Farm News, IA
12-27-07
ISU’s Bob Wisner retires after 40 years
By Darcy Dougherty Maulsby - Farm News staff writer
Bob Wisner, an Iowa State University ag economist who has retired after providing grain marketing information and advice to Iowa producers for more than 40 years, says he'll have more time to enjoy his Silver King tractors and other interests.
Ames —When Bob Wisner joined Iowa State University’s (ISU) Department of
Economics in February 1967, soybean prices ranged from $3.40 to $3.75 a bushel, corn hovered around 85 cents to $1.15 a bushel, and the statewide average corn yield hit a whopping 80 bushels per acre.
“I remember debates about whether the state-wide average could break the 100bushel-peracre mark,” said the soft-spoken Wisner, 68, a well-known Extension grain marketing specialist who retired from ISU in early December. “Yields of 200 or 300 bushels were far beyond what we could imagine.”
Grain marketing was also much less complex than it is today. A majority of Iowa farmers raised livestock, much of the corn was handled as ear corn, and most of the grain was fed to livestock. If a producer did have excess corn or soybeans to sell, marketing was based on government programs, which were dominated by the government storage programs of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Wisner recalled.
Growing from farm roots
In those days, grain farmers didn’t worry about global competition in the marketplace. When Wisner was growing up with his three siblings in rural southeastern Michigan during t he 1940s and 1950s, his father wasn’t concerned about the condition of the South American crop. More immediate issues involved the Wisner family’s row crops and pasture on 830 acres, which supported the farm’s dairy herd, sheep, farrow-to-finish swine operation and cow-calf operation.
Wisner, a 1957 high school graduate, hoped to farm after completing his formal education. While opportunities at Michigan State University (MSU) prompted him to study ag engineering, the young scholar quickly discovered his true calling in ag economics. He completed his bachelor’s degree and master’s degree at MSU, where he wrote his thesis on the behavior of basis in corn.

When he began his job search after earning his doctorate from the Univeristy of
Tenneessee, interview opportunities arose from North Dakota State University to the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Washington, D.C. When Wisner had the chance to join the economics department at ISU, however, the choice was clear.
“ISU was number-one in the nation in ag economics, thanks to leading economists like Dr. Earl Heady, whom ISU’s Heady Hall is named after, and Dr.
Bill Murray, the department head who helped found Living History Farms in
Urbandale,” said Wisner, who noted that many of these men were literally writing the books on ag economics, since their texts were used by economics departments in universities across the country.
Space-age technology simplifies work
As the new assistant professor and Extension economist in grain marketing,
Wisner relied on the tools of the trade in the late 1960s, including typewriters and mechanical calculators, which could add, subtract, divide, multiply and calculate square roots. “One version of the mechanical calculator weighed about 45 pounds,” Wisner said. “When you put in the numbers, it sounded like a coffee grinder as it calculated, and sometimes it could take up to a minute to give you the answer.”
All charts had to be completed by hand. “What now takes a few seconds on a computer could take several hours back then,” Wisner said. Word processing marked another major advancement in the economics department, which generated countless reports and charts throughout the year. “We got into trouble with the secretaries if we wanted to make changes to our reports after they were typed, because it was so time consuming,” Wisner said.
Thanks to his eye for detail and commitment to ag economics, Wisner became a valued member of ISU’s ecnomics department. “Bob’s years of experience, combined with a real passion for grain marketing and detail analysis, have set him apart,” said John Lawrence, an ag economist at ISU and director of the Iowa
Beef Center. “He is one of the few economists, if not the only one, who makes his own estimates of acreage, exports, feed use, etc., rather than simply using
USDA numbers.”
Today, no economic forecast is complete without an analysis of global affairs.
U.S. farmers entered the brave new world of global markets, Wisner recalled, when the former Soviet Union became a large grain importer in the 1970s.
Global markets underpin the three keys that Wisner believes will greatly influence the future of U.S. agriculture, including 1.) South America, specifically Brazil and
Argentina; 2.) China, especially if it becomes a corn importer again, and 3.) the former
Soviet republics, which are major exporters. “If they achive political

stability and a financial and legal system that encourage foreign investment in their agricultural sector, this could have a dramatic impact,” he said.
Looking ahead
While Wisner has retired from his full-time work at ISU, he plans to keep busy in
2008 working with the Livestock Marketing Information Center in Colorado, spending more time with his wife, Ann, as well as the grandchildren, restoring a
1941 Silver King Tractor at his acreage northwest of Ames, and enjoying some of his favorite hobbies, including vegetable gardening and hiking.
“Being born and raised on a farm, I’ve always had a strong desire to help the
American farmer,” Wisner said. “In my 40 years at ISU, I’ve enjoyed meeting and serving farmers across Iowa and am pleased that many are becoming better grain marketers.”
Darcy Dougherty Maulsby can be reached at yettergirl@yahoo.com.