Agricultural economics

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Agricultural economics originally applied the principles of economics to the production of crops and livestock - a discipline known as agronomics. Agronomics was a branch of economics that specifically dealt with land usage. It focused on maximizing the yield of crops while maintaining a good soil ecosystem. Throughout the 20th century the discipline expanded and the current scope of the discipline is much broader. Agricultural economics today includes a variety of applied areas, having considerable overlap with conventional economics and finance.

Contents [hide] 1 Origins 2 Areas of Concentration 3 Academic resources 4 See also 5 References 6 External links

Origins

Economics is often defined as the study of resource allocation under scarcity. Agronomics, or the application of economic methods to optimizing the decisions made by agricultural producers, grew to prominence around the turn of the 20th century. The metamorphosis of agronomics into the much more mainstream discipline of agricultural economics is widely credited to the economist and scholar Theodore W. Schultz. Specifically, Schultz was among the first to examine development economics as a problem related directly to agriculture.^[1] Schultz was also instrumental in establishing econometrics as a tool for use in analyzing agricultural economics empirically; he noted in his landmark 1956 article that agricultural supply analysis is rooted in "shifting sand", implying that it was and is simply not being done correctly.^[2] This is a problem that, despite being identified more than a half century ago, remains largely unsolved to this day.

Areas of Concentration

• Econometrics
• International Development
• Community and rural development
• Food safety and nutrition
• International trade
• Natural resource and environmental economics
• Production economics
• Risk and uncertainty
• Consumer behavior and household economics
• Health economics
• Labor economics
• Forestry economics
• Analysis of markets and competition
• Agribusiness
• Industrial organization
• Marketing of agricultural products
• Policy analysis
• Rural sociology

Agricultural economics tends to be more microeconomic oriented. Many undergraduate Agricultural Economics degrees given by US land-grant universities tend to be more like a traditional business degree rather than a traditional economics degree. At the graduate level, many agricultural economics programs focus on a wide variety of applied microeconomic topics.