40 Under 40: Anna Van Diest

Anna Van Diest, 35, got into the business of selling agricultural real estate because she was fascinated by the business of farming.

“I just couldn’t get enough of it,” she said in an earlier interview of her research into farming. Van Diest is a farm specialist and broker with Basin Ag Sales, an extension of Moses Lake Realty Group. She’s got other business interests and pursues them from her office in the building she owns with her husband Rob on Broadway Avenue in Moses Lake.

Van Diest said trips around the Columbia Basin triggered her interest in farmland, noticing a field with a crop that seemed random but actually was planned. That got her interested in the details of farming and how it worked, she said.

Her family purchased the building on Broadway, half of which is now the Moore Brewing Company, because there was potential on Broadway, and she was looking for opportunity, she said in an earlier interview.

Van Diest and her family immigrated from Estonia in 1992; she was three years of age. Her parents started with very little, she wrote. 

“With practically nothing, we emerged as a testament to hard work, passion and the will to succeed,” she said.