Obituaries
Bernard “Bud” F. Stanton
1925-2020
Bernard (Bud) Freeland Stanton passed away September 25, 2020, in Ithaca, New York, at the age of 95. He was an agricultural professor at Cornell University for 39 years, retiring in 1992. His contributions to the profession, both domestically and internationally, were extensive. During his time as chair of the Department of Agricultural Economics at Cornell from 1968-1976, he led the expansion of the department’s expertise in resource economics, international trade, and econometrics. His own research area was farm management and production economics, and he taught courses in those areas as well as statistics and research methods. Following his retirement to Professor Emeritus, Bud worked part-time in Cornell's Health Careers Office from 1996 to 2008, where he advised Cornell students preparing for medical fields.
Bud was born on Old Homestead Farm in Westerlo Township, New York, on August 3, 1925. He grew up on a farm and was active in 4-H and the local dairy club as a boy. He graduated from Greenville High School in 1942 and, after working on the farm during WWII, received his BS degree from Cornell University's College of Agriculture in 1949. Following graduate work at the University of Minnesota, earning MS and PhD degrees in Agricultural Economics, and a year at Oxford University as an Elmhurst Scholarship recipient, he returned to Ithaca and joined the Agricultural Economics faculty at Cornell in 1953.
Bud Stanton’s early research concentrated on topics in farm management of various commodities, but he subsequently contributed to the literature in price and supply analysis, and farm structure. His paper on the seasonal demand for beef, pork, and broilers won an AAEA research award. His AAEA presidential address highlighted the literature on the economies of size in agricultural production, still a timely research area with the continual increase in farm size.
Bud was selected a Fellow of the AAEA in 1983. He served as the AAEA president in 1979, as well as on numerous AAEA committees, including the editorial council of the AJAE. He was an active participant in the International Association of Agricultural Economists, serving in 1981 as President and becoming an Honorary Life Member in 1994. He was an active participant with the Northeastern Agricultural Economics Association, serving several years on the Executive Committee.
Bud took sabbatical leaves in Washington, DC, Finland, Australia, India, and Belgium, and guest lecturing appointments in Japan, China, and Slovakia, which enriched his professional and family life. He was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Helsinki.
As these positions and awards demonstrate, Bud’s contribution not only included his research and teaching contributions, but more importantly, his contributions to the agricultural economics profession, locally, domestically, and internationally. His term as department chair at Cornell was a time of transition to new research areas and new faculty educated outside of Cornell. His involvement in professional organizations often led to new directions, changes, and improvements. He was always willing to undertake difficult assignments that offered little or no reward to himself, simply because he was aware of their importance to the profession.
Bud is survived by his children, Margaret, Karen, and Randy, grandchildren Lara, Tim, Shannon, Kate, Sean, and Tom, and great-granddaughter Elenora. He was preceded in death by his wife of nearly 65 years, Lara, whom he met on a blind date in 1955 while she was visiting Cornell from North Dakota for summer coursework.
Donald Lee Winkelmann
1931-2020
Donald L. Winkelmann, an agricultural economist and global leader in international agricultural research, died on October 7, 2020 at age 89 at Santa Fe, NM. Winkelmann lived and worked for 29 years in Mexico, rising to become Director General of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), a pioneer center for the Green Revolution. With intellect, persuasiveness, and perseverance, Winkelmann permanently changed the trajectory of international agricultural research to the benefit of poor farmers’ people around the world. In 1994, the Government of Mexico recognized his achievements with the Order of the Aztec Eagle, the highest honor bestowed on foreign nationals.
In 1966, through a Ford Foundation initiative, Winkelmann was seconded from Iowa State University, where he was a Professor of Economics, to the Colegio Postgraduados, Mexico’s premier university for advanced studies in agriculture. There, in the rural outskirts of Mexico City, he was granted two months to learn Spanish before embarking on his new task: helping to build Mexico’s first graduate program in agricultural economics.
Winkelmann was appointed the first economist at CIMMYT, El Batan, Mexico, in 1972 amid controversies about the social and economic impacts of the Green Revolution. Facing a headwind to demonstrate why social scientists were essential to international agricultural research, he mounted studies in seven countries to analyze the adoption of Green Revolution maize and wheat technology by small-scale farmers. By 1980, with researchers posted to six major regions of the developing world Winkelmann had built CIMMYT Economics into one of the flagship programs of the group of international agricultural research centers forming the CGIAR System,
Winkelmann focused his career on making international agricultural research both more relevant and more efficient. Under his leadership, CIMMYT pioneered methods to evaluate farmers’ circumstances and learn how technologies could be designed to meet their needs. These methods were encapsulated in economics training manuals that were translated into many languages and used by agricultural research programs worldwide. Winkelmann also developed methods to target agricultural research more efficiently by identifying relatively homogeneous maize and wheat ‘mega-environments’ across countries and continents.
Appointed CIMMYT’s fourth Director General in 1985, he pushed the Center to focus sharply on maximizing research impacts on the poor, engage with other CGIAR centers to promote sustainable intensification of diverse agricultural systems, and forge new partnerships with the rapidly developing private seed sector. In 1995, Winkelmann moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico and was appointed Chair of the Technical Advisory Committee (TAC), a high-level scientific panel of the CGIAR to guide research strategy and priorities and oversee science quality across the CGIAR System. He retired in Sante Fe in 2000.
Winkelmann was born on July 18, 1931 in Culbertson, NE, and grew up in rural Imperial Nebraska. He studied business administration in 1953 at the University of Nebraska and on graduating spent two years in the US Air Force. He went on to earn an MS in agricultural economics in 1957 at the same university, and after a stint at farming, earned his PhD in Economics at the University of Minnesota in 1964.
His many friends and colleagues from around the world recall Don Winkelmann for his sharp intellect, good humor, and generosity. He challenged his peers even as he challenged himself. An effective communicator in both English and Spanish, he was a voracious reader and a life-long learner.