Dwayne O. Andreas*

Class of 1994

  • Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Archer Daniels Midland Company

I had more good luck than anybody else I knew. Some people say the harder you work, the luckier you get.

Born in Minnesota in 1918, Dwayne Andreas was less than a year old when his family moved to a farm near Lisbon, Iowa. There, Andreas and his five brothers and a sister learned to live off the land. Their father was a Mennonite who instilled in his children a strong sense of discipline and hard work, as well as a religious reliance on the land. "Some people would say we were poor, but we didn't think so,"