Robert Evenson, the farmer-scholar who brought agricultural economics to Yale

At the time that Yale students formed YHAP, Yale had never made a tenured hire in the field of agricultural economics, an applied field traditionally relegated to agricultural schools at land grant institutions while elite universities prioritized theory. A February 1975 YHAP statement noted that, “if any member of the Economics faculty is competent to teach a course in agricultural economics or some dimension thereof, he is not doing so now… While such a course has been taught in the past, apparently it is not considered sufficiently important to warrant incorporation in the regular curriculum.”   

Indeed, the faculty member whose research was most invested in ending world hunger had just left Yale. Without an opportunity to get tenure, in 1974 Robert Evenson headed to the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in Los Baños, the Philippines.

Established in 1960 with funding from the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, IRRI was the first of four international research institutes formed to build agricultural capacity and productivity in lower-income countries. In his new position, Evenson helped develop research programs that would allow these countries to adapt the new agricultural technologies of the Green Revolution to their unique ecological, social, and economic contexts. 

Back in New Haven, however, the surge of interest in fighting world hunger was making Yale’s administration more receptive to the idea of hiring faculty in related fields. With YHAP’s urging, in 1975, Yale President Kingman Brewster appointed a University Committee on World Hunger charged with preparing a detailed report on how the university could help alleviate world hunger. Among its members was economics professor and Economic Growth Center (EGC) director Lloyd Reynolds. 

Knowing that one of the committee’s forthcoming recommendations was the hiring of faculty whose research addressed hunger through the academic lenses of agriculture and nutrition, Reynolds concluded that the time was right for the economics department to seek its first tenured appointment in agricultural economics. 

“We have reason to believe that the administration is sympathetic to these ideas,” he assured his economics department colleagues in a memo. “... There is also strong student demand for teaching and thesis supervision in this area and, while we shouldn’t be entirely demand-oriented, this should be taken into account.”

Of course, as a leader in the growing subfield of development economics, EGC already recognized the importance of agriculture to economics. Collecting agricultural data and researching agricultural markets in lower-income countries were important aspects of the Center in its early years. 

In a memo to his department colleagues, Reynolds explained why they should support an appointment in agricultural economics. Not only was boosting agricultural productivity key to the well-being of people and economies in lower-income countries, but also agriculture was methodologically suited to cutting-edge economic research: “Viewed as a field of research, agriculture has the advantage of a large number of production units and a wealth of microeconomic data,” he observed. “This makes it possible to fit production functions, to apply tests of economic efficiency, to investigate adoption of innovations at the farm level as well as in aggregative terms.”

Reynolds and other members of the agricultural economics appointment committee decided the best candidate for the position was Evenson, then just eight years out of his PhD but already the leading scholar of how government investment in agricultural research and extension affected productivity. 

Evenson had already made a name for himself through his influential research with Yoav Kislev on the process of technological innovation. Their 1975 book, Agricultural Research and Productivity, uses detailed empirical research to create a theoretical framework for analysis of the relationship between technological improvements and productivity.  In tracking farmers’ adaptations of new agricultural technologies, Evenson and Kislev developed a model of agricultural productivity with enormous implications beyond agriculture. 

“It’s a classic,” said David Zilberman, the Robinson Chair in the Agricultural and Resource Economics Department at UC Berkeley. “[It showed that] with innovation, the key element is experimentation. The more experiments you have, the better outcomes.”

This research made Evenson an appealing prospect for a tenured position. As Reynolds noted, “Evenson ‘owns a field’ to a degree which is rather unusual... In addition to its intellectual interest, I think experts would agree that no line of research is more relevant to the problem of raising agricultural productivity and world food output."

In 1977, three years after departing, Evenson returned to Yale, remaining until his retirement in 2007.

Evenson was born in 1934 in southern Minnesota and began his working life as a farmer. In his late 20s, he decided to pursue bachelor’s and master's degrees in agricultural economics at the University of Minnesota, followed by a PhD in economics from the University of Chicago. Before completing his Chicago PhD in 1968, he began working as an assistant professor at Minnesota. In 1969, he joined the Yale Economics department as an associate professor.

Throughout his career, Evenson drew on the knowledge and sensibility he had gained as a southern Minnesota farmer. “Bob was unique because he came from a farm background. He was from the first generation to move off the farm, like many of us did later,” said Prabhu Pingali, Director of the Tata-Cornell Institute for Agriculture and Nutrition at Cornell, who co-edited two volumes of the Handbook of Agricultural Economics with Evenson. “That connection to the farm made it easy for him to understand the role of agriculture.”

“He was totally at home in the middle of a rice field,” said Agnes Quisumbing, a Senior Research Fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), who first met Evenson in the 1980s, when she was an assistant professor at the University of Los Baños, the Philippines. “It was one of the best places to get his insights on things. He would ask questions that came from him knowing the sector really well, even if it was in a totally different context.”

During Evenson’s three decades back at Yale, which included 25 years as director of the International and Development Economics master’s program and three years as director of EGC, he was known for his superb mentorship of generations of students.

In his research, he continued to examine agricultural innovation around the world, helping lower-income countries develop their capacities to conduct productive agricultural research and extension. As new methods for genetically modifying crops emerged, Evenson investigated how government regulatory frameworks including patents could best support biotechnology.

One of Evenson’s most consequential research collaborations was his work with the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa), a public research corporation established in 1973 to develop Brazil’s agricultural productivity through research attuned to local ecological conditions. An agrarian culture before the Green Revolution, Brazil has become a top exporter of agricultural goods. Recent work by development economists has shown that Embrapa’s scientific research – and not adoption of foreign technologies – was responsible for raising the nation’s yields of staple crops and increasing overall agricultural productivity. 

From 1983 to 1989, Evenson oversaw a collaboration between Embrapa and the World Bank that supported a variety of research projects investigating the influence of Brazil’s agricultural research on productivity – and who these technological changes ultimately benefited. In helping Brazil set up systems to collect data and measure agricultural productivity, Evenson encouraged the rapid identification and adoption of productive innovations, making each success more likely to bear additional fruit.

Evenson also sustained a strong relationship with Brazilian collaborators, bringing economists including Elmar DaCruz and Antonio Flavio Avila to EGC for year-long fellowships.