In this episode of the Iowa Ag Podcast, host David Geiger takes listeners through a personal reflection on the creation of his documentary Journey of a Bean, marking nearly a decade since the project began. David recounts starting the documentary in 2016, early in his broadcast career and still new to agriculture, driven by a simple question: how does a soybean make it around the world?
Without a farming background, David explains how agriculture initially felt complex and inaccessible, despite its central role in everyday life. That gap in understanding fueled his curiosity and ultimately shaped the documentary’s focus on logistics: from farms and rail yards to ports, processors, and grocery shelves. Agriculture, he notes, is logistics, and many of the systems modern society depends on were built to move and preserve food.
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The episode walks through the challenges of producing the documentary independently. David shares stories from filming in Illinois, the West Coast, and South Korea, where U.S. soybeans were processed into traditional foods and served to families half a world away.
Despite setbacks, Journey of a Bean exceeded expectations by capturing the scale of agriculture. David reflects on meeting farmers, transportation workers, processors, and international partners, all connected through shared responsibility. The experience reshaped how he approaches storytelling, reinforcing the value of curiosity, humility, and asking fundamental questions.
Interview Transcript
This transcript was created with help from Ai. Please report errors to us and always refer to the video as your primary source.
David Geiger: Welcome to the Iowa Ag Podcast. I’m your host, David Geiger here at the Jetro Barbecue Studio. Thanks so much for joining me today, and we are going to do a bit of a different episode. I’m gonna be a bit reflective in this one. Today I am going to reflect on one of my favorite memories in my professional career, and also one of the most ambitious projects that I’ve worked on was a decade ago at the start of 2016 that I started on the adventure of making a documentary. Called Simply Journey of a Bean. I was new to far full-time broadcast only two years into working for the Agribusiness Association of Iowa. They had made an agreement at the time to make a three minute, morning and noon program for WHO Channel 13 called the Agribusiness Report. So I was learning and still figuring out how to tell a good story even more so. I was new to the world of agriculture. I had no background in farm. I had lived in suburban or urban areas most of my life. Although retrospectively I did learn. I had lived in agricultural strongholds. I was born in the Central Valley of California. I was raised in Iowa, and I even lived for a time in the south of Brazil. Hug Grand Soul were the GA or Brazilian version of Cowboys. Lived that meant I had a lot to catch up on from terms and acronyms to markets and agronomics to increase my understanding, I was drawn to many simple questions, including the one that kickstarted the documentary. That is, how does the soybean make it around the world? You see, I was fascinated by agriculture because for something so important, I had heard and learned so little about it while I was outside of the community, and the more I learned about it, the more I realized just how much of an impact it had and how much we take it for granted. It was so deeply entrenched in the lives of every human being on Earth. Yet it has a massive communication problem, and despite that, it touches an incredibly large number of businesses and just as importantly, facilitates the existence of the rest of them. At the heart of agriculture was and is logistics. Agriculture is logistics. Agriculture creates logistics, transportation systems, preservation techniques, cutting edge technology. All of that often begin and are the drivers of. Agriculture. So as early as 2014, I’d wondered how cool would it be to follow a crop growing in the US to some location in the world that needs it. But it wasn’t until 2016 that I would begin, I’d saved up enough money and found enough context to pursue the documentary that would lead me to Illinois, the West coast, and all the way to South Korea. Now it was about the scale I had hoped for, but at the time there were not many obvious leads to follow. My research had led me to just one other story that was similar. It was an article I found online following the production of specialized pork from the US to Japan. Being based in Iowa, I’d hoped to find a nearby farmer, but I knew I needed more than just the farmer. I needed a business that was heavily involved with both the crop and the end user. So I made some connections with the US Soybean Export Council and the Schooler Company. Now to be clear, this was never going to be a high budget operation. I had my normal nine to five and journalist salary. Uh, if you know, you know, I was also highly independent doing most of my own reporting video and editing by myself. The combination made it so I didn’t prepare much support for documentary production. I ended up spending about $4,000 of my own money and about three to four weeks of vacation time I was thankfully able to use some of the Agribusiness Association of Iowa Equipment. Again, the place I worked for, they had some video equipment that I could use to film, and I also got some help through contacts to set up times for interviews or facility tours, which I was. Incredibly grateful for. Still, I was all in. I was connected to Dustin Carstensen. He was a farmer who grew non GMO soybeans for schooler over in Illinois. Schooler sold those specialized products to South Korea, so I got that access to logistics. I found and interviewed people who ran the trains, those soybeans would travel on and the ports they would depart. And enter from. I was shown a factory the beans arrived in and how they were processed into a product called Ku Jang. Then I visited stores with US products in South Korea and filmed it all turned into food. Throughout the whole documentary, I made sure to interview government and economic experts as well as professionals, however. Not all went quite as I had hoped for one, the South Korean businesses I worked with were a lot more private than I had expected. Very, very private. Actually, some of the news pieces I watched while I was there showed blurred faces just of people passing by it. Very respectful of that privacy. And so the business that I worked with there, they agreed only to be interviewed on the condition of not. Mentioning their names, so I couldn’t have the business name there. And then I also was not allowed to reveal grocery clients in respect of their privacy, so I had to film more generic products after I filmed the soybeans dust and made and turned into the product over there. And another problem, disaster struck at the end of soybean harvest. Almost said tragedy, but I know there’s way worse things. I’d put a time lapse camera on a fence post at planting and I’d filmed that field throughout the entire year and I filmed it plant. I filmed it growing. I filmed harvest. After that harvest, I checked that TimeLapse camera and it was still there, and I’m like. Should I grab this now, but I, I was certain I needed just a couple more shots of that time lapse to get just a couple more pic pictures of the empty field, and so I left it there and came back a couple weeks later. It was gone. I was so devastated. I did have a backup camera that I put in a different field that I did similar things of filming with, but that camera was on a tree instead of a fence post, so it was a bit more shaky for some of the time lapse progression of that field. Of course, another problem. Some of the interviews I thought that would be easy ended up to be a bit harder. I had to take a plane ride, uh, after, uh, nearly I wanna say six months or more after I’d done most of the other filming. Take a plane to Texas, do my stuff, take an interview there, come back to try to avoid taking too many days off. Um, and then of course, my last one’s just all my own fault. Have a bit of a procrastination problem, and so while I did nearly all of the filming and editing of the documentary between 2016 and 2017, I then had a bit of life events happen and didn’t write or edit that documentary until 2019. So it was released about seven years ago. There were parts of the documentary that exceeded my expectations. Despite all of my efforts to work and work to make it happen. I was never really sure that I would get to see every part of the process. I figured there’d be some barrier of some kind that would stop me from entering some place or another, but I was able to get access to the farm, train, yards, ports, facilities, and even managed to see in South Korea the containers that I believe I saw. Saw shipped off there and, uh, took a couple weeks to get there. And that was so cool to me, uh, to see that entire process, with the exception being all the way to the grocery store from the processor because of the previous privacy concerns that were had before. Traveling to South Korea was also a highlight of my life. I was nervous going there by myself. I was in a country where I didn’t know the language. Uh, I was often in places where I was the only white guy around, and that was a really good experience to have. In my opinion, it really made. Life look a little bit differently and it clarified it a bit better. So I think that’s a, a good thing to experience and I had to navigate and, and interview people despite all of that. And it was just so cool going to Seoul and seeing all sorts of. Ways they do transportation, the different way they live as well. I also built a relationship with some of the businesses that helped me translate during the processor tour. That was really cool. And I also was blessed by my Airbnb host who cooked a soup with DW Jung. It was not quite the exact product, but it was a very similar product. Uh, just to show off what. Our products in the US become. And so I gotta film and show what it could be, what a US soybean could be in another country. Additionally, and this was, this was a personal little thing. Uh, I was interviewed by Charity Nevy of Iowa Public Radio after, uh, the documentary was released and I sent a pitch their way. Um. It was really funny. I, when I was first doing the documentary, when I was thinking of it, I’m like, I wonder if I could be the person on the radio there being interviewed. Like that would be really, really cool. And then it happened. I was so nervous though. And to this day, I have not listened to that interview because I’m so nervous that I sounded horrible in it. Now looking back, the making of the journey of a Bean was an incredible experience and in my opinion, still shows the heart of the story I wanted to tell. Showing just how incredible our agricultural system is. It takes so many moving parts and allows you and I to have our own lives, to live our own lives with. A diverse and an abundant amount of food. A soybean planted in Illinois can be a part of a family meal on the other side of the world. And in the same way Iowa grocery stores can serve fresh tomatoes in January. That shouldn’t be happening, but it does still. Agriculture is ultimately about people. That logistics thing I was talking about, it centers around people and I had the honor and pleasure to speak to so many people that individually have their own lives and jobs, but together create the complex and vibrant foundations of modern civilization. I absolutely thought the documentary I set out to create 10 years ago was ambitious, and I wasn’t sure if I would make it all the way to the end. But as I ask the simple question, how does a soybean make it around the world? I got a simple answer. It’s piece by piece. It’s step by step, and it’s one person’s effort handed off in trust to another. I. This project was a turning point in how I approach storytelling, interviews and farm communication. I believe fundamental questions should be revisited, so our ability to understand each other never breaks down. I learned at times my most foolish questions could get the best answers, and I was reminded. Curiosity should be a core component in broadcasting. If you haven’t seen the journey of a Bean, please feel free to check it out. It’s free to watch on YouTube and should be the first thing that pops up if you search that journey of a bean in that keyword slot there. But who knows if it’s fallen off in the last seven years or so. Quick side note, I was worried about trying to pitch and sell the journey of a being in pre-production. Procrastination problems. I was worried it’d be more obstacles to face in actually getting it done, so I marketed it as a pro bono documentary to try and help get my foot in the door, and I think it did help me secure some of the interviews I got. Ultimately though, I think it also made it easier to access because at the end of the day, that’s what I wanted. I wanted good information and interesting story. As many people as possible learning about the agricultural system they knowingly or unknowingly rely on. So after a decade, I fondly look back on my own journey of a bean. Thanks for joining me on the Iowa Ag Podcast here at the Jethro Barbecue Studio. Again, I am your host, David Geiger. And to send you off, here’s a couple minutes of my documentary Journey of a Bean.