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From the Chairperson
| As the season changes into autumn, our Department is changing too. In addition to welcoming new and returning students for fall classes, we also have new faculty and staff joining the department. I am new to MSU, as my appointment began in August 2015. We also welcome both David Hennessy, as Elton R. Smith Professor of Food and Agricultural Policy, and Hongli Feng, as associate professor. |
As Chairperson of the Department of Agricultural, Food and Resource Economics (AFRE), I face a fresh beginning. For the past 15 years, I was a faculty member (and Chairperson from 2011 to 2015) of the Department of Applied Economics and Statistics at the University of Delaware. My family (wife, two sons and a daughter) is also making a new beginning, as we recently moved from the East Coast to East Lansing, Michigan. While we will miss our friends and colleagues in Delaware, I'm very excited about the great opportunity to join the Spartan community and serve as the leader of an excellent and very dynamic department. I'm truly honored to be a part of AFRE.
As AFRE's Chairperson, my main goal is to work alongside faculty, staff, stakeholders, and administrative leaders at MSU and across the state in building empowering relationships and programs. Our department's future success will depend on how well we work together in building a stronger sense of community and effective working partnerships across our field and other disciplines. We must strengthen our outreach and engagement with our stakeholders within MSU, across the state of Michigan, and around the world. I'm very confident that we can do this. I value open communication, accountability, transparency, and fairness. I will work very hard to be a strong advocate and promoter of our people and programs.
We have some important decisions to make in the next few years with regards to our research enterprise, undergraduate and graduate programs, outreach programs, and key personnel changes in our centers and working groups. These pivotal decisions will require internal conversations and planning amongst us as we revisit key questions about our identity and future as a department. Addressing these questions will require greater commitment to strategic thinking about our future and engaging in service to AFRE. While we have some challenges ahead, we are doing very well and are poised to achieve even more and make a greater impact in scholarship, education and outreach. We have excellent faculty, staff and students who are pushing the frontier of knowledge and making national and global impact.
My primary objective in the next few weeks and months is to take time to listen and learn more about AFRE and MSU. To that end, I plan to meet with various stakeholders within MSU, Michigan and beyond. I look forward to listening to your insights and ideas for building stronger relationships and programs within and beyond our great department.
I am very grateful to the two most recent AFRE chairs, Steve Hanson and Lindon Robison, and the associate chairs, Scott Swinton and Jim Hilker, for their effective leadership and strong commitment to the welfare and development of the department. Please join me in showing them our appreciation for their excellent contributions to AFRE. I'm also thankful for the many other AFRE faculty and staff who have played key leadership roles in the past and continue to do so. I look forward to working with each of you in extending and expanding upon our recent successes. Together we can do more amazing things and make a larger impact on our world. I'm very excited about being part of this great adventure.
Titus Awokuse
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Grad team wins 2015 IFAMA Case Competition
How comfortable is a fourth-generation Wisconsin dairy farmer analyzing a business plan before a panel of judges from the International Food and Agribusiness Management Association (IFAMA)?
If that dairy farmer is Leonard Polizin-very comfortable.
Polzin, a master's candidate in the agricultural, food and resource economics program at Michigan State, never felt more at home than in the final stage of the IFAMA Student Case Competition in St. Paul, Minnesota, in June. He and his case study competition teammates - Kendra Levine, Tatevik Avetisyan and Andrea Leschewski - secured the top prize among 20 international collegiate teams during the three-day conference. In doing so, the Spartan team convinced the judges they that they had the best plan for Monsanto and The Climate Corporation to leverage new acquisitions to help farmers maximize net returns per acre while better utilizing scarce land and water resources to feed a growing population.
Because he had participated in similar competitions, Polzin had an idea of which leading agribusiness and food industry companies might be represented on the judges panel. He also felt it was important for his team to present a big-picture solution to the problem and not get bogged down in strict detail.
"It was important for us, as a team, to deliver a plan that showed our understanding of the problem and our awareness of companies facing these types of challenges," Polzin said. "We put in weeks and hours of prep time before the conference to make sure each of us knew our role and what was expected of us as a team."
