“Our agricultural programs have broadened,” says Moore. “Now, we deal with a lot of things other than agricultural production,which was the primary focus when I began working. Agribusiness is much larger than it used to be. More and more, extension work is done with the people who buy and sell products from the farmer, and less business is done with the farmer himself.”

Forestry students have changed over the years, but not as much as you might think, according to Gerhold. “In some ways, I think today’s students are generally more environmentally aware than their counterparts in the past,” he says. “But they have less understanding of nature than they used to. Before, many of the kids grew up on farms or in the country, and they spent a lot of time outside with nature. That’s a lot less true today.”

Gerhold also has noticed a shift in students’ career goals. “When I first started here, most of the forestry students were looking for a career involving timber production,” he says. “That is less true today. But I remember the days when our forestry students took field trips in canvas-covered trucks, not buses."

”Moore—who increasingly has been involved in international agribusiness, working closely with educational institutions in the former Soviet Union—has been impressed by the increase in demand over the years for international agribusiness services and students. “In the 1950s and 1960s, we never would have dreamed that today agriculture would have such an international flavor to it,” he says. “Globalization has not only come to the university, but also to agriculture.”

—Jeff Mulhollem