Alumni Memories

Essays on the College of Agriculture's History

Meat Science Extension Programs

by Robert E. Rust Professor Emeritus, Animal Science

Robert E. Rust
Professor Emeritus,
Animal Science

Editor’s note: Robert E. Rust is an emeritus professor who served as a faculty member at Iowa State University for 35 years in the extension program and the Department of Animal science from 1959-1994. Rust writes about the development in the short courses for processed meats and how they reached international audiences.

Coming to Iowa State University in 1959, I was charged with developing an extension program in meat science. Traditionally, extension efforts in this area were confined to home butchering, the newly emerging area of meat animal carcass evaluation and quantity barbecues. Based on my past experiences at Michigan State University, it was evident that this was only part of the support needed for a successful marketing effort by livestock producers. Something had to be done to provide extension education programs for the final part of the marketing chain as well as for consumers. After all, Iowa was a major player in the harvesting and further processing of meat animals.

The first major encouragement in this area came from a request by the American Meat Institute, the major industry trade association, to update the text for their then existing correspondence course on Sausage and Processed Meat Manufacturing. After completing that task, I suggested to them that there were additional educational efforts that could benefit the meat industry. With that text as support I encouraged them to try some two and a half day short courses. They were skeptical as to the success of these, but when they found them to be fully subscribed they launched a series of courses around the United States. But, there was still something lacking. These courses were held in conference facilities with lecture-only formats. However, what we really needed was a venue where “hands-on” processing demonstrations could be conducted.

Then in the late 1970s, Iowa State completed its new Meat Laboratory. Now we had an appropriate facility for such a program and we could increase the course to a one-week activity. In the summer of 1979 we held our first annual Sausage and Processed Meat short course. Organizing this activity was no small effort. After all, no university had ever tried this before. There were some in extension who looked askance at what we would have to charge participants. After all, extension was used to offering its programs for free. It took a couple of years but suddenly I found that this summer course had taken on a life of its own. No longer did we have to worry about enrollments. We were turning people away two to three months before the course was scheduled to start.

When the American Meat Institute looked at what we were doing they said, “Why don’t you take over our course as well?” Okay. If we were going to add their two and a half day offering, why not add some more specialized courses such as Cured Meat Processing and Dry and Semi-Dry Sausage Production? We did, and the rest is history. 2007 will be the 29th anniversary of Iowa State’s short courses for the meat industry. In a typical year, these short courses will attract some 200-250 attendees from 20-30 states and 10-15 international countries.

During these courses several international opportunities presented themselves. With the cooperation of Protein Technologies Inc. (now Solae, Inc.), a major soy protein producer, we held several one-week courses in Spanish for Latin American processors. The American Soybean Association’s (ASA) Latin American office asked us to conduct a three-day course that followed the pig from live animal quality selection through final processing. This was presented to a group of Latin American pork producers/processors that ASA hosted at the Pork Expo each year. We held this event for five years until that particular ASA office was closed.

It is said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. If that is true, then an event that was started by Svein Berg of the Meat Research Institute in Göteborg, Sweden was indeed flattery. After spending a year as a visiting professor at Iowa State, Berg looked at the success of Iowa State’s meat industry short courses and established a program of similar events in Sweden, something that was a new venture for European meat science programs. The same is true of a program started in 2006 by one of our former graduates students, Julio Chaves, who is a professor of meat science at the University of Costa Rica, San Jose.

Finally, in 2006, one of the major meat industry trade publications named Iowa State number one in the United States for meat industry extension programs. This was done largely on the basis of the short course offerings. Iowa State continues to build on its successful short courses with new specialized programs added each year.