The Work of the Office of Farm Management and Its Relation to the Agricultural Experiment Stations

Abstract

It is with great pleasure that I find myself representing the interests of economic research at a meeting of experimental station directors. Prior to the days of experiment stations the economics of agriculture was better developed than were the physical and biological sciences in their relation to agricultural problems. As evidence of this condition attention is called to the English literature of the latter part of the eighteenth century and the first part of the nineteenth, especially the extensive writings of Arthur Young and William Marshall, the county agricultural surveys made by the Board of Agriculture and the writings of Adam Smith, James Anderson, David Ricardo, T. R. Malthus, and others relating to the economics of agriculture from the individual, the social and the national point of view.