After over 20 years of hitting the “agriblogging” highway, ZimmComm principals Chuck and Cindy Zimmerman are retiring from business travel at the end of 2025.
The Zimmermans founded ZimmComm in 2004 as the first social media-based agricultural communications company and pioneered “event blogging” for farm and biofuels conferences, capturing the sights and sounds in photos and interviews. Nearly 225,000 photos and countless interviews and miles later, Chuck and Cindy have decided to hang up their traveling bags and spend more time at home.
“Event coverage has been the main part of our business for over 20 years now and while it is the most lucrative for us, it’s also the most stressful,” said ZimmComm president Chuck Zimmerman. “We have cut back on our travel considerably since 2020, but we are still logging a lot of miles a year as travel continues to get more expensive and less fun.”
“We plan to continue our news release service, AgWired and Energy AgWired, as well as our podcasting and audio production services, we are just giving up the travel portion of the business,” Chuck said. ZimmComm does still have several events before the end of 2025, including Tech Hub LIVE, Ag Media Summit, American Coalition for Ethanol annual meeting and AgGateway annual meeting.
ZimmComm has had a pro Flickr account since June of 2005 and the 980 albums in the account are representative of the travel the Zimmermans have done since starting the company. The ZimmComm Flickr account includes every Ag Media Summit since 2005 and every National Agri-Marketing Conference since 2006, Cattle Industry Conferences and Commodity Classics since 2006, all the National Biodiesel Conferences since 2006 and all the National Ethanol Conferences since 2007, just to mention a few. We intend to maintain these photo archives on Flickr where they can be easily downloaded.The albums include both domestic and global travel, including International Federation of Agricultural Journalists (IFAJ) Congresses going back to Switzerland in 2005, with trips to Norway, Japan, Austria, Canada, Sweden, Argentina, Scotland, New Zealand, and Germany. There are U.S. Grains Council trips to Mexico, Egypt and Morocco, multiple visits to Germany with Bayer and BASF, as well as Italy and Ireland with New Holland and Alltech.
“Most people want to retire so they can do some traveling and see the world,” said the Zimmermans. “We have been blessed to see pretty much all the places we ever wanted to see and then some! We want to retire so we can stay home and enjoy our beach more and just travel to see family.”