Do you know about Harry Stine, Iowa’s only billionaire?
You might not have heard of Harry Stine, who is in his 80s and lives on a farm in Adel, just west of the Des Moines metro.
But he and his four children, who jointly own Stine Seed Company, have made a fortune breeding, selling, and licensing high-yield soybean and corn seeds.
Stine Seed is Iowa’s third-largest landowner, with more than twenty-five thousand (25,000) acres of land on which they test their plants.
Harry Stine started his private soybean research and development company in 1968, after finding some soybean plants with extra seeds in a nearby field, and learning to breed them from Iowa State University, which had its own breeding facility.
Most soybean breeding was done by public universities at that time, because there was little money in it. Stine found a way to profit: By the 1970s, he was the first soybean seller to explicitly forbid growers from breeding his seeds or reusing them for next season, and growers had to pay him royalties for using them.
In 1994, the federal government allowed a soybean’s genetic makeup to be patented, which withstood a challenge at the US Supreme Court in 2013. Stine took full advantage, becoming the first to patent his soybean varieties, and today has over 800 different seed and technology patents.
All those patents, licensing, and royalties—including huge deals with multinational seed corporations Monsanto and Syngenta—have made Harry Stine a bushel of money. Today, he and his family are worth approximately $10.2 billion, putting him among the 400 richest people in the world.
But small Iowa farms aren’t sharing in that wealth: As yields increased, crop prices went down while production costs rose. Iowa net farm income fell 53% from 2022 to 2024, while farm bankruptcies more than doubled.
