Sitting relaxed in his office in a long-sleeve plaid shirt and blue jeans (the working apparel of a man who proudly refers to himself as an Iowa farmer), Harry H. Stine heads one of the largest privately-owned seed production companies in the world, Stine Seed Company of Adel.
     After 40 years in the seed business, Harry is still enthused about coming to work every day, enjoying the thrill of discovery and the challenge of competition. He states in a soft matter-of-fact tone, “I find that creating new technology and seed products that are the best that ever existed — and in fact have never existed on the face of the earth before — is the most exciting thing I can imagine. This is fun!”
     On a late February day, the computer screen on Harry Stine’s desk glows with the latest harvest data from the company’s corn plots in Argentina, as he stays near the phone awaiting word about progress on a major business deal underway.
     No day is “typical” for Harry. He explains, “That’s partially because I am a farmer, and if you ask a farmer what a typical day is, depending on the season that varies radically. The fact is that we plant and harvest almost all of the time someplace in the world, which changes that a little more.”
     On this day, for example, harvest had just begun in Argentina, where Stine Seed has 45,000 corn plots, and in Hawaii where it has nursery material. A week earlier the company’s crops in southern Florida had been harvested and replanted.
     During peak times when harvest data is coming in, Harry is up at 2 or 3 a.m. and arrives at the office around 5 a.m. Other times of the year, he gets in around 7 or 8 a.m. “I’m not a night person, so I’m normally out of here by 9 p.m. during harvest,” he says. However, on occasion when the harvest is running 24 hours a day, he may work through the night.
     Perhaps this work ethic is the secret to why Harry’s company has become one of the nation’s top soybean seed suppliers. Stine seed breeding is a world-class business supplying the genetics for half of all soybean seed sold in the Midwest. In recent years, the company has been on the cutting edge of biotechnology soybean and corn seed research.
     What is Harry Stine most proud of? “Simply creating the newest and best seed products for my fellow farmers.”

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     As a young boy growing up on the family farm, Harry always had a love of the land and wanted to have a farming operation someday. However, as he acknowledges today, “The magnitude of what we have done is greater than I had ever anticipated.”
     In 1963, Harry graduated from McPherson (Kansas) College, where he majored in agriculture. He then attended Iowa State University to study agricultural economics before returning to the farm to work with his father, who also had a small soybean seed cleaning operation, selling seed produced on the farm to neighbors.
     In the late 1960s, Harry, working for a short time with four other seed producers, started a plant breeding operation at the Stine farm. In 1973, the business was dissolved and Harry and head plant breeder Bill Eby founded Midwest Oilseeds, which today is one of the largest and most successful soybean research and development programs in the world.
     Through all of this success, Harry’s love for the land has kept him involved in nearly all aspects of seed research and production. He was named Iowa Jaycees’ Outstanding Young Farmer in 1972-73. In 1989, he was selected as Agri-marketer of the Year by the Iowa chapter of the National Agri-Marketing Association, and was Arthur Young’s Iowa/ Nebraska Entrepreneur of the year. In 2000, the Des Moines Register named him as one of the 50 most influential people in Iowa, and in 2003 he was inducted into the Iowa Business Hall of Fame.
     Harry says his company’s success has been based on “constantly following cost-effective principles that have worked well for us, being very logical in our approach to plant breeding and research, and being ready and willing to adjust and change.”
     In addition to having the largest private soybean breeding and development program in existence — testing about one million unique varieties annually — the company operates its own proprietary seed corn breeding program, testing more than 100,000 different preliminary hybrids a year.
     Stine Seed also owns around a dozen other entities that serve different functions for operating purposes, he says. International Oilseeds, for example, is the company’s primary marketing arm, selling soybean and corn germ plasm to other seed companies.

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     In recent years, Stine crop seed research business has mushroomed with the integration of biotechnology into production agriculture. The company was the first to release and market soybeans derived from biotechnology.
     The rapidly emerging acceptance of bio-tech seed products by farmers convinced Harry that biotechnology was going to be an effective tool in developing new seed products. “The classical example is Roundup Ready soybean seed developed by Monsanto, which is now planted on over 80 percent of the soybean acres in the U.S.,” he notes.
     In 1997, Stine Seed entered a 15 year non-exclusive collaboration agreement with Monsanto Agricultural Products and Asgrow Seed Co. to share technology to further improve and develop soybean genetics and product development technologies.
     That agreement was a landmark event for Stine Seed. Today, the licensing of germ plasma to other seed companies is Stine Seed’s primary business. Its revenue from Stine label seed has increased significantly, as well.
     To lead its bio-tech research effort, Stine Seed opened a biotechnology lab in the Iowa State University Research Park in Ames in 1995. The company’s budget for bio-tech research has approximately doubled since the facility opened, says Martin Wilson, director.
     “Today, over 90 percent of the products we sell are bio-tech in nature or carry bio-tech traits,” says Harry. “Five years ago, it may have been around 20 percent, and 10 years ago it was zero.”
     The company has also invested in other new promising biotech ventures, such as NewLink Genetics, an Ames, biotech startup which is developing a drug that would use the human immune system to fight cancer; and ProdiGene Inc., based in Texas, one of the nation’s leading research companies in the production of bio-pharmaceutical crops.
     “One of the major challenges in this industry is overcoming the apprehensions of those — in the U.S. particularly, as well as internationally — who do not want change or who have concerns about the progress of science,” says Harry.

