Description
Sound economic thinking is crucial for farmers because they depend on good economic decision making to survive. Governments depend on economic information to make good policy decisions on behalf of the community. This course will help you to contribute to better decision making by farmers, or by agencies servicing agriculture, and it will help you to understand why farmers respond to policies and economic opportunities in the ways they do.
You can use this course to improve your skills and knowledge, and to assess whether this is a subject that you'd like to study further. The course includes high-quality video lectures, interviews with experts, demonstrations of how to build economic models in spreadsheets, practice quizzes, and a range of recommended readings and optional readings. Assessment is by a final exam.
The key economic principles that we’ll learn about can help us understand changes that have occurred in agriculture, and support improved decision making about things like agricultural production methods, agricultural input levels, resource conservation, and the balance between agricultural production and its environmental impacts.
There are literally thousands of agricultural economists around the world who work on these issues, so there is a wealth of knowledge to draw on for the course.
Course outline
- Week 1 - Agricultural production and prices, and agriculture's reliance on natural resources
- Week 2 - Resource and environmental challenges facing agriculture
- Week 3 - Economics of agricultural inputs
- Week 4 - The economics of land conservation
- Week 5 - The economics of agri-environmental projects
- Week 6 - Agricultural policies
- Week 7 - Final Exam
