In the 1920s, he worked in the USDA's Bureau of Agricultural Economics and in 1935 he returned to the Giannini Foundation at the University of California at Berkeley.
[2] During that period, Chicago was a leader in agricultural economics under the leadership of Theodore Schultz and D. Gale Johnson, largely funded by the Rockefeller Foundation.
He worked with a number of graduate students who became prominent in the field, particularly Robert L. Gustafson, Conrad Gislason, Cleon Harrell, Seymour Smidt, Hendrick Houthakker, Lester Telser, Clifford Hildreth, and F. G.
His questioning at workshops were gentle but probing, and he was considered a more relaxed audience member than many of his University of Chicago colleagues at research seminars.
[5] His research was broad reaching and included migration and agricultural policy, water allocation, water investments in depressed areas, international trade in agriculture and economic development, social costs and rural–urban balance, resource allocation effects of environmental policies, fiscal externalities and suburbanization, road capacity and city size, tax rates and national incomes, and freeing up transit markets.
In 1961 and 1962 he received honorable mention for the Published Research Award for a pair of articles written with Loyal M. Hartman, "Inter-Area Relations in Agricultural Supply" and "Effects of Federal Acreage Controls on Costs and Techniques of Producing Flue-cured Tobacco".