Howard Buffett never finished college. He taught himself to farm on rented land in Nebraska, spent a stint as a county commissioner, served as sheriff of Macon County, Illinois, and photographed conflict zones and wildlife across roughly 130 countries. On September 18, the 71-year-old — the middle child of Warren Buffett — became chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, the trillion-dollar conglomerate his father spent six decades building.
On Wednesday, September 30, he will be on a much smaller stage: the Van Emmerik Studio inside the Maytag Student Center at Central College in Pella, Iowa, in conversation with Harry Smith, the award-winning broadcast journalist and 1973 Central graduate. The event begins at noon, it is free, and it is open to the public.
The subject is Ukraine — specifically, what Buffett has learned from the people displaced by Russia's full-scale invasion, and from those still living under occupation. It is a conversation that grew out of a classroom. Smith returned to Iowa and now serves as executive in residence at his alma mater, teaching a course he calls "Commencement: The Beginning," built around curiosity. Buffett is appearing as part of that curriculum.
"The work Howard Buffett is doing sheds a light on a war that is very much still alive, despite media focus shifting to other international conflicts," Smith said in announcing the visit. "These are incredible stories that will remind us of the humanity of these situations. He will also share a wide range of interests and his role in doing a world of good."
That work has been substantial. The Howard G. Buffett Foundation, which Buffett leads as CEO, has committed roughly $500 million — by some later counts around $800 million — in humanitarian assistance to Ukraine since the invasion began in February 2022. The foundation's stated focus is mitigating conflict and addressing its fallout: food insecurity, human trafficking, public safety. In Ukraine, that has meant supporting Ukrainian grain exports to developing nations facing food crises, backing the investigation and documentation of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and funding agricultural aid for farmers whose equipment, storage and fields have been destroyed or seeded with landmines.
Buffett's connection to the country is not abstract. He has documented what he saw in a book, "Courage of a Nation: Three Years of War," a compilation of his own words and photography drawn from the thousands of images he has captured since the invasion. The project later became a traveling exhibition — displayed at the Ukrainian National Museum in Chicago in 2025, and mounted on a set of Ukrainian railway cars turned into a moving gallery.
His perspective is that of a farmer as much as a philanthropist. Speaking at the 2024 Top Producer Summit, he described the destruction in agricultural terms: "Many farmers lost everything they've had. Think about if you were to go home today and your machinery shed is completely shelled, all your equipment is burned, and you don't know when you're going to be able to go back in the field because there are hundreds of landmines." He has argued that Ukraine's role as a top-three global grain exporter makes the war a food-security crisis for countries far from the fighting, and he has warned that favorable harvests elsewhere have only postponed a reckoning. "The timing is such that we've avoided a serious crisis around the world with food insecurity so far," he said, "but that doesn't mean it will stay that way."
Buffett's biography has always run outside the usual lanes of finance. He is named for his grandfather Howard Buffett and for Benjamin Graham, his father's favorite professor at Columbia. He grew up in Omaha with his older sister Susan and younger brother Peter. He has been a businessman, a politician, a photographer, a farmer and a conservationist, and he has served on Berkshire Hathaway's board since 1993. When Warren Buffett stepped down as chairman in September, he framed his son's new role narrowly: Greg Abel runs the company, the elder Buffett wrote to shareholders, while Howard will guard its culture and values — a culture, he said, worth more than anything on the balance sheet. Shareholders, he added, should think of Howard as a policy they own and hope never to claim against.
Smith's own path to the Pella stage is a homecoming story. He studied at Central, graduating in 1973, and went on to a long career bringing the world into American living rooms as an anchor and correspondent for CBS News and NBC News, interviewing presidents and world leaders and covering history as it happened. He announced his departure from NBC on the Today Show and came back to Iowa, where he now teaches.
The pairing is fitting for a small liberal arts college in a town of about 10,000. Central College was founded in 1853, and its alumni network has produced both the man asking the questions and, in Buffett, a guest whose foundation operates where, in its own description, others can't or won't. For an hour on a Wednesday at noon, the conversation will turn on a war that has slipped from the top of the news cycle — and on the people Buffett has met who are still living inside it.
The event is free and open to the public. It takes place at noon on Wednesday, September 30, in the Van Emmerik Studio at the Maytag Student Center on the Central College campus in Pella.