MIDCONTINENT PERSPECTIVES Midwest Research Institute Kansas City,

April 13, 1983

C.L. William Haw President and Chief Executive Officer, National Farms, Inc. Kansas City, Missouri

Kansas City’s Niche In Agricultural Economic Development

My subject is going to be a little different from that of my usual presentations in that although I am going to talk about farm economics I am going to tie my remarks to some specific thoughts about this beautiful and livable city, its history in agribusiness, some misconceptions about our present role in agribusiness, and what I perceive to be Kansas City’s most significant opportunity for agribusiness-related economic development. I want to make it clear from the first that although I am a director of the Chamber of Commerce and the Board of Trade, these will be my own thoughts. You will not find me to be a cheerleader for all aspects of where we are, but I hope you will find some optimism – maybe even excitement – for our opportunities to capitalize on the strengths that we have in Kansas City. Before we can do that, though, we have to understand what those strengths are and what they are not. I am going to try to break my remarks down into the following areas. First, I will give a brief description of our company, National Farms, partly to give you a perspective of my perspective and partly because I love to talk about it and you are my captive audience for a little while! Second, I want to draw a distinction between agriculture, which is our business, and agribusiness, which is the business of Kansas City. I think there are some definite misconceptions in that area, and hopefully we can clear them up. Third, I want to trace Kansas City’s historical roots in agribusiness and illustrate how the times and trends have taken us from where we were to where we are now and how we got here. Fourth, and perhaps most important, I will outline the strengths we have to build on and some specific ways in which we might capitalize on those strengths in Kansas City. Our company is primarily a large farming, livestock feeding, and feed ingredient manufacturing company. We were for many years publicly held and were listed on the American Exchange. We are now privately held by the Bass family in Fort Worth, and we headquarter in the Kansas City Board of Trade building. Our principal business originally was the manufacture of dehydrated alfalfa pellets for the feed industry, an energy-intensive, pollution-intensive, and labor-intensive business. These have been three of the Four Horsemen of the business Apocalypse over the last ten years, and as times have changed we have systematically sold 40 of the 41 manufacturing plants that we had in that area and are now a very small producer of that product. At the same time, we market material for other producers of dehydrated alfalfa and market more than we ever have before. But our

© MRI, 2000 C.L. William Haw, April 13, 1983 Page 1 © MRI, 2000 C.L. William Haw, April 13, 1983 Page 2 principal business, as we have gotten out of the one business, has been to get more heavily involved in production-level agriculture. We have expanded our ownership of farmland and livestock. We are not farm managers, and we are not farm consultants. We farm the land that we own with people who are our employees and with equipment that we own. We farm 10,000 acres of bottomland in southern Arkansas which is planted in wheat and rice. We have 1,100 steers grazing PIK wheat at that location. We have 14,000 acres in eastern Texas, with 8,000 acres planted to wheat and the balance supporting a 1,000-head cow herd. There are also 1,100 steers grazing on PIK wheat at that location. We have 16,000 acres of center pivot land, mostly in wheat and corn, in the panhandle of Texas, the heart of the Ogallala, which all of you read about from time to time. On that farm we have a 10,000-head cattle feedlot and graze another 10,000 head on wheat pasture and corn stalks. We have sold 12,000 acres in Kansas of center pivot irrigated land that we farmed for years primarily because the water problems are most severe in the western Kansas portion of the Ogallala formation. We have a 15,000-head custom cattle feedlot west of Hutchinson, Kansas, our only “customer” business, and it has been a very good business for us. Until a year and a half ago we owned 22,000 acres in northern Nebraska, all in Ogallala, planted to corn under center pivot. We sold it to Prudential. This first really big sale of good farmland we have ever made reflects quite a change in our company strategy and reflects some doubt about continuing increases in land value. We do lease it back, however, and operate it. We have a 75,000-head annual capacity confinement facility for hogs, which we are expanding this summer to 225,000 head, and hope to be one of the largest producers of confinement hogs in the world. So essentially we are great big farmers and raisers of livestock. To give you a little perspective, if all our farms were in one place starting here and stretching a mile this way and a mile that way, they would extend somewhere beyond St. Joseph in one block. We have perhaps $75 million present market value in assets involved in farming, but we employ only nine people in Kansas City, rent a small amount of office space, and have some banking relationships. An interesting thing is that although we headquarter in Kansas City for this quite large operation, we represent very little economic benefit to Kansas City. Which brings me to my next topic, the difference between agriculture, our business, and agribusiness, the traditional business of Kansas City. It is a common misconception that agriculture plays a direct role in the economy of Kansas City. That is not really very true. Kansas City is not a farm town and has very little business actively generated from farm activity in terms of money spent in town or farm profits flowing into town. Farming is a highly fragmented, decentralized business, with