Calling him a “grow-it-and-sell-it kind of guy,” Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue on Thursday appointed Ken Isley, formerly a top lawyer at Dow AgroSciences, to be administrator of the Foreign Agricultural Service, which promotes U.S. farm exports, monitors food and agricultural issues worldwide, and has a role in U.S. food aid. Also on Thursday, Perdue announced three other senior-level appointments, including an Illinois farmer, Martin Barbre, to run the Risk Management Agency, which oversees the federally subsidized crop insurance system.
During his tenure, Perdue has given priority to ag exports as a way to boost farm income. Last May, he re-drew the organizational chart at the USDA and put the FAS under the control of the newly created post of undersecretary for trade. Ted McKinney, who worked for Eli Lilly and Dow AgroSciences before becoming Indiana state agriculture director in 2014, holds that job.
Isley, a 1988 law graduate of the University of Iowa, has spent most of his professional career as a lawyer at Dow, holding positions of increasing responsibility. “Isley most recently served as special adviser for Corteva Agriscience, the agriculture division of DowDuPont,” said the USDA. “For the previous five years, he served as vice president, general counsel, secretary of Dow AgroSciences, and was a member of Dow AgroSciences’ corporate management committee.”
The new RMA administrator, Barbre, has been president of the National Corn Growers Association since 2014. He is the owner of a 6,000-acre grain and specialty crop farm in southern Illinois. In the other appointments, Joel Baxley was named administrator of the Rural Housing Service and Tommie Williams was named U.S. minister-counselor for agriculture to the UN agencies for food and agriculture in Rome. Baxley has more than two decades of experience in real estate finance, said the USDA. Williams, like Perdue, is a former Georgia state senator and has worked overseas.