Lester Manderscheid

MANDERSCHEID, MILLIKEN, VARNUM

Posted By: Kelli Wilslef (email)
Date: 5/17/2011 at 12:52:06

Jackson Sentinel
December 5, 1958

Starting with the late Robert Milliken, Nobel physics prize winner and longtime head of Cal Tech, the Maquoketa area has produced a lot of young men who have achieved their doctorates in various scientific fields. May have already made their mark in the academic or industrial research and others are on their way to doing so.

One of the youngest of the current group is Lester Manderscheid, son of Mr. and Mrs. Vincent Manderscheid, formerly of the Andrew area and now of Maquoketa.

Lester completed work on his doctorate in agricultural economics at Stanford University at Palo Alto, Calif., in 1956. He studied at Stanford from 1953 to 1956, after receiving his bachelor’s degree from Iowa State College in 1951 and his master’s degree in 1952. He graduated from Andrew high school in 1947.

Since 1958, Lester has been in the faculty of Michigan State College at East Lansing. Most of his duties have dealt with agricultural price research. And surprising to corn-minded Iowans, a great deal of this study has had to with the causes of fluctuations in prices of potatoes and onions. In this cattle-feeding area, the quotations on these commodities are of little interest to anyone but the budget-minded housewife. However, in the vegetable and fruit-growing areas of Michigan, these prices are not “small potatoes” to their agricultural economy.

Lester wrote his doctor’s thesis on, “The Influence of Price Support Programs on Seasonal Corn Prices”.

Prior to the first corn loans made in the autumn of 1933, corn prices fluctuated radically throughout the year. At harvest time, corn prices would be depressed due to large amounts put on the market by farmers in order to meet operating expenses or loans that were due. A few months later prices would climb as most of the available corn had already been claimed by feeders or was being held by speculators who bought at harvest and profited from the fluctuation.

Dr. Manderscheid feels that the original intent of the corn loan was successful in that it ended the big drop in corn prices immediately after harvest. Farmers could get a loan on their corn and sell it or feed it later, as needed.

Both farmers and grain speculators because very good at estimating “futures” on corn. With more statistics on corn yields and amount in storage, they now guess with great accuracy the future demand and price some months hence. Manderscheid estimates that in recent years, corn prices very little more than the amount needed to compensate for the interest involved in buying at harvest season over buying later in the year.

Although he doesn’t involve himself with the political implications of the corn program, he does assert that the higher support prices of recent years have done nothing to reduce the increases of corn supply. Manderscheid calculates that eight percent of the agricultural production is surplus.

As an assistant professor at Michigan State, Lester attended a Canadian-American farm economic meeting at Winnipeg earlier this year. Nearly a thousand agricultural representatives from the U.S., Canada, Alaska, and Hawaii were present. The emphasis of the meeting was on international trade and the disposal of farm surplus.

According to Lester, this disposal of surplus commodities aboard is not as simple as it may seem. The “dumping” of certain crops abroad can raise havoc with agricultural or food commodity prices in the areas concerned, much to the distress of farmers, within those countries. In addition, it can depress prices in international trade of the commodities concerned. This can cause great economic loss to other nations, and their farmers, who depend upon export of the same crops for a major portion of their income.

For instance, Lester related, Canada exports two-thirds of her wheat. The Canadian wheat board, government operated, buys all the wheat and controls the rate of marketing. They put so much on the market this month, and so much next month, depending upon conditions as they see them.

Canada has no government support prices on wheat and wheat raisers get private loans if they need financing. This is contrary to the U. S. plan where the average wheat support price is $1.31 per bushel.

Since the Canadian economy is greatly dependent upon international wheat prices, it doesn’t take much figuring to realize their reactions to any mass “dumping” of U.S. wheat on world markets.

Too, countries of western Europe which produce wheat maintain a policy of high wheat support prices. And strangely enough to us, this is because they have a deficit in local wheat supply.

Wheat prices are kept high so that bread prices are high and the people won’t buy so much bread that it’s necessary to import large quantities of wheat, with the resulting expenditures of scare U.S. dollars.

Lester has been observing the formation of the Western Europe common market and believes that the dropping in the tariff walls will be helpful to the nations concerned. With free trade, he feels that they can get mass production in many manufacturing and agricultural fields. They can then help each other by an exchange of agricultural and industrial products.

Despite the rapid increases in population of the United States, Lester believes that constantly improved yields means a surplus for the next 20 years. He also reasons that foreign countries could alleviate a lot of their own food shortages by setting up agricultural schools and modern extension systems.

At the present time the agricultural faculty of Michigan State, with the aid of the Ford Foundation, is setting up an agricultural school and experimental farm in Pakistan. Pakistan agricultural technicians and instructors are being trained at Michigan State, Michigan’s equivalent of Iowa State college. It has grown rapidly in the last 15 years and now has 20,000 students.

Lester is married and has two children, David, 4, and Paul, 3. Mrs. Manderscheid is the former Dorothy Varnum of Oregon, Ill.

Vincent Manderscheid, Lester’s father, is well known to many people throughout the Maquoketa area as a onetime breeder of registered Poland China hogs and a longtime member of the Jackson count A.S.C. committee. The home Manderscheid farm, located west of Andrew, is now operated by another son, Julien. The third son, Mark is employed in Dubuque.

Vincent and Mrs. Manderscheid have two daughters, Madonna, an elementary teacher, will receive her degree next June from the State University of Iowa. Eileen is a junior majoring in home economics at Iowa State college.

Mrs. Manderscheid is active in church circles.