David Jobe was among a handful of far-sighted businessmen who forced MFA's metamorphosis from farm organization to agribusiness in the early 1980s. He retires at the end of this month. Jobe has a well-earned reputation for preaching fiscal discipline from his pulpit of senior vice president of corporate operations. Financial analysis, said Jobe, is the lifeblood of any healthy business, pointing the path to profitability and underscoring the very real costs of operation.

Practices must be weighed against data. The concrete of a grain bin or feed mill must be measured against the concrete fiscal realities every business faces.

Jobe was retail controller when he left MFA in 1971 to become vice president of finance in a private business. But he missed farming, farmers and cooperatives. By 1976, he'd become treasurer, CFO and director of operations for United Suppliers, a large cooperative in Iowa. Then Bud Frew, who would become CEO, and Eric Thompson, who had just defeated MFA president Fred Heinkel for MFA's presidency, lured Jobe back as vice president of finance. They needed a man focused on business, one unafraid of sensitive decisions and hard choices.

What he found, Jobe said, was an organization on the brink of disaster. The balance sheet was weak, a weakness so severe bankers were hesitant to loan money, talked in fact of calling loans. MFA, said Jobe, was paying out on capital assets based on politics.

Jobe helped refocus MFA's vision on sound business practices. Good value for the money. Never extravagant. Never cheap. Balance-sheet focused. Fiscally conservative. Alert for opportunity.

During Jobe's term on the board of Farmers Export Company in the 1980s, his leadership set the standard for grain industry restructuring in cooperatives, said Frew. He was proud of Jobe, saw him as a shining example of a man who could provide objective data useful in making business decisions. Those analyses (and others like them) prevented MFA from following institutions like Farmland into bankruptcy. Jobe's insights helped MFA to return to profitability and to increase the business, said MFA President and CEO Don Copenhaver.

Jobe knows what a businessman needs in abundance to be successful: character and integrity, terms his associates use to describe him. A devout Christian, Jobe uses his faith to guide his business and personal relationships.

Bill Stouffer farms near Napton in central Missouri. He's also a Missouri senator and once an influential MFA board member during the 1980s. Years ago, standing in a pasture in central Missouri with his grain silo as a backdrop, Stouffer told me that wherever a trouble spot surfaced, MFA sent David Jobe to analyze the situation. Everyone respects Jobe, said Stouffer, because they can count on his analysis, integrity and judgment.

At one point, Jobe was sent to analyze an MFA business in southern Missouri. His recommendations: restructuring, new equipment and a price hike. Complaints followed immediately. Jobe persisted.  The operation had exhausted its assets while never retaining earnings. All profit returned to customers. A cooperative, Jobe said, cannot operate that way from a business or ethical standpoint. That shortsighted practice benefits today's customers at the expense of their children.

And that's David Jobe. 'Do what's right," he once told me, 'even when it's unpopular." He's spent a lifetime doing right, following his conscience and his intellect-tempered by faith and his desire to serve. As Copenhaver says, Jobe has been instrumental in MFA's success.