Life can be like driving a car.  Most of the time we look forward, anticipating where we want to go and making plans on how to get there.  But occasionally, it's helpful to look in the rearview mirror and see where we've been.  Indeed, it's only by comparing where we are with where we have been that we can measure our progress, gain confidence in our ability to arrive at some future location, and enlist the cooperation and consensus of our traveling companions for the future journey. 

On May 15, the Department of Agricultural, Food and Resource Economics (AFRE) did both.    After a luncheon for staff and current and emeriti faculty members organized by Taylor Logan, we enjoyed a symposium on the history of the department, which was followed by the annual department meeting, where most of the focus was devoted to reviewing the qualifications of four outstanding candidates to be the next AFRE chairperson. This is a critical time for AFRE, and our future will be significantly influenced by the person we choose to be our next chair. Perhaps taking the time now to look briefly in the rearview mirror of the department can help us make the best choice.

Looking back.  In this effort we are fortunate to have Mike Weber's commitment. He was concerned that, when faculty members retired, they were dropped from the web page and their efforts lost from view.  So after his own retirement, Mike went about rebuilding profiles and gathering materials that are now available on the Emeritus/Former Faculty section of the department web page.  So when we needed someone to help organize a session on the history of the department, Mike seemed like the natural choice, and he was willing to do it.  View outputs to date at  2015 AFRE Historical Reviews.  If you have significant historical information about the origin of the department and who helped us arrive at where we are, would you drop Mike an email and be part of this effort?

Looking ahead.  As we look to the future and a new department chairperson, AFRE has benefitted from a dedicated chair search committee under the able leadership of Scott Swinton with committee members Nicky Mason, Chris Wolf, Frank Lupi and Jim Kells (chair of the Department of Plant, Soil and Microbial Sciences). Their dedication to this assignment is reflected in the four outstanding chairperson candidates who visited the department before the annual faculty meeting.  The four chairperson candidates who interviewed are Titus Awokuse, Joan Fulton, Cathy Roheim and Ian Sheldon.

Finally, thank you for your support of AFRE-your contributions in the past have helped us arrive at this point in time, and your continuing commitment will help us build a bright future in which we continue to develop policy solutions and extension/outreach programs for reducing poverty, hunger and natural resource degradation; manage food and resource businesses in a global setting; partner with biophysical and social scientists to evaluate new production and policy approaches; and add to the knowledge base of theory and methods.

All the best,

Lindon J. Robison 

Thom Jayne has been named an MSU Foundation Professor, a new honor designed to recognize the work of outstanding university faculty members. The professorship is supported by the MSU Foundation in partnership with the MSU Office of Research and Graduate Studies.  Jayne will receive up to $60,000 per year over the next five years that he can use for research-related expenses such as travel, salaries and graduate student tuition.

David Washburn, executive director of the MSU Foundation, said this type of program is vital if MSU hopes to retain its best and brightest faculty members. Washburn said the foundation wants to name 25 MSU foundation professors over the next few years.

"This is one tool we can make available to help the university retain and attract the best," Washburn said. "In turn, we expect the recipients will help us increase our preeminence as a major research institution that solves the world's hard problems."

That is exactly what Jayne has been doing since he joined AFRE in 1989 and moved to sub-Saharan Africa for the first time with MSU. He decided that his work would focus on the ways in which government policies affected smallholder farmers as they struggled to feed themselves and climb out of poverty.

Jayne sees positive change happening in much of Africa, and increasingly it's Africans who are taking the lead in policy analysis and guiding government officials.  Jayne cited the Indaba Agricultural Policy Institute (IAPRI), a Zambian think tank that grew out of a policy analysis training project with Jayne, Nicholas Sitko, Nicole Mason and others from the MSU Food Security Group. He also pointed to Egerton University's Tegemeo Institute in Kenya, where he has worked with African colleagues for almost 20 years.

"African policymakers increasingly expect to be relying on African analysts to guide them," Jayne said. "The time has now come where there's enough African expertise that MSU can be making itself a valuable partner by supporting African organizations to do many of the things that international researchers used to do directly."

Recently, Jayne has been turning his attention to a looming challenge called the "youth bulge." Over the next 20 years, 350 million young Africans will be entering the workforce.

In April, Jayne traveled to several African capitals to help African colleagues prepare and present a program titled "Megatrends in Africa and the Factors Shaping Them." The youth bulge is one of those megatrends.  With 70 percent of Africa's population currently working in agriculture, "its viability will influence whether millions of young Africans are gainfully employed in farming or underemployed in informal sector jobs.  The labor force is growing too rapidly to absorb most of the youth into viable non-farm jobs,"  Jayne said.

During his April travel, Jayne also sought to promote the efforts of IAPRI and seven other African policy institutes, whose analysts will be working on this dilemma in the coming years. Later this year, they will present their findings on the population and jobs issue to the African Union.

"Our role is to work with governments and increasingly local policy institutes in Africa to do the analysis that will guide governments on how to address this huge challenge," Jayne said.

"In my mind, Thom was the ideal candidate for this honor," said Lindon Robison, AFRE interim chairperson. "He has an amazing blend of scholarship, along with service aspirations for solving problems of poverty, and he does both really well." 