"One thing that really helped us was to focus on clarity in everything we presented, especially the visuals," Levine said. "Our adviser [and coach], Dr. Brent Ross, made sure to emphasize that throughout our practice sessions leading up to the conference."
MSU was one of four teams that advanced to the final round on June 16 and again went through a similar five-minute setup, 15-minute presentation and five-minute question-and-answer session in front of the four-person judges panel.
"We mastered how to brainstorm effectively in a very limited time," Avetisyan said. "We knew how to identify the key problem in a case study and develop a strategic response, with a strong emphasis on teamwork."
Levine credited the team's diverse skill set for its ability to quickly size up the situation and produce a coherent plan:
- Avetisyan - business performance analysis, experience working with cooperatives in Armenia.
- Leschewski - a Ph.D. candidate well-versed in research and data analytics.
- Levine - PowerPoint pro, concise wordsmith, solution creation (she accepted a position with McDonald's corporate office as a manager of U.S. supply chain sustainability in August 2015).
- Polzin - public speaking and presentation (he has accepted a position with University of Minnesota as an assistant extension professor in the Center for Farm Financial Management beginning in January 2016).
The MSU team arrived at the St. Paul Convention Center on June 14 and competed in the preliminary round the following day. Each of the 20 teams was given exactly four hours to analyze the case and create and submit a PowerPoint presentation to the judging panel. Teams were then given a one-hour break to prepare for the 15-minute presentation to the panel.
The following criteria were used to evaluate each of the presentations: situational analysis - appreciation of the problem and its strategic implications; pragmatism - appropriateness and applicability of the recommended solution; creativity and originality of the solution; PowerPoint quality; oral presentation quality and professionalism; effective responses to judges' questions; inclusion of all team members in the presentation.
by Mark Meyer
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Garnache's goal: smarter decisions, cleaner environment
AFRE assistant professor Cloé Garnache considers the great outdoors to be more than just a place to enjoy her hobbies of rock climbing and backpacking. It is also a resource to be studied to find out how much people value it and how it can be managed to maximize its value to society.
Garnache came to Michigan State in 2013 after completing her Ph.D. at the University of California, Davis. She joined the MSU Global Water Initiative, a campuswide endeavor seeking to make the university a leader in water-related issues both around the globe and here at home.
Through the Water Initiative, Garnache is working with a team of experts across campus to study the link between phosphorus use in agriculture and the loss of freshwater ecosystem services such as beach recreation, fishing and lake-front amenities.
"We're trying to understand how farmers may respond to a suite of policies aimed at reducing phosphorus runoff and how those changes in farmers' behavior may affect the value of the services provided by freshwater ecosystems in the Great Lakes region," Garnache said.
On an international level, she was named a fellow in the Academy for Global Engagement to work on improving access to safe drinking water in sub-Saharan Africa. Garnache said she wants to know why so few people use water treatment technologies at the point of use, despite their low cost and proven effectiveness.
"It's really important to understand household preferences so we can design policies that mitigate the barriers to adoption and incentivize use," she said, explaining that this particular project aims to examine the tradeoffs that households make between the efficacy of the water treatment technology, its convenience, its price and the availability of traditional sources of water.
Garnache, who was raised in France, said she realized early on while studying biology and chemistry that simply knowing the science was not enough to influence the decision-making process that ultimately would determine the future of the world's natural resources.
"You can have the best science and technology, but if you don't understand how people respond to incentives, then you cannot know what is going to happen. That led me to take classes in natural resource and environmental economics," she said.
A desire to learn more about resource management in the United States led her to California to work with professors in natural resource economics at UC-Davis, where she received a Ph.D. in agricultural and resource economics. She also holds master's degrees from AgroParisTech in energy and environmental economics, and agronomic and life sciences engineering.