ownership widely dispersed in the countryside; and the benefits or losses of ownership pretty much remain in the countryside. Although we read a lot about the corporate farm taking over farming and about the centralization of ownership of farming, the fact is that less than one percent of all farmland in the is owned by non-family corporations. Ninety-nine percent of it is still owned and operated by farming families. The reason that the percentage of corporate ownership is not increasing is that historically there has never been any money to be made in the farming business other than the steady appreciation in the value of the land. Anybody who tells you any different is either a lot smarter than I am or kidding you. Let me interject a little joke here before I go on with my sad tale about how unprofitable farming is. It is about the farmer whose wife was about to give birth to a child. The farmer says © MRI, 2000 C.L. William Haw, April 13, 1983 Page 3 to the obstetrician, “I don’t know what you can do to help me, but there are three things I want more than anything else from this child. I want it to be a boy, I want him to have red hair, and I want him to be a farmer.” So in the normal course of events the obstetrician helps deliver the child and comes back into the waiting room, where he says to the farmer, “Well, I really did it all for you. You got all three wishes.” The farmer says, “I understand how you could tell it was a boy, and I understand how you could tell he had red hair, but how do you know he’s a farmer?” The doctor replies, “He must be. He’s been crying since the minute he hit the table.” I will try to convince you that the economic lament of the farmer is real in most cases. Let me say it again. Historically, there has never been any money made in the farming business. The only good part of it has been the steady appreciation in the value of the land. The farmer has lived poor and died rich. In fact, in 1980, 65 percent of all farm income in the United States came from non-farm sources, that is, jobs in town and government transfer payments, which is the largest part of it. In 1982 and 1983, government payments to farmers will have exceeded the total net income of farmers by a wide margin. Now what does that mean? It means simply that farming is a losing business, a business being subsidized and kept going by transfer payments from the government of the United States. So maybe it is not such a bad deal that there is a distinction between agriculture and agribusiness. Historically, being in the middle of the world’s biggest pea patch is not the same thing as being in the middle of the world’s oil patch, first because the ownership tends to be widely scattered outside the cities, and second because large profits really are not generated to be reinvested in the community even if the ownership were in the community. What, then, has been the role of Kansas City in agribusiness? Historically, we have been an agribusiness town. I think the best illustration of that fact is in the famous Norman Rockwell painting of the fellow standing in the foreground with his sleeves rolled up, and of the things around him that Rockwell perceived as being the basic business of Kansas City. Cattle, sheep, hogs, wheat, corn, stockyards, and grain elevators are the things he chose to depict. Agribusiness has been the business of Kansas City. We have provided the services of distribution of inputs and machinery to the farms, and more important, we have been a focal point for gathering, processing, and redistributing the crops and livestock produced by the farmers. This was a logical, natural role 50 to 100 years ago as Kansas City emerged as a rail and highway center and as crops and livestock found Kansas City to be the logical first stopping point to concentrate and sometimes be further processed and redistributed before moving into the more populous areas to the east of us. Our business, then, has not been agriculture, which is a fragmented, decentralized business; it has been one step beyond that – agribusiness. The next question is, where do we stand now in this historical agribusiness role? This, I think, is where we discover another misconception. In 1977, MRI prepared a report entitled “Kansas City, The Agribusiness Capital.” That report accurately pointed out that our market area, perhaps optimistically defined, is 500 to 800 miles in any direction and includes 35 percent of the nation’s farms, 44 percent of the nation’s farm acreage, and farm receipts of $36.1 billion annually. The study showed further that sales and receipts from agribusiness in Kansas City totaled $5.6 billion in 1976. That figure is equal to two-thirds of the total from all manufacturing activity in the metropolitan area. The wages of 94,000 employees were supported by agribusiness in Kansas City, which is one out of every six persons employed in the city. What the report did not show was the direction of © MRI, 2000 C.L. William Haw, April 13, 1983 Page 4 momentum in all of this agribusiness activity, and that direction of momentum does not present such a rosy picture. Remember that the roots of our agribusiness activity go directly back to the physical movement of supplies to the farm and products from the farm. Here is what is happening in that physical movement activity by category. Thirty years ago livestock was a major aspect of Kansas City’s business. As a matter of fact, Kansas City was the undisputed stocker and feeder capital of the world. We were the logical gathering point for rail shipment of cattle coming up from the Southwest to be redistributed in the Corn Belt, and a normal week’s run of cattle through the sales in Kansas City was 40,000 head or more. The normal run today is one-tenth that number. Distribution patterns have changed. The cattle are now fed in the Southwest where they are raised because grain production emerged there under irrigation, and we have lost that tremendous piece of agribusiness in Kansas