The list of Jayne's successes in securing grants and publishing articles is long. His published work has been cited almost 7,000 times by economists and agricultural economists worldwide, Robison said. Jayne has been the principal investigator or co-principal investigator on over $45 million of external grants since 2008. A $7.8 million Gates Foundation grant he secured in 2013 is helping to fund the work of at least seven other MSU faculty members involved in research in Africa. As testament to the esteem in which he is held in Africa, in 2013 Jayne was inducted as a fellow of the African Association of Agricultural Economists.

Jayne is a home-grown product who received his master's and doctorate from MSU.

"Thom is AFRE," Robison said, "and having him recognized for this honor sends a significant message to potential faculty members that this is a premier place to develop a career."  

Jayne's list of accomplishments also includes being a dissertation advisor for eight Ph.D. researchers who have graduated since 2010, five of whom are assistant professors at U.S. universities. Two of them, Nicole Mason and Milu Muyanga, are AFRE assistant professors at MSU.  Both Muyanga and Mason, along with assistant professor Jordan Chamberlin, have provided valuable assistance in building the university's relationship with African research institutes, Jayne noted. 

As the years go by, Jayne has come to realize that it's the people he meets and the relationships he builds - both at MSU and in Africa - that provide meaning to his work as it  carries forward, he hopes, into future generations. 

"That's what will have the most lasting impact, far more than what I write," he said.

As a young Peace Corps volunteer in the African nation of Guinea, Nicole Mason discovered her passion for working with smallholder farmers in Africa, which led her to graduate school at MSU and her current position as an assistant professor in the Department of Agricultural, Food and Resource Economics.

"I loved interacting with the farmers in my village in Guinea, particularly the women's gardening cooperatives, chatting with them and learning about the opportunities and challenges they faced," said Mason, whose job in the Peace Corps involved environmental education and agroforestry.

When she returned to the United States, Mason said she missed her interactions with the farming community, so she got involved with the local foods movement in Pennsylvania, where she had graduated from Allegheny College with a degree in biology. She also realized that she wanted to continue to work and travel internationally. She decided to focus on food security issues in Africa and chose Michigan State as the place to earn her advanced degrees. She received her master's and doctorate in agricultural economics. 

"MSU has been a great fit for me," said Mason, who grew up near Rochester, N.Y. "Our long-term engagement in and commitment to building research capacity in Africa really sets MSU apart from other universities."  

When Mason joined the Michigan State faculty in 2011, she was based in Lusaka, Zambia, and was also a research fellow with the Indaba Agricultural Policy Research Institute, or IAPRI. During her second year in Zambia, she became the capacity building coordinator. While in Zambia, she did collaborative research with Zambian partners, conducted technical training sessions for IAPRI staff members on agricultural policy analysis and quantitative methods, and  taught two master's-level classes at the University of Zambia in a brand new agricultural economics program.   

"Collaborating with researchers at IAPRI has been a wonderful learning experience. We learn from one another," Mason said. "They know the Zambian context far better than I ever could, no matter how many trips I take there. They ensure that our work is grounded in the local context, and I can help them improve their skill sets in other ways, so it's a mutually beneficial partnership."  

Armed with the knowledge she gained from working and living in Africa for two years, Mason returned to East Lansing in 2013 for a new assignment as an assistant professor in the tenure system. Part of her current research focuses on the resurgent role of governments in agricultural markets in Africa, with an emphasis on agricultural input subsidy and crop purchase programs.

"I began studying these programs a few years ago and started out looking at the effects of the programs on fertilizer and hybrid seed use as well as cropping patterns," she said. "Now I'm focusing more on higher level impacts of the programs, such as their effects on poverty among small farmers in Zambia and Kenya."

She sums up the lessons learned in an engaging video called "The Scoop on Fertilizer Subsidies" released May 20, 2015. The 20-minute talk appears in the AgTalks series on IFAD TV  (International Fund for Agricultural Development). 

She also has been working with her first graduate student advisee to understand how subsidies for inorganic fertilizer in Zambia affect farmers' use of other soil fertility management practices.

"These practices can improve soil quality and the effectiveness of inorganic fertilizer, so we want to understand if the fertilizer subsidy program was encouraging or discouraging farmers' use of these practices," she explained. "Improving soil health is high on the policy agenda-in fact, 2015 has been named the International Year of Soils by the United Nations - so this is an important issue.

"I was a biology major and have a longstanding interest in the interactions between agriculture, the environment and development. It's an area I would like to explore more in the future," Mason said.

She will travel back to Zambia early this summer to help train trainers for an upcoming IAPRI survey of about 8,000 smallholder farm households. The households were first interviewed back in 2012, and the goal is to reinterview them this year to track changes over time in their farm and off-farm activities. She will use these data in her research in the coming years.

Later this summer, Mason plans to travel to Kenya to share with policymakers the findings of her work on fertilizer subsidy issues there. This work is in collaboration with colleagues at the Tegemeo Institute of Agricultural Policy and Development, which is a unit of Kenya's Egerton University.

Mason's first teaching experience at MSU came this past year and involved two graduate-level courses. One was a statistics class for first-year master's students. She team-taught the other class - "Agriculture and Economic Development"-with another relative newcomer, assistant professor Saweda Liverpool-Tasie. The class included students from just about every continent, Mason said.

"That made for some really rich discussions," she said. "I've always enjoyed teaching, and the talented graduate students we have in AFRE made both classes a lot of fun to teach. Saweda was wonderful to work with as well, and we're excited to teach together again this coming fall."

MSU Department of Agricultural, Food and Resource Economics, few would have predicted that he would become president and fellow of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association (AAEA) and chairperson of a leading department of applied economics.