Meet the Corn Farmer: Howard Buffett

While we wait out the Fed, take a peek at this interview that ran on Nightly Business Report last night with Howard Buffett.

Buffett mania should be out of control later this week with the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting taking place, and Susie Gharib got ahead of the curve by sitting down with Buffett's children. As much as I would like to poke fun at Warren for making Becky Quick and Liz Claman trip over themselves to line up interviews, you can't fault Warren for raising children like Howard.

His father did not gain notoriety until Howard was a teenager, and Warren was just a normal Dad to him. Who made him sweat for his 25 cent allowance. Of course, in typical Buffet fashion, Howard has found himself in the middle of the commodity boom, and is a humble corn farmer at heart:

GHARIB: It's planting time now at your farm. You're dressed to plant corn. Why do you do that when you could sit back and let others do this work for you?

BUFFETT: Because I love doing it. I don't know any other answer. I like doing it.

GHARIB: Did your father indulge you in any way with lavish gifts or buying you anything you ever wanted?

BUFFETT: No, I would say that that's just about the opposite of how we grew up. I mean he was always very thrifty and very conscientious about how money was spent. And so the last thing he would have done is -- for more than one reason is to spend a lot of money on his kids.

GHARIB: I figure you didn't get a big allowance.

BUFFETT: I probably got a $0.25 allowance. For that I had to clean the gutters and dump the trash on Saturday or something. You didn’t get an allowance without also doing something for it. And I will tell you, growing up, I always felt it was fair. I might have argued for, you know, a little increase to $0.50 or something but, you know, I got $0.35.

GHARIB: Howard, in our culture, money can change people. Why is it that money hasn’t changed your father?

BUFFETT: Money has not been something that’s driven him. He’s got—he had more than he needed years ago and it’s the challenge of doing deals and doing good deals and working with people that you want to work with.

Good stuff, in its entirety below.

“Meet the Buffetts” - Howard Buffett
NBR

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