City. It is nobody’s fault, but the patterns of sale and feeding changed. The times passed us by, and Kansas City does not fill that need anymore. In slaughter cattle, 20 to 30 years ago all the five major packers in the United States ran significant slaughter operations in Kansas City, and now there are none. Again, it is nobody’s fault. The packer follows the cattle, if you will, and they are being killed in Amarillo and Garden City and Sioux City -the places where the cattle are fed. The fact is, it is another agribusiness activity that we do not fill a need for anymore in Kansas City. Flour milling also was a great claim to fame for Kansas City. I asked the other day when the last flour mill was built in Kansas City, and the answer was that it was right after World War I. There have been 50 to 100 flour mills built in the United States since that time, and not one of them has been built in Kansas City. Distribution patterns change, and freight rates change. It is now more economical to ship the grain than to ship the flour. Again, it is nobody’s fault. Milling production since 1967 is down 25 percent in Kansas City. In just the last two years we have lost the headquarters of two major milling companies, and we are down to two now. On grain shipments, I asked when the last major grain elevator was built in Kansas City. It could not be remembered when the last elevator was built in Kansas City. The fact is that total shipments and receipts of grain through Kansas City are fewer in the eighties than they were in the sixties, in spite of the dramatic increase in crop production in the United States during the same period. More grain elevators have been built in Holt County, Nebraska – there probably are not 15,000 people who live in Holt County – by many times in the last two years than there have been in the entire Kansas City metropolitan area in the last 20 years. It is nobody’s fault, but patterns of distribution from the farm, unit train rates, and elimination of transit privilege have all worked to ensure that Kansas City has not grown – in fact, it has declined – as a distribution point for grains. All these things have worked against the traditional pattern that gave us such a dominant place historically in agribusiness. So far I have not been very cheerful, and I suppose I am really trying not to be optimistic. I am trying to be realistic about where we stand. Changing times have altered our historic role in the agribusiness chain. We no longer fill the central physical distribution role that came so naturally to us years ago. We probably can never bring back that role, but maybe there is a new niche that we can fill in the agribusiness community of the United States. What we do have in Kansas City is deep roots in the history of this country’s agriculture. The personality of the city is warm and friendly, and this is probably greatly influenced by our agricultural heritage. The American Royal here is a great asset, and it also reflects this © MRI, 2000 C.L. William Haw, April 13, 1983 Page 5 agricultural heritage. The Future Farmers of America come here every year; they love it and feel welcome here. The Kansas City Board of Trade is the world’s largest hard winter wheat market and provides the great focal point for financial, clerical, and executive agribusiness activity in Kansas City. History is passing us by as a physical center for agribusiness activity, and we are swimming against the current if we try to bring it back. What could be more logical than to have Kansas City be the place where we locate the executive, clerical, financial, and research center of U.S. agribusiness. We have the history, the tradition, the work-oriented labor force, and the head start with the existence of this great city asset, the Kansas City Board of Trade. What if in this parcel of land south of the Kansas City Board of Trade a great agribusiness complex were to rise up – a or Corporate Woods kind of development that was specifically designated as an agribusiness center. Would major grain companies, who will eventually decide that New York and are untenable places to employ 200, 300, 400 executive and clerical people in an environment whose infrastructure is deteriorating, decide to relocate in Kansas City if such a center existed? Would major departments of the USDA decide that there are some advantages to being in the midst of the world’s most livable city in close association with other agri-businesses of the world? Would trade associations such as the Charolais Association, National Cattlemens Association, National Grain and Feed Association, Millers’ National Federation, and dozens of other agribusiness groups see the benefits of being physically located in one beautiful, contiguous agribusiness spot? Would the struggling Ag Hall of Fame west of town be more appropriately located in such a center of economic agribusiness activity? I think it just might. Decisions to locate things like packing plants or flour mills are made on the hard facts of freight rates, distribution patterns, and existing feedlots. Those considerations have passed us by and hurt our chances for that kind of development. On the other hand, executive offices, clerical staffs, and financial centers are being relocated in beautiful places where senior executives like to live and work, where people of similar interests are congregated, and where parking and access are readily available and convenient. If there is a more likely spot in all the world than right between the Plaza, MRI, UMKC, the Board of Trade, and the beautiful nearby residential areas to locate such a center, I wouldn’t know where to look for it. It is great to call ourselves the agribusiness capital of the world, and our historical position has built our foundation, but if we are going to grow in agribusiness economic development, it will surely be in the areas of clerical, financial, executive, and research activity in this wonderful livable city we live in. Thank you.

