Bancroft

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This is Bancroft.

It's a small Iowa town composed of a grocery store, a bank, a liquor store, hardware store, office supply store, flower shop, hair salon, medical clinic, bed and breakfast, funeral home, trailer manufacturer, whiskey distillery, gym, baseball field, city pool, nine-hole golf course, two gas stations, two restaurants, two feed suppliers, two car dealerships, 346 homes, 699 people, and that's about it.

Bancroft more or less nestles into a single one-by-one-mile square, and it's surrounded by eight other one-by-one-mile squares, fields full of corn and soybean.

Six squares down, there's another town, Burt.

Six to the west, it's Lone Rock, then six more, and there's Fenton.

Therefore, this county, as large as the country of Luxembourg, uses some 85% of its area for the singular purpose of growing these two crops.

The reason why is because Kossuth County and its neighbors are powerhouses in the world of agriculture—crucial food production resources not only for Iowa, not only for the United States, not only even just for North America, but for the entire world.

I ask myself this question a lot.

When was the last time you did something for the first time? I was in Bancroft, Iowa for the first time yesterday.

Welcome to the studio.

We are recording from Iowa Lakes Community College in the Tietz Entrepreneurial Center.

I want to thank Kossuth County Economic Development, Todd Ferris, who coordinated a two-day festival of manufacturing here in Algona and beyond.

You have 100 employees in Bancroft, and your town population is what in Bancroft?

Roughly 800 people.

you are a cornerstone of that economy.