During her time in California, Garnache also became interested in the comprehensive climate policy that the state legislature passed in 2006, which includes a cap-and-trade program that has been in effect since 2013. The California Air Resources Board, which is in charge of the rule making, is considering allowing the agricultural sector to participate in the cap-and-trade program. Along with a colleague from UC-Davis, Garnache is evaluating the cost effectiveness of various payment schemes for reducing greenhouse gas emissions from the agriculture sector.
"Agriculture," Garnache said, "could provide low-cost emission reductions relative to other capped sectors, and what matters is reducing carbon emissions wherever you can, from whichever sector is the cheapest," she said. "So I am looking at what role agriculture could play in lowering the cost of achieving the state's emissions cap."
An American by birth, Garnache grew up in the French Alps and said her interest in natural resources began with forests and how they are used around the world. Currently she is involved in a project in southern California with the U.S. Forest Service to study four national forests surrounding the Los Angeles metropolitan area. Garnache is examining how human and environmental stressors such as wildfires, climate change and urban growth affect the value of ecosystem services that these forests provide to the public.
"These national forests see millions of visitors every year, so understanding how various stressors affect how much the public values the forests will help inform policymaking to manage these resources in accordance with the value the public places on them," Garnache said.
Since her return from the forests and mountains this fall, Garnache is co-teaching applied microeconomics for graduate students and ecological economics for undergraduates.
"I love teaching because it is a great opportunity to bring research into the classroom to engage the students and illustrate the class material using case studies that draw from applied research," she said.
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Swinton receives MSU Outstanding Faculty Award
Swinton is an agricultural and environmental economist who joined the MSU faculty in 1991 and now serves as associate chairperson of the Department of Agricultural, Food and Resource Economics.
"I enjoy working on projects that make the world a better place," Swinton said. "Most of my research deals with how farmers can manage to be profitable and improve environmental stewardship." On the Great Lakes Watershed Ecological Sustainability Strategy, Swinton and MSU colleagues collaborated with The Nature Conservancy and LimnoTech, Inc., to encourage agricultural conservation. In the face of a resurgence of harmful algal blooms in western Lake Erie, Swinton and Ph.D. candidate Leah Palm-Forster explored economic incentives that would lead farmers to reduce the amount of phosphorus flowing into Lake Erie from their fields and thereby abate the algal blooms. The pair started in 2013 by conducting four experimental conservation auctions with farmers in the Maumee River basin of northwestern Ohio, a significant source of agricultural runoff. But instead of simply awarding the conservation dollars to the lowest bidder, they worked with Todd Redder of LimnoTech, who adapted USDA's SWAT model to simulate how much the proposed conservation practices on each field would change the amount of phosphorus entering Lake Erie tributaries. They ranked the bids by cost per pound of phosphorus reduction to get the biggest "bang for the conservation buck." Through the auction experiments, Swinton, Palm-Forster, and AFRE Associate Professor Rob Shupp found that direct payments and tax credits were more cost-effective than green insurance and certification premiums. Then in 2014, they conducted a real conservation auction with an eligible pool of almost 1,000 landowners in two counties of the Tiffin River watershed. Less than 2 percent chose to participate. From a survey to learn why, Swinton and Palm-Forster discovered that some farmers already were practicing conservation. Others said there was too much paperwork or the process was too complicated. The finding "helped us recognize that we need ways forward on conservation policy that aren't complicated," Swinton said. Working with graduate students on research puzzles builds intuition and skills that they will use for the rest of their careers, Swinton said. Palm-Forster agreed, saying skills she developed such as collaboration, project management and navigating the research process with Swinton as her adviser should help her greatly as she transitions to her new job as an assistant professor of applied economics and statistics at the University of Delaware.
Swinton provided the right amount of guidance while also leaving her free to explore her own questions and ideas, she wrote in an email.
"Instead of dictating how our research would progress, Dr. Swinton encouraged me to take ownership of our project," she said. "He allowed me to explore research questions that I found interesting, and he valued my ideas and input. He has high expectations for his students, and he works closely with them to set goals."