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS QUESTION: What about locating a research center for agriculture here something like a research park atmosphere? ANSWER: Absolutely natural flow, isn’t it? I think what I’m really talking about is the creation of a magnet of significant enough proportion that we truly attract all kinds of agribusiness activity because it wants to be associated with other agribusiness activity. It would © MRI, 2000 C.L. William Haw, April 13, 1983 Page 6 be natural for research activity, as well as private enterprise, to benefit from the synergy of being located in the middle of other significant agribusiness activity. QUESTION: How are you going to move research away from the land grant colleges that are scattered throughout the nation? ANSWER: I don’t think you do move it away from them. I think if it has a logical reason to be it would be a focal point for research activity that originates on the campus but focuses on a more central location. That’s a comment from a person with almost no basis of knowledge in that area, but it seems logical. QUESTION: Would National Farms develop this project from farming income? ANSWER: No. I don’t see National Farms as having any vested interest, or Bass Brothers, our owners, as having any financial interest in it. I think if an agribusiness center is going to be built it’s going to be born of entrepreneurial spirit. It’s going to be the enlightened self-interest of someone who recognizes an opportunity to profit personally from having done it. It seems to be an exciting idea that has some momentum. Its timeliness, I think, is good, but I think it’s going to be motivated by somebody who says, “Here’s a great idea to bring business in from which I can profit from having created this center.” QUESTION: Would not a project like this require a single-mindedness that would come from a single ownership and a single direction and control? ANSWER: I think that is the most likely formula for success in any venture like this. As it happens, the Nichols Company does own a large, contiguous block of property immediately to the south and adjacent to the Kansas City Board of Trade. They have proposed a development somewhat like I’m talking about, and my observation is that the time is right to do just exactly that, and I wish them Godspeed and to hasten in doing just that kind of thing. I hope it will become a magnet and not just another office building. We really have to be talking about a scope that is significant enough to be a magnet to bring things into the area. Timing could be terribly critical on a thing like this, because we could pick a newspaper up tomorrow morning and find that Omaha or Des Moines or Amarillo is proposing the same kind of thing. It really can’t be a fragmented thing; it has to be an idea whose time has come for it to be exploited. It can’t be partly at the airport, partly at the Ag Hall of Fame, partly at Crown Center, and partly at the Plaza. It has to be something, in my mind, that has the magnetism of being in one spot. QUESTION: The dean of the school of agriculture at the University of Missouri- Columbia recently resigned, and I read the comments he made about this area’s financial commitment to agricultural research. I found it very disturbing that Missouri is spending very little on agricultural research and wonder how that lack of spending will affect this agribusiness area. Should we be concerned about this state’s commitment to research in agriculture? ANSWER: Yes. The University of Missouri has gotten no additional funds from the state legislature for the third straight year. I happen to have been until just recently the president of the Business School Council at the University of Missouri. They are very seriously concerned about the fact that money isn’t being appropriated for business research. I don’t think it’s just ag research that’s being neglected. The dollars aren’t being spent in the educational community because the dollars aren’t being put there, and the Missouri Legislature hasn’t been willing to reallocate the dollars that exist, which is a terrible mistake, I might say, on their part, to the areas © MRI, 2000 C.L. William Haw, April 13, 1983 Page 7 that are most necessary. So it’s a bad situation, not just for ag research but for business research and all other areas of educational activity. QUESTION: Several years ago, it was said that the U.S. Department of Agriculture should be moved to Kansas City and that Rod Turnbull, Kansas City’s senior agriculture spokesman, should be put in charge of it. Why hasn’t that come about? In 1972, Charlie Kimball made a suggestion that things should be pulled together in an office building. Why the Ag Hall of Fame hasn’t quite come off has been a great question mark of many. What you say sounds good, but how can this all be brought about? ANSWER: That’s a very good question. I had two points that I wanted to make today, both relating very closely to the same theory. One of them is that we do not have the momentum in our historic role as a physical distribution point and we may be spending a lot of effort to no avail pretending that we are still in that same historical role. The other point is