It all started with an oil field rotational job and a honey-do list that was too short…

Ryan and Amanda Bare, both Mechanical Engineering graduates from Iowa State University and Iowa natives, married and moved to Texas after college. After 15 years of refining oil, they moved back to Iowa where Ryan first learned how to turn corn into alcohol at an ethanol plant. The oil field called to him, however, and he went back… working a 14 day rotational shift in oil production. But what’s an engineer to do with half the year off?

It started small, with some hardware store parts put together in the garage. This is where Amanda should have stepped in with a longer list of honey-dos, but Ryan was passionate about his project. As a farm kid, and after 22 years of designing, operating and maintaining production plants for other people, it was time to build his own. In 2017, we bought a building on the north end of Spencer and the dream started coming to life. Hard work and life well lived… That’s the legacy of our Century Farms.