Arkansas native elected next president of Southern Agricultural Economics Association

By Lauren Sutherland
U of A System Division of Agriculture

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — Starting next year, John Anderson will be in a position to provide strategic guidance to the Southern Agriculture Economics Association, an organization he says has helped shape him professionally for more than two decades.

Anderson, a native of Timbo in Stone County, is head of the Department of Agricultural Economics and Agribusiness for the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture and the Dale Bumpers College of Agricultural, Food, and Life Sciences.

John Anderson was elected president of the Southern Agriucltural Economics Assocation. (U of A System Division of Agriculture image by Fred Miller)

In February, Anderson was elected to be the next president of the Southern Agricultural Economics Association for 2024.

“It is an honor for me to have this opportunity to give back to an organization that has done so much for me,” Anderson said. “I am looking forward to working closely with them and the rest of the SAEA Executive Council over the coming year.”

Anderson has been a member of the SAEA since he was a graduate student in the late 1990s. His participation and involvement in the organization have helped shaped his professional outlook and provided him with countless opportunities.

“I have made lifelong friendships among my SAEA colleagues,” said Anderson. “I have known the current president, Marco Palma at Texas A&M, and past president, Rodney Holcomb at Oklahoma State, for many years and have the utmost respect for them both.”

The SAEA is a non-profit association comprised of economists striving to understand and explain the values and impacts of factors related to agricultural production, agribusiness, rural development, and natural resources management in the Southern United States.

“John is a very respected leader throughout the land-grant system,” said Deacue Fields, head of the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture and a past president of SAEA. “He will do a great job implementing programs for the SAEA. This is a great recognition of John’s leadership that will provide tremendous visibility for the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture.”

Encouraged to run

Rodney Holcomb, professor of agricultural economics at Oklahoma State University, encouraged Anderson to stand for election.

“I’m a big fan of John Anderson. He’s an outstanding agricultural economist who is greatly respected by peers in both academia and industry,” said Holcomb. “He’s also a strategic thinker with excellent people skills, which is why he’s a good department head. That combination of talents is exactly what the SAEA needs, and that’s why I encouraged him to run for the office.”

Anderson was elected by a vote of the membership that includes 400 members of SAEA. The organization has a three-year rotation for the president's office where the candidate-elect will serve as president-elect for one year, president for the second year, and past president for the third year.

For that three-year period, Anderson will sit on the SAEA Executive Council to help provide strategic leadership to the organization and assist in managing the association’s functions, the primary functions being the organization and execution of the annual meeting and management of the SAEA’s peer-reviewed journal, the Journal of Agricultural and Applied Economics.

For more than 20 years, John has worked as a professional agricultural economist in both academic and industry positions. His work has involved describing and assessing the farm- and sector-level impacts of policy, regulatory, and market developments across a wide variety of agricultural commodities and markets. John has served as a faculty member, with primary appointments in extension, at the University of Kentucky and Mississippi State University. He received his Bachelor’s in Agribusiness from College of the Ozarks in Point Lookout, Missouri, a Master of Agriculture at Arkansas State University, and his Ph.D. in Agricultural Economics from Oklahoma State University.

To learn about extension programs in Arkansas, contact your local Cooperative Extension Service agent or visit www.uaex