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     Harry is quick to acknowledge the contributions of his employees to the success of the company: “We think our work ethic is a little different than typical. Our people work harder, and with a better attitude. There isn’t anything that I can’t or won’t do here, and we don’t expect to have any personnel to have anything that they would not want to do.”
     In recognizing their efforts, Harry gained widespread publicity last fall by giving his 270 employees a bonus of $1,000 for each year of their individual service. The cost: close to $1 million, or an average of nearly $4,000 per employee. Some veteran employees have worked for the company as long as 35 years.
     “We had done similar things frequently over the years, but had not done so for awhile,” he says. “We do not do it not because we are nice folks, but because our people deserve it.”
     Chuck Hansen, a vice president who has worked for the company for 20 years, including the past 11 years as production manager, recalls that Harry’s announcement of the bonus came at the annual post-harvest luncheon held at the company’s headquarters.
     “People were a little shocked,” he says. “Some were obviously thinking ‘did I really hear that right,’ and then added up in their own mind how long they had been here. You could tell in talking to people afterwards that it gave them a boost, and made them even more enthusiastic about what they’re doing here.”
     At the same time, Harry has demonstrated through his philanthropy and personal participation a belief in the power of education to transform lives, particularly in his involvement with Buena Vista University.
     Harry’s introduction to BVU began in the mid-1990s through a meeting arranged by an alumnus, Steve Simon, Class of ’83, who is vice president/commercial banking services at Bankers Trust in Des Moines and a former member of the BVU alumni board. Harry, a business client of Simon, eventually came to the BVU campus to participate in a discussion with a group of science and business students and an Academic and Cultural Event Series presentation.
     Under the leadership of President Fred Moore and biology professor Dr. James Hampton, BVU’s relationship with Stine Seed has grown, initially leading to the funding of an innovative tissue culture project and peer mentoring program for science students. Then, in 2002, Stine Seed donated $1 million to the new Estelle Siebens Science Center, which was one of the key gifts in meeting BVU’s science challenge campaign goal.

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     “Harry Stine’s personal participation with our students and faculty, and the extraordinary gift from Stine Seed, have helped energize the study of science on our campus,” says President Moore. “His partnership with BVU has created new learning opportunities for our science majors, as well as other benefits that will enhance the academic experience for all students.”
     Over the course of this relationship, BVU sophomore science students have had the opportunity to annually visit the Stine Biotechnology Center. “The scientists stop their work for the day, meet with our students, provide the materials and help us make the nutrient media for the tissue culture project, go to lunch with us and then give presentations on their own research,” says Hampton. Additionally, the bio-tech center has provided internship opportunities for BVU students.
     As a graduate of a small college, Harry has a great respect for the role that schools such as BVU and his alma mater McPherson College have in higher education. “Having a broad educational background is desirable, and having the personal attention from the faculty and staff at a small to medium size college or university has some advantages.”
     “Unfortunately, extremely small schools have problems simply maintaining viability,” he comments. “Buena Vista is in a nice position in being able to have competent staff and administration, yet small enough to provide students with personal attention.”
     “Despite all the problems we hear about, I think students today are better prepared than ever before, both to go to college as well as when they graduate,” he comments. “They have a broader perspective on the world, at least in reference to my generation. Young people have exciting advantages today in both the experiences they have growing up and their future opportunities.”

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     Whether fishing on a quiet stream, picking mushrooms and berries, exploring for arrowheads on his farm along the Raccoon River, or stopping his pickup along the road to dig parsnips from the ditch, Harry is in tune with nature.
      His wife, Molly, who is a native of Cherokee, says one thing most people don’t know about Harry, is that “he is as intense about doing any of his pastimes as he is about business. He has to know the exact depth to fish, whether or not to use a bobber, and size of hook. He also has kept a detailed four or five year running daily log of the number of mushrooms that he picks.”
     Showing another side of his competitive spirit, he also may invite visitors to a friendly game of table tennis, a game he took up in college and now does not get to play as much as he would like.

