Agricultural economics

Agricultural economics is an applied field of economics concerned with the application of economic theory in optimizing the production and distribution of food and fiber products. Agricultural economics began as a branch of economics that specifically dealt with land usage. It focused on maximizing the crop yield 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. Agricultural economists have made substantial contributions to research in economics, econometrics, development economics, and environmental economics. Agricultural economics influences food policy, agricultural policy, and environmental policy. Economics has been defined as the study of resource allocation under scarcity. Agricultural economics, or the application of economic methods to optimize the decisions made by agricultural producers, grew to prominence around the turn of the 20th century. The field of agricultural economics can be traced back to works on land 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. Another contributor, 1979 Nobel Economics Prize winner Theodore Schultz, was among the first to examine development economics as a problem related directly to agriculture. 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. One scholar in the field, Ford Runge, summarizes the development of agricultural economics as follows: Agricultural economics arose in the late 19th century, combined the theory of the firm with marketing and organization theory, and developed throughout the 20th century largely as an empirical branch of general economics.