CHECKOFF INVESTMENT
Purdue Extension’s “Corn King” Bob Nielson will hand his scepter down as he phases out of his Extension Corn Specialist position into 2022.
‘Corn King’ Bob Nielson to retire from Purdue Extension BY EMMA HOPKINS-O’BRIEN
E
ven though Purdue Extension’s “Corn King” Bob Nielson will hand his scepter down as he phases out of his Extension Corn Specialist position into 2022, many would agree that his contributions to Indiana’s corn industry could be described as permanent. “I hope that over the course of these many years I have helped corn farmers improve, not only their yields, but also their profitability – It’s always been my primary goal to provide education and information to growers that will simply help them do a better job at farming,” Nielson said. After earning his bachelor’s degree at the University of Nebraska and his graduate degrees from the University of Minnesota, Nielson started at Purdue in 1982. His statewide responsibilities included applied field research, graduate student training and Extension programming with an emphasis on corn management practices. Those duties remained largely unchanged during his 39 years on the job, but the methods by which he disseminated corn and agronomic information to producers and others
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INDIANA CORN & SOYBEAN POST
in the industry certainly did. In the mid-1990s, Nielson had the foresight to use the Internet to connect corn farmers to university professionals, corn research, educational materials and each other by putting all these resources in one place – his KingCorn website. “As we all know today, the beauty of the web is that it allows you to aggregate information from not just Purdue, but all over the Midwest, so the appeal of that website is that it provided people access to corn information from all over,” he said. Nielson made extensive use of the web as a communication medium. The popular KingCorn website was quite a unique endeavor at the time. The Chat ‘n Chew Café – a page on KingCorn that became extremely popular to growers and agronomy professionals – provided links to timely agronomic newsletters from land-grant universities throughout the Midwest, and links to educational events and useful crop management references. “Using that, what we were able to do educationally was