Over the years, Harry has served as:

• 4-H leader
• church youth leader
• church board chair
• Rotary Club member
• Iowa Council for International Understanding board member
• Trees Forever director and board member
• Corporation for International Trade of the Des Moines Chamber of Commerce director
• American Society of Agronomy and American Seed Trade Association member
• Iowa Arboretum Board member

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     When taking a break from his work day, Harry often enjoys going up the nearby 110-foot observation tower which he built, complete with an elevator, about 15 years ago. As one visitor recalls, “Harry likes to say he lives in a one-story farm house and has an 11-story elevator.”
     “Sometimes I go up the tower several times a day, and other times I may not go up for a week or two. It offers a nice view of the river and the wildlife, and you can check how the crops are doing, or when a weather front is moving in,” says Harry. “When I was up the other day, I counted 21 deer.”
     Harry frequently invites visitors to go up the tower. They have included schoolchildren, former Gov. Terry Branstad, Senator Charles Grassley, and a number of foreign guests.
     Some of his business visitors may get a special initiation when they get out of the elevator: Harry tells them that is where he likes to conduct business — 11 stories high.
     Dr. James Hampton, associate professor of biology at BVU, recalls that experience when he met with Harry about a gift for a research project for BVU science students: “When we got to the top of the tower and he said he was ready to talk about a gift. So he sat on the rail that surrounds the observation platform, and asked me to sit on the rail and tell him what I wanted. Of course I did, and we ended up getting the money for the project. I think Harry tries to see how people react when he pushes them a little. Do they take it as a joke and have fun with it, or do they panic.”

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  More on Stine Seed’s Role in the Bio-Tech Revolution

     “One of the most important things we are doing now is developing agronomic traits for corn and soybean seeds,” says Harry. “Most of the new things are so-called bio-tech, or traits to improve the quality of a crop, or the cost-effective production of the crop by adding traits that improve insect, disease and herbicide resistance.”
     “Specifically in bio-tech and just in general, historically there are people that don’t want to change. There were those who thought electricity was not good when we first had electricity. When hybrid corn first developed in the 1930s, there was resistance, and stories that it would not be good for livestock. There is just a natural tendency in human beings, and a certain segment in particular, that do no want to adjust or accept.”
     Regarding the potential threat of agricultural bio-terrorism to the nation’s food supply, he comments “None of us can guarantee there won’t be some kind of significant problem, but I believe the steps being taken by both government and industry reduce that probability. I think the seed industry has less potential problems with bio-terrorism than the livestock industry.
     ”And, while we should be concerned, we should not be overly concerned and therefore miss things that are perhaps more important — such as in the case of the so-called mad cow disease, which received a lot of press and got a lot of people concerned. The fact of matter is that to our knowledge no one from U.S has ever been sick or ill from such a problem. However, we have dozens of people who die every year from food poisoning, and hundreds of thousands who become ill from it. It is interesting to me that we don’t concern ourselves about the people who are dying and becoming ill, and are more concerned about a potential problem that we don’t have.”

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     Chuck Hansen, a vice president and production manager at Stine Seed:

     “Harry gives you the opportunity to utilize your abilities to the utmost. He does not try to micro-manage, but gives you freedom to make decisions, which is how you learn and get better at what you are doing.
     “If I could use one word to describe Harry as an employer, I would have to say ‘smart.’ He is also able to take complicated things and filter them down to a level that anyone can understand. He is patient, willing to take the time to explain things to you; his door is always open can go in and visit with him any time.”
     “In addition to being intelligent, Harry is extremely fair. We all can get frustrated when people make mistakes, but he understands that is part of it and hopefully we learn from our mistakes.
     “One thing I learned when I have a discussion with Harry and he says a number is this and I may think it’s something different, is that now I don’t say anything until I go back to my office and refigure it myself. Before, I used to say I didn’t think the number was correct. I’ve learned he is usually right.”

Martin Wilson, director of Stine Biotechnology:

     “Harry has played a major role in creating an environment for our research group to succeed, especially in his commitment to working only with elite germ plasm and to being cost-effective. He has many new ideas and is the main source of direction when it comes to identifying commercial targets for the group. He is very much a hands-on leader.”
     “We hope to maintain our leadership by continuing innovation and cost efficiency. You also have to have a bit of luck in research. Harry manages to give us enough freedom to try new things while at the same time maintaining focus on the company’s goals. The most exciting aspect of our work is to see a product of research make it into the field for testing. We hope always to be directly involved in new product development.”
     “One new area of technical interest is our aerosol beam injector, which is a new method for introducing DNA into plants and other organisms.”

Dr. James Hampton, professor of biology at BVU:

     “Harry is really an advocate of the power of education to transform lives and broaden world perspectives. He believes a strong foundation in science is important, but students should also have a sense of the reality around them through a general education curriculum.”
     “In his presentations to BVU students, Harry likes to talk in human terms about the genetic research he does with plants. The whole focus of his research is about yield, because he understands that yield is all that matters to farmers, and everything else is of secondary importance.”
     “The analogy he uses is a good pedagogical tool, because it reaches out to the students and they can understand his concepts. For instance, in talking