Swinton has co-authored more than 30 journal articles with his graduate students. He has supervised theses that have won nine departmental and three national awards. His students come from around the world, and he has supervised thesis field research in eight countries. As associate chairperson of the department, he also directs AFRE's 90-student graduate program.
Swinton views agriculture as a managed ecosystem that generates both farm products and ecosystem services. Farm products have markets, but ecosystem services often do not. To him, there is no bigger challenge in agriculture than to find ways to encourage farmers to manage for those beneficial ecosystem services while maintaining profitability. On the NSF-suppported Long-term Ecological Research in Row Crop Ecosystems project (KBS-LTER), Swinton works with researchers in ecology, soil science, plant biology, entomology and microbiology on agricultural sustainability and bioenergy issues.
"Virtually all problems are interdisciplinary," Swinton said. "I believe the most promising way to attack them is with teams of people who know their own fields very well and can work together productively."
by Christine Meyer
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People and Awards
Titus Awokuse became AFRE's Department Chairperson, effective August 16, 2016. He was previously professor and chairperson of the Department of Applied Economics and Statistics at the University of Delaware.
Hongli Feng joined the Department effective August 16, 2016 as Associate Professor. She came from Iowa State University, where she was previously adjunct associate professor. Her office will be 401D Morrill Hall of Agriculture, effective October 1, 2015.
Student Awards and Honors
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AFRE Alumni News
1960s
Robert A. Young (Ph.D., 1963), emeritus professor at Colorado State University (CSU), passed away on July 17, 2015. Following his Ph.D. at MSU, he worked at University of Arizona and Resources for the Future (Washington, D.C.) before joining the faculty at CSU, where he was a resource economist from 1970 until 1992. His research focused on economic and policy analysis, chiefly related to water management.
1970s
Jerry Eckert (Ph.D. 1970), emeritus professor at Colorado State University (CSU), passed away on May 27, 2015. He taught and conducted research in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at CSU from 1972 until 2005. In retirement, he followed a passion of non-fiction writing. His soon-to-be published memoir, entitled "Weeping Kings and Wild Boars: Moments of Magic and Sorrow from Forty Years of Trying to Save the World," recently won the Northern Colorado Writers Top of the Mountain Book Award.
1990s
2000s
Nelissa Jamora (M.S., 2006 in AFRE; Ph.D. 2014, University of Göttingen) started work as Research Fellow at the Global Crop Diversity Trust ( www.croptrust.org) in Bonn, Germany, in July 2015. During the prior year, she worked on an academic support grant from the German Research Foundation for early researchers.
2010s
Jordan Chamberlin (Ph.D., 2013) has left his position as assistant professor in AFRE located at the Indaba Agricultural Policy Research Institute (IAPRI) in Lusaka, Zambia, to take a position as a spatial economist with the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) based in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. He started on Aug. 1, 2015.
Nicole Kendra Levine (M.S., 2015) took a managerial position in U.S. supply chain sustainability with McDonald's (corporate), Oak Brook, Illinois, in August 2015.
Leah Harris Palm-Forster, (Ph.D., expected 2015) accepted a position as assistant professor in the Department of Applied Economics and Statistics at the University of Delaware, Newark Delaware, in August 2015.Carson Reeling (Ph.D., 2015) joined the Department of Economics at Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, as an assistant professor, in July 2015.Traci Taylor, (M.S., 2015) began work as senior analyst at Anderson Economic Group, East Lansing, Michigan, in September 2014.Chenguang Wang (Ph.D., 2015) took a position with Freddie Mac in the Enterprise Risk Management Division in Washington, DC, starting in July 2015.Hui Wang, (PhD expected 2015) has accepted a position as an economist at Amazon.com, Seattle, Washington, starting in July 2015.
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Masthead
Advancing Economics, Transforming Lives
is the quarterly newsletter of the Department of Agricultural, Food, and Resource Economics at Michigan State University (http://www.afre.msu.edu/).
Editor:
| Scott M. Swinton
| Writers:
| Mark J. Meyer, Christine Meyer
| Assistant Editor:
| Debbie Conway
| Editing Assistance:
| ANR Communications
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