Agricultural economics

Henry Charles Taylor was the greatest contributor in this period, with the establishment of the Department of Agricultural Economics at the University of Wisconsin in 1909.

The discipline was closely linked to empirical applications of mathematical statistics and made early and significant contributions to econometric methods.

[14] The farm sector is frequently cited as a prime example of the perfect competition economic paradigm.

Since the 1970s, agricultural economics has primarily focused on seven main topics, according to Ford Runge: agricultural environment and resources; risk and uncertainty; food and consumer economics; prices and incomes; market structures; trade and development; and technical change and human capital.

In addition to economists' long-standing emphasis on the effects of prices and incomes, researchers in this field have studied how information and quality attributes influence consumer behavior.

Agricultural economists have contributed to understanding how households make choices between purchasing food or preparing it at home, how food prices are determined, definitions of poverty thresholds, how consumers respond to price and income changes in a consistent way, and survey and experimental tools for understanding consumer preferences.

Studies of risk and decision-making under uncertainty have real-world applications to crop insurance policies and to understanding how farmers in developing countries make choices about technology adoption.

These topics are important for understanding prospects for producing sufficient food for a growing world population, subject to new resource and environmental challenges such as water scarcity and global climate change.

A 2011 study by the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce rated agricultural economics tied for 8th out of 171 fields in terms of employability.