Economics of Food and Agriculture (Third edition, 2014)

This is a heavily-revised version of an introductory agricultural economics text book “Economics of Food and Agriculture” that was originally published by Kendall Hunt, in 1990 but has long been out of print. The material is intended for use as a series of classroom presentations for an introductory agricultural economics course, and for downloading by beginning students to their computers and tablets. No mathematics prerequisites other than basic algebra are required. There are two files, one containing 620 color pdf slides in 17 chapters. A second file handout file contains the same slides set up for printing on a black-and-white printer, two-to-a-page. The 1990 versions of this book relied heavily on graphs that constructed by the author using secondary data. Now there are many other sources, most notably the graphs contained in the USDA ERS chart gallery. In updating this version to the present, I retained a few of the graphs that were in the original version, but then located graphs created by the USDA ERS in their chart gallery in order to add to and supplement the original information. These slides were originally constructed employing Harvard Graphics routines. At that point in computing history, clip art as opposed to photographs was being used extensively. By retaining some of the quirky clip art from the original version, I have also retained some of the look and feel of the original edition. Color is important on these slides. Students will want to download the color file to their laptops or tablet devices. For the most part, the black-and-white handouts look fine, but for a few of the graphs, the color causes lines or other information to be washed out or a graph or map becomes hard to read. Students should refer back to the color version on their computing devices.