that maybe we do have some momentum in this other area. If the idea is a good idea, you know good ideas are unstoppable. They happen because their time has come and because they are good ideas. I think the Chamber of Commerce and specific business organizations can encourage it, but I think it’s going to take the entrepreneurial spirit of one or more partners to say, “Here’s a great idea. Its time has come, and it needs to happen. We can make some money out of it, and so we’re going to make it happen.” QUESTION: How does the Board of Trade management feel about it? ANSWER: Ambivalent. The Board of Trade, you know, isn’t here to develop agribusiness in Kansas City. The Board of Trade is here to conduct the business of the Board of Trade, and part of that is to keep your rent down. If you’re a party to an operation, a real estate operation, and you live in the building, one of the things you want to do is keep your rent down. If you want to keep the rent down, you make it less attractive to a business partner who wants to build it up and expand it. My guess is the Board of Trade management would love to see such a development come about and, I think, would benefit enormously from it. I don’t think they need to be a part of it from a financial standpoint, and there are some counterproductive aspects to their being a part of it. Let me digress a minute about that. Again, not speaking as a representative of the Board of Trade, we’ve got kind of a difficult situation now in the Board of Trade in that the physical plant is too small to house even the existing members. Some of them are going to Corporate Woods, some are going to the Plaza, and some are going to Executive Park. I think that’s a very serious thing. As they scatter and fragment, the Board of Trade is a less strong focal point and that is something that needs to be corrected very quickly or it’ll become a very serious problem. QUESTION: Do you have any PIK grain, and if so what are you going to bid tomorrow? ANSWER: Yes, we have a lot of PIK grain. You’re looking at a guy who for years said, “I don’t want those damned government programs. They are wrong; they are keeping the farmers in bonded service by barely keeping them alive. Those programs are morally bad.” But for the last two years we’ve put every bushel we’ve raised in the reserve. And it’s been the best deal in town. Now we’ve got two year’s production of grain in the reserve, and we are going to offer every bushel of it back to the government Friday in the PIK repurchase program, and I wouldn’t tell you what we’re going to offer it at for anything in the world until Monday. © MRI, 2000 C.L. William Haw, April 13, 1983 Page 8

QUESTION: Entrepreneurial involvement means capital investment to me. Is the capital investment for a project you’re talking about within our community, or must it be financed from outside? ANSWER: I don’t know the answer to that. I suppose if it isn’t here and a joint venture partner were offered an attractive enough piece of the action, it would come from somewhere else. Our company doesn’t have any interest. Obviously the Bass family is building projects even larger than this in other parts of the country, and I suppose that if there was an attractive enough proposition, they or somebody like them would be delighted to participate in it. QUESTION: Do you foresee a time when farm producers will be in a seller’s market instead of a buyer’s market for the farming commodities and livestock either by the workings of supply and demand or by some type of regulated collective bargaining? ANSWER: I wouldn’t be a farmer if I didn’t think that probably next year we’re going to hold the bastards ransom for this stuff. Every year, for the past 30 or 40 or 200 years, farmers have believed that next year they’re going to hold the world ransom for their grain. I really don’t believe it. Farmers farm for reasons that transcend the economics of what they do. They farm because they want to produce and there is something holy about producing and something unholy about not producing, and I really think that as long as we have the capability to produce ourselves into bankruptcy, that’s exactly what we’re going to do. QUESTION: Is this proposition going to be discussed outside of Kansas City with potential entrepreneurs? I realize that’s not your role. ANSWER: I’ve discussed it with our principals in Fort Worth, and they’ve said it would have to be an awfully good deal and it would have to promise a very good financial return to do it. I don’t know if the Nichols Company or the Board of Trade Investment Company or anyone else has talked about it outside of Kansas City. QUESTION: It occurs to me that the Mormon Church has been buying extensive holdings of farmland and, as you know, they are a very well off entity. It appears to me they may be a good prospect to develop an agribusiness center. Could you comment? ANSWER: That’s a good idea. The Mormon Church is an enormous buyer of farmland. Why not develop a complex like this as a place for them to headquarter? Why not Armand Hammer, who owns Iowa Beef Processors, and now has become an enormous factor in the agricultural community? Why not the Basses who own large holdings in