Alums Stories

When Janine (Stewart) Whipps was a student at Iowa State, her family’s farm faced a crisis when pseudorabies struck the purebred Duroc herd.

Steve Mickelson was three when he started singing in public. Known as “The Mickelson Five,” he, his sister and three brothers sang at funerals, church events, community events and Farm Bureau meetings around Storm Lake where his family farmed.

"It’s just a café.”

In the meat processing business, food safety remains a priority issue for companies of all sizes, including small, independent processors who have been supplying local foods long before the concept captured the attention of culinary professionals

David McDonald started training for his job as president and chief operating officer of the OSI Group more than 25 years ago when he was hired as the company’s first intern.

Students in the San Diego Unified School District are trading cards of a different variety these days. One “Farmer Bill Brammer” card could equal a “Robin and Lucila from Suzie’s Farm.”

Andrea Falk Sellers feels at ease advising her clients as both a scientist and entrepreneur. With a career path that took her from decoding DNA to drawing up patents, she is as much of an entrepreneur as the clients she counsels.

A person would count themselves lucky to have enjoyed one successful career on the cusp of scientific breakthroughs in agriculture and improving farmer-profitability.

Maggie Howe’s products are a bit different from those of most Iowa farmers.

The curious faces of children peer out farmhouse windows, greeting recent visitors to the Hansen Family dairy farm in northeast Iowa.

Those little faces are the seventh generation of the family to be raised on the land since the 1860s.

Ask Anwar Battikhi where he’s from and he’ll offer an oratory of familial descent beginning with his great grandfather’s emigration from Syria to Jordan in the mid-19th century.

To combat malnutrition, the president of Zambia promised one pint of milk per day to each school-age child in the country. He soon found his promise impossible to keep. Thankfully, Alex Buchanan was able to help.

As a volunteer manager for Peace Corps in Honduras, Alejandrina Carrasco looks at her job as a way to bring two cultures together for a common good.

Laurie Hueneke Martens has many tools in her arsenal, but her weapon of choice is science.

A version of the “Ag Travel Course” also took students to farms and agricultural sites throughout the U.S.

“Did you grow up on a farm?” Owen Newlin asks a recent visitor.

Leadership, career success and personal growth are all goals listed in the FFA mission statement.

If you visit the Science Bound web page at Iowa State University you’ll see that under “results,” in addition to 56 graduates, the program for recruiting ethnically diverse students in math and science lists a number of masters graduates and “a Ph

For Bonnie (Cowell) Hoffmann, the choice to raise goats was a good fit – in more ways than one.