Bruce R. Beattie was born and raised on a small ranch in central Montana. His BS and MS degrees were earned at Montana State University and his PhD was awarded from Oregon State University.

Beattie's service as academic administrator and leader in the agricultural economics profession are extraordinary. His leadership has stressed two themes: the fundamental importance of academic quality and integrity in research and teaching/extension and the need for administrators to serve in a facilitative role in support of individual faculty initiative. In his writing and his many leadership roles he brings to these themes a keen sense of understanding and logic; crisp, clear communication; creativity; a concern for the individual; wit and humor. His provocative papers on administrative philosophy and the optimal role of academic administrators, the proper preeminent role of faculty and academic disciplines in setting research and teaching/extension agenda, the efficient design of administrative and incentive structures in land grant universities, and rent-seeking behavior in the academy are legendary.

Beyond the university and professional association setting, Beattie has been frequently called upon to assist lay audiences on thorny public policy issues. He recently played a prominent role in providing timely and influential economic analysis of the U.S. Karnal bunt wheat disease problem in the Desert Southwest. His research and extension work with colleagues at Montana State on income, sales, and property taxation was recognized by WAEA as the outstanding extension program in 1989. Beattie has also enlightened public debate by debunking myths about the relative importance of agriculture in state economies and providing economic insight on a number of agricultural and urban water issues.

Beattie is one of our profession's foremost scholars of production economics and the economics of water allocation and valuation. An Oregon Agricultural Experiment Station bulletin, based on his PhD dissertation on interbasin water transfer, won the AAEA's 1972 award for best published research. Over the subsequent fifteen years, Beattie conducted a series of studies on the value and demand for water in agricultural and urban uses. His work integrated rigorously applied production theory with meticulous empirical work, shedding light on how western water might be more efficiently managed and priced. His work on urban residential water demand, with one of his many MS students, earned the WAEA's best published research award in 1979.

Beattie's reputation for quality research and teaching in production economics spans theory and estimation, focusing on production function estimation and the theory of asymmetric production stages, product complementarity, and the economic region of production. His crowning achievement in production economics--and his most influential--is his lucid and comprehensive presentation of classical production theory with Bob Taylor, The Economics of Production, published in 1985. Beattie and Taylor's rigorous, yet user-friendly, treatment of the comparative statics of conditional and unconditional factor demand and product supply, the implications of the technical properties imbedded in alternative production function models, and the interplay between properties of the underlying production function, product demand, and factor supply forces influencing optimal choice has been the access point to mathematical production economics for many an agricultural economics graduate student.

Bruce's exceptional ability to communicate is complemented by an unassuming charisma and sensitivity to others that has made him one of our profession's most respected teachers and colleagues. His enthusiasm for the beauty and explanatory power of economic reasoning is, indeed, infectious.