true. And again, you know, the one thing I can’t overstate is when you have a passion for something, it’s really not work. And yes, any farmer, you know, you know, it’s extremely hard work. Sometimes it’s not rewarding. Sometimes the cards just don’t come in your favor. But you’re so passionate about farming and and being in that life that you take everything in stride. So it’s really a passion.

Lisa Foust Prater: So tell me about the Iowa Farmers of Color.

Todd Western: So the Iowa Farms of Color was really, was not on my radar whatsoever. So what happened was, I’m a big believer in no matter what you do in life, you have to tell your story. Everybody has a unique story that needs to be told. I don’t care if you, what it is, but everybody’s unique and everybody has a unique story. And so once my father passed away, I realized how unique we were in the fact that just as a farm in general, to have this farm for as long as we did. And then on top of the fact that, you know, my ancestors bought the way out of slavery in Virginia in 1790, traveled to Iowa, settled in Iowa in 1864, bought 160 acres and successfully farmed it. That’s a story. And they deserve to have their story told. And so me being Todd the fourth, I’m sorry, I’m Todd the third. Me being Todd the third, I felt and the oldest of the family, I felt it incumbent upon myself to tell the story with no real end result. I just wanted to I just felt like it needed to be told. And so therefore what happened was Aaron Jordan from Cedar Rapids Gazette picked up the story and followed us for an entire year and the life and times of the Western family on the farm. And then that story was produced. And then all of sudden people started to take notice. 

Now, like I said, I had no real end game in this. just wanted to tell the story. But then people started letting me know that, did you know that’s not an ordinary story? And obviously you’re one of only 1700 period in the state of Iowa. But more importantly, in 1944, there was 14 % of the farmers were black. Today there’s less than 1.4%. So that made it my story even more important to tell because I wanted to. So then all of a I said, you know what? Of that 1.4 percent, how many are in Iowa? There was only one other farmer, black farmer that I knew in Iowa, and that was Mike Cook. Mike Cook was a neighbor to us and his dad and Mike used to work at John Deere with my dad. And so I said, you know what? There’s some other stories out there. I want to highlight other. I want to highlight farming in general, but then let the general farming public know that there are black farmers out there. According to the census in 2023 there’s 86,000 farms in Iowa. The census says there’s 59 black farmers. So with that said, I created, I co-founded the Iowa Farms of Color two years ago. 

We actually had it during COVID where it was just a zoom call and we’d meet once a month and we just talk about in just random things. Well, then over the last couple of years, I said, you know what? We need to escalate this and put some meat into it. So I created Iowa Farms of Color, Practical Farmers of Iowa thankfully provided us with a grant. And so our first conference was in 2023. And so because there’s only 59 black farmers in Iowa, I expected maybe we get 20. Well, the first year we wound up with over 90 farmers that showed up to our first conference. The conference was so successful that the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture heard about it came to meet with me and my core team to talk about what it was about, how we could help us and what we need. And so again, it was just letting him know that we’re here. And so we had our second conference this year (in 2024). This year we had over 120 farmers and we were at the Living History Farms in Urbandale. And they were so gracious to be our host for this at no cost. And so I wanted to say a special shout out to Living History Farms for that. But yeah, so we had our second conference this year. And so really that was developed out of me telling my story and my passion for farming, and then even more my passion for letting the world know that there are black farmers and that we contribute to the farming scheme and then the goal with the Iowa Farmers of Color is just to bring value to the farmers that attend. And when I say Iowa Farmers of Color, I mean all colors, white, black, Asian, the whole works. But we want to make sure that the people of color know that this is a safe spot for them to come to.

And so it’s been really successful. The ultimate goal has been that we’ve shared cost sharing programs with farmers. We’ve bridged the gap between farmers and state agencies. So now the state agencies know that these farmers are there. My ultimate goal is to find all 59 black farmers. That is my ultimate goal.

Lisa Foust Prater: I love that. You know, going to conferences, you know, I go to several women in ag conferences and same sort of thing where, you know, when you’re in a space like that, where you everyone sort of knows your backstory and you they get you like right off the bat, they understand the challenges that you have and just what your life is like is so great. It’s that’s always such a great experience. And you know, the networking aspect of a conference like that, I feel like is almost as important as the sessions and the things that you learn from the different tracks that you maybe will attend while you’re there. So it’s such a great experience to go in person and be able to meet other people, you know, exchange information, share your contact info, and then also to learn some things while you’re there. So tell me about like what you did for like speakers and informative tracks and things like that.

Todd Western: So we have US Secretary of agriculture Vilsack’s senior advisor. He speaks each year to talk about the farm bill and the implications. This year we had Cargill, Syngenta, we had Choose Iowa, we had Iowa’s Farmer Union, we had USDA, and several others, and we had a panel discussion. And so each organization talked about what they do. And then we had opened it up to say, for them to understand what we need to the audience. Then we also had three breakout sessions. We had everything, three breakout sessions focused on rural crop farmers and the markets. We had the second session was focused on youth, where we had a youth organization from Minnesota come down called Urban Roots come down and talk about what their work they’re doing to inspire individuals in Iowa to engage young people. Cause that’s another thing we want to make sure we engage young people. And the third breakout session was a strategy session. We had professional business coaches come down and they held a strategy on how to develop your farm. You know, what, how to set goals on your farm, how to, you know, what do you want to get out of your farm and how to get there? What strategies do you need to get there? And so it was absolutely wonderful. We had people come from all over the, all over the, all over the country. Really. We had North Carolina, all five states surrounding Iowa. 

And one of the big stories was we had Lori Janes out of Minnesota who’s developing an organization called Solid Roots and where she is engaging women that are coming out of incarceration to reuniting with their children in a farm setting. So she came down to get information and meet state agencies and meet other organizations to implement that. She’s really close now to buying land. And once they buy the land, those individuals will come out there. They’ll work together on the land and they’ll bond with their children. And what better way to get a new lease on life than when you come out of making a mistake, to come out to the fresh air, to open field, to learn, to revisit your own self, to get reestablished internally. And so Lori Janes with Solid Roots is working hard on making that happen. And that’s where Iowa Farmers of Color comes in is what can I do to support her and her vision? And so we’ve done some key things now and some partnerships to help her get to that point.

Lisa Foust Prater: Yeah, so that’s so great that you get together then throughout the year, either virtually or in person that just builds a real community around, around your group. And rather than just the once a year flying in where if you miss it, you’re out for a year. That’s great. 

Todd Western: Right. Yeah, no, it’s been a great experience. It’s my mission moment. I like to think it’s my mission moment.

Lisa Foust Prater: Well, I love seeing what you’re doing. I love following all of your projects and your progress and congratulations on a successful conference. You’re just you’re going going all the time but doing such fantastic work in all of your spaces, the ag space, the civic engagement space, the corporate space. So congratulations to you.

Todd Western: Thank you, I appreciate it.

Lisa Foust Prater: Thank you for listening. Please subscribe, rate, and review us wherever you listen to your podcasts. Open the latest issue of Successful Farming and visit us online at agriculture.com for more interesting features and news for your farm and Join me next week for another episode of 15 Minutes With a Farmer.