agriculture? There are lots of what-if’s to think about, and if it’s a good idea maybe we can help some people come to that conclusion. QUESTION: Do you have any idea or vision of the size of the area needed? ANSWER: I think it would have to be at least a couple of square blocks. What has been packaged is one and a half square blocks to the south of the Board of Trade building. It’s absolutely imperative that if it is to work it should be of significant scope to truly be a world agribusiness center. As big as possible is the answer because if it isn’t significant, it isn’t going to work. QUESTION: I’ve been listening to you and I keep referring back to an impression that land for an agribusiness park is not available, to my knowledge, adjacent to the Board of Trade. Could you comment? © MRI, 2000 C.L. William Haw, April 13, 1983 Page 9

ANSWER: A complex is a better word. Park is a word that I lapse into using which brings up visions of large green spaces. It doesn’t have to be a park; it can be a complex of many-storied buildings, a high-rise kind of a thing. I make the point of the specific location near here merely for emphasis. Maybe you should start all over again and move the Board of Trade, which is the focal point, to Corporate Woods. I guess the physical location is not so important as its contiguousness to the existing focal point of the Board of Trade. QUESTION: I think you’re right that New York and Chicago cannot keep the headquarters locations they have. What we’re lacking is leadership to pull this off. I’ll predict that if we don’t do it, Minneapolis will. They have an existing infrastructure. They have the Cargills and the Pillsbury people there and if they make the decision, it’ll be the ag center of the world. But the question is whether our civic, community, or banking leadership here can get their heads together and get this project going. Could you comment? ANSWER: Your point is well made. I think somebody’s going to do it. I think some business is going to move from some very large metropolitan centers that aren’t really tenable places to do the sort of thing they’re doing. And if we don’t do it I suspect somebody else will do it. Our city really is kind of a nifty place to build an agribusiness center. We have a big head start; we have the heritage. It is not nearly so cold in the winter here as it is in Minneapolis. This is a beautiful place. We really do have some strengths that we can build on to make this the agribusiness capital of the world. © MRI, 2000 C.L. William Haw, April 13, 1983 Page 10

C.L. WILLIAM HAW, President of National Farms, Inc., is widely regarded as a well- informed and articulate leader in the field of agriculture and agribusiness in Kansas City. Born in 1939 in Bonne Terre, Missouri, Bill graduated from the University of Missouri in 1961. After a two-year stint in the U.S. Army, he returned to the Graduate School of Business at the University of Missouri. From 1964 until 1974 he was an officer of the Commerce Bank of Kansas City, handling for several years all the grain and flour milling loans. His final position there was Executive Vice President and Chief Administrative Officer. Since 1974 he has been the President and Chief Executive Officer of National Farms, Inc., one of the largest diversified agricultural production companies in the United States. Bill is now a director of the American Royal, the Kansas City Chamber of Commerce, the University of Missouri Business School Council, Labconco, and the Kansas City Board of Trade.

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MIDCONTINENT PERSPECTIVES was a lecture series sponsored by the Midwest Research Institute as a public service to the midcontinent region. Its purpose was to present new viewpoints on economic, political, social, and scientific issues that affect the Midwest and the nation. Midcontinent Perspectives was financed by the Kimball Fund, named for Charles N. Kimball, President of MRI from 1950 to 1975, Chairman of its Board of Trustees from 1975 to 1979, and President Emeritus until his death in 1994. Initiated in 1970, the Fund has been supported by annual contributions from individuals, corporations, and foundations. Today it is the primary source of endowment income for MRI. It provides “front-end” money to start high- quality projects that might generate future research contracts of importance. It also funds public- interest projects focusing on civic or regional matters of interest. Initiated in 1974 and continuing until 1994, the sessions of the Midcontinent Perspectives were arranged and convened by Dr. Kimball at four- to six-week intervals. Attendance was by invitation, and the audience consisted of leaders in the Kansas City metropolitan area. The lectures, in monograph form, were later distributed to several thousand individuals and institutions throughout the country who were interested in MRI and in the topics addressed. The Western Historical Manuscript Collection-Kansas City, in cooperation with MRI, has reissued the Midcontinent Perspectives Lectures in electronic format in order to make the valuable information which they contain newly accessible and to honor the creator of the series, Dr. Charles N. Kimball.