The Iowa football team traveled to Ohio State University on Nov. 2, 1985, debuting a new helmet with the letters “ANF” located just above the iconic Tigerhawk symbol. Forty years later, the Hawkeyes continue to sport the letters in solidarity with farmers not just in Iowa but across the country.
Former Iowa head football coach Hayden Fry founded the America Needs Farmers movement, or ANF, to bring awareness to farmers who faced extreme hardships during the farming crisis of the 1980s.
Today, ANF still holds the same mission: to support every farmer and educate those who don’t understand the impact they have on the country.
Andrew Wheeler, public relations manager for the Iowa Farm Bureau Federation, said Fry, who grew up in Texas, created the organization to emphasize how the 1980s farm crisis was impacting many farmers throughout the nation.
According to Iowa PBS, the 1980s farm crisis was a period when many U.S. farmers faced bankruptcy due to falling crop prices, high interest rates, and heavy debt from borrowing during the 1970s boom, leading to rural poverty.
“Coach Fry grew up on a farm, had many farm kids on his team, and knew the farm crisis was impacting farm families and rural communities, particularly in Iowa,” Wheeler said. “He wanted to bring awareness and America Needs Farmers’ message to a national audience.”
Former sports information director at the University of Iowa Phil Haddy worked at the university from 1971 to 2012 alongside Fry and saw ANF emerge and evolve over the last 40 years.
Haddy said Fry did everything with a purpose, one of those being the promotion of ANF through the Hawkeyes’ 10-2 season in 1985 that produced a Rose Bowl opportunity.
“It was to make the people and farmers of Iowa feel good about something,” Haddy said. “And at the same time, it was another reason to motivate his team to prepare and play better for the sake of the farmers in Iowa.”
Colin Johnson, a farmer from Batavia, Iowa, said ANF continues to recognize Iowa farmers for the work they do, just as it did for the movement’s original purpose four decades ago.
“It’s a great way to recognize the contributions of not just the food and the items we produce, but also just what we as farmers contribute to the local community,” he said.
Johnson encourages and urges people to think about how many different products farmers contribute to society, from items at the grocery store to gas.
“We take everything that’s in the grocery store for granted,” he said. “People don’t think about where it comes from and all the effort and financial
means it takes to get there.”
After 40 years, Wheeler said the campaign continually tries to ensure farmers are getting the recognition and awareness they deserve, as agriculture impacts people’s lives every day.
“Farming today looks much different than it did 40 years ago, but a lot of the same challenges still exist — obviously economic pressures and challenges that we’re seeing today,” he said. “There’s so many different things to have in agricultural products, so it’s an opportunity to show that agriculture touches our lives in so many different ways.”
Fry, who retired from coaching in 1998 and died in 2019, considered ANF part of his legacy.
“The thing I’m most proud of here at Iowa is putting the ANF on our headgear,” he once said.
Haddy noted how successful Fry was in his ability to make the campaign stick and how well-known it is in the country four decades later.
“It’s evolved to where now everybody who knows [college] football knows what ANF stands for,” he said. “The legacy of Hayden Fry and the logo he put on those helmets will live into infinity. You know it’s going to last for a long time because there will never be a time when the world doesn’t need farmers. He was a spellbinder.”