UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- At a recent ceremony honoring long-time employees of Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences, two professors received special recognition for 50 years of service. In fact, noted the dean of the college, Henry Gerhold is second in university seniority only to legendary football coach Joe Paterno.

“But I have an advantage over Joe,” the professor of forest genetics quipped. “I was a student here in the late 1940s, before Joe got here.”

Lou Moore, professor of agricultural economics, also received recognition for working for Penn State 50 years. He was a student at the university too, earning both a bachelor’s degree in economics and a master’s in agricultural economics.

Obviously Gerhold and Moore have seen a lot of changes over the past five decades, as Penn State grew from a sleepy little agricultural college to a cosmopolitan university with an enrollment of 42,000 at the University Park campus. “The students seem so much younger now than they used to,” says Moore with a chuckle. “When I first came to Penn State, there were just 9,000 of them.”

When Gerhold started at Penn State as a student, the structure of DNA had not been discovered yet. “I was at Yale working on my doctoral degree when I first became aware of it,” says Gerhold, a native of Mahwah, N.J. “That was just after Crick and Watson discovered DNA at Cambridge, and a thorough understanding of the cellular material that determines heredity in all living things was still decades away.” In the mid-1950s, when Gerhold began his research in the then-College of Agriculture trying to develop a better Christmas tree, terms such as “genetic modification,” “genomics” and “gene sequencing” were unheard of. Today, partly because of his work, Pennsylvania is a leader in Christmas-tree production.

Moore, a native of Bedford County, began working for the university in 1955 as its first area marketing agent. Based in Erie County, he traveled to 10 Pennsylvania counties consulting with farmers and other agricultural producers. In 1958, Penn State invited him back to University Park to become an extension economist and livestock, meat and grain specialist -- a role he still plays.

“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 looked to get into some career involved with 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.”

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Writer/Editor: Jeff Mulhollem 814-863-2719 jjm29@psu.edu