Agricultural Economics, 1950-2000

In the past 25 years, agricultural economists have made significant progress in research but they have also experienced substantial inner turmoil and great anxiety about the profession— its direction and substance. Self-criticism has taken two major forms. Some people have argued that a larger share of staff time and funds should have been devoted to problems of the majority of the rural population. Others have contended that the research completed on such problems could have been done better. The practical problems of agriculture and rural Americans will be changing in the future at an accelerating rate. To help agricultural economists and others keep up, midcareer opportunities and experiences in which people learn new skills to prepare for different activities must become more common. Future research techniques will also emphasize multifield and multidisciplinary work more. Increasingly, analyses will incorporate multiple-objective concepts, such as those recently used in water resource planning. Issues of conflict among rural people—in use of land, for one—will become more important. To further complicate the work, equity considerations will increasingly favor rural and urban groups over commercial farmers. Questions on commercial agriculture must not be ignored, though, when doing research on communities with natural resources and on rural people. Similarly, questions on the equity of certain conditions or actions, for example, must be raised in research on commercial agriculture. Agricultural economic research of the next 25 years will carry a strong streak of practicality. The profession particularly needs to focus on major national issues that private and public decision-makers cannot avoid. Agricultural economists must also avoid the false dichotomy of skills used in economic work related to U.S. problems and skills used to work on problems of other countries or on concerns that are international.