Des Moines Register
12-08-07
Esteemed grain economist retires from post at ISU
By JERRY PERKINS • REGISTER FARM EDITOR
Ames, Ia. - When Robert Newell Wisner began his job as an economist at
Iowa State University Extension in February 1967, Lyndon Baines Johnson
was president, the cost of a first class postage stamp was five cents and the
Green Bay Packers had defeated the Kansas City Chiefs, 35-10, the month
before in the first Super Bowl.
Wisner, a Michigan native who was 27 years old then, said that when he came to
Iowa State, most farms and farm equipment were a fraction of their size now,
most of the farms combined livestock and crop operations and almost every farm
town had an independently owned grain elevator.
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"When I came here, we had calculators that sounded like a coffee grinder and
acted something like a cash register," said Wisner. "Now, we can do more with a
laptop than we could back then with a mainframe computer.
"Our main sources of information were the Reuters news service and a ticker
tape that followed the prices on the Chicago Board of Trade," he recalled. "Now,
we have satellite images that show us the condition of crops in foreign countries
and instant access to historic and current farming information."
Wisner, 68, has racked up an impressive list of milestones in the 41 years that
have passed since his hiring and his retirement on Monday.
It has been conservatively estimated that Wisner has spelled out what is
happening in grain markets to farmers and other interested parties at more than
2,200 Extension meetings and has authored more than 1,500 publications.
He has contributed a market analysis article to 960 issues of the Iowa Farm
Outlook Newsletter, which in its online incarnation receives more than 50,000 hits
a month.
Wisner has traveled to 11 countries this year and has lost count of the number of
countries he's visited in the course of his duties at Iowa State.
"It's probably in the upper 20s or low 30s," he said.
Jack Payne, vice president for Extension and Outreach at Iowa State, said
Wisner has built his career on trust and savvy.
"Bob is such a gem and provides such a service to Iowa," Payne said. "He's had
his finger on the pulse of the bioeconomy since the beginning. He exemplifies
what Extension should be about."
For most of the past 41 years, Wisner has been considered "the pre-eminent
grain economist in the United States," according to Arne Hallam, chairman of
ISU's economics department.
Wisner has been an innovator in providing market outlooks and in analyzing
marketing and risk-management strategies, Hallam said.
Wisner pioneered research in the options market, which can be difficult to
understand but has allowed farmers more flexibility in their marketing strategies.
He also was one of the first to work on revenue assurance contracts that are
routinely offered to farmers by crop insurance companies, Hallam said, and went
to work educating crop insurance agents and farmers about risk management
tools like forward pricing and harvest-price revenue insurance.
Doug Cooper, Extension market news director, interviewed Wisner frequently
when Cooper was a farm broadcaster at radio stations in Iowa and Nebraska.
Farmers and journalists trusted Wisner and respected him, too, Cooper said.
"Bob told the truth," Cooper said. "He was accurate and you could trust him to
say what was going on and why."
Farm Editor Jerry Perkins can be reached at (515) 284-8456 or
jperkins@dmreg.com