BROOKINGS, S.D. -- A South Dakota Wheat Growers-funded effort at South Dakota State University will focus research and teaching on issues important to agribusiness through the leadership of a named faculty scholar.
Professor Matthew Diersen in SDSU's Department of Economics is the new South Dakota Wheat Growers Scholar in Agribusiness Management. Diersen will carry out an initiative he proposed called "Engaging with agribusiness." South Dakota Wheat Growers has funded the program with a total of $240,000 spread over three years.
Diersen said Wheat Growers funding will help support research into issues critical to agribusiness, in part by providing assistantships for graduate students in the department of economics.
"The research will be supported, and we will be able to start addressing a variety of real issues faced by agribusinesses," Diersen said.
Diersen said his plan is to focus initial research on a few topic areas, starting with market structure. In the Northern Plains, he added, that means using the tools available to economists to look at grain merchandising and inputs for production agriculture.
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"Aside from market structure, you have the behavioral aspects of the different agribusiness firms in this area. What do they do? What are their actions? What strategic moves are the different agribusiness firms making? That makes for good economic analysis -- to explore and understand that," Diersen said. "The benefit of that comes right back into the classroom and enriches the classroom experience that our students will have."
An additional benefit will be that SDSU students will be better prepared for agribusiness careers. Students in the department who are heading toward careers in agribusiness will have classroom experiences that deal more frequently and in more detail with different aspects of management problems in the agribusiness sector.
"Agribusiness firms are always looking for talented students, and if we can provide a bigger pool of talented students to draw from, they benefit from that," Diersen said. "This will bring more real-world problems into the classroom. If we learn more about the current and changing needs of where an agribusiness student needs to be with their skill-set, we can make some changes with our instructional side of things and in our graduate programs to produce students who are better prepared, more capable to make a larger impact sooner if they go out into the agribusiness field and work for different organizations."
Diersen said the added agribusiness emphasis in research and teaching will begin at SDSU in the fall semester of 2011. The Wheat Growers program is one of several new donor-funded programs in economics and management that SDSU's Department of Economics is using to address needs in the state and region.
