Bob Worth was painting a barn when he heard about the attacks
September 11, 2025, is the 24th anniversary of the terrorist attacks in New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.
U.S. farmers remember where they were when news of the attacks that killed a total of 2,977 people started to spread.
“My son Jon and I were painting a barn. It was a beautiful September day,” Bob Worth, a farmer from Lake Benton, Minn., about 21 hours away from the National Sept. 11 Memorial & Museum, told Farms.com. “My wife came out of the house and told us an airplane struck the twin towers.”
The Worths stopped painting to watch TV to see the footage in New York.
While trying to assess the situation is when Worth realized what he saw wasn’t accidental.
“You’re sitting there thinking how could something like this happen in the United States?” he said. But then it’s back-to-back planes in New York, then the Pentagon and then the one in Pennsylvania. You quickly understand these incidents are on purpose and America is under attack.”
Worth’s daughter Kim was working as an event planner in Minneapolis at the time. Suddenly people she scheduled to fly into the country weren’t allowed to, he added.
From that day on, talk of yield potential and harvest took a back seat to what was happening in New York.
“It was the only topic of conversation,” Worth said. “Whether you were at the parts shop, the coffee shop, or the dinner table. Everyone in the country had to come to grips with what happened.”
One part of the days and weeks that followed Sept. 11 Worth remembers is the stillness of the sky.
Planes fly over Worth’s farm from time to time – but that all stopped.
“There was nothing,” he said. “It was so quiet you almost felt like you could hear the clouds move.”
A member of the U.S. ag community died in the attacks.
John Ogonowski, who farmed 150 acres at White Gate Farm in Dracut, Mass., was the pilot of American Airlines Flight 11, which crashed into the North Tower.
He grew corn, hay, pumpkins, blueberries, and peaches. He also supported immigrant farmers from Cambodia through the New Entry Sustainable Farming Project,
In the 2008 Farm Bill, the USAID Farmer to Farmer program was renamed the John Ogonowski and Doug Bereutuer FTF Program.
Farms.com has spoken with other members of the ag community in the past about their memories of 9/11.
In 2018, Don Guinnip, a corn producer from Clark County, Ill., was doing maintenance on his equipment when news started flooding in.
“Early September in this part of Illinois, I was working on machinery and combines when someone told me,” he told Farms.com. “I remember watching the TV that night trying to get a grasp on what happened in New York.”
And in 2020, John Kriese, a beef producer from Branchport, N.Y., about 300 miles from the national Sept. 11 memorial, remembered driving to a bull sale in Indiana after the attacks.
“It was so eerie,” he said. “There was almost nobody on the road and no matter what radio station you put on, everybody was playing very patriotic music. We pulled into the bull sale and people couldn’t believe that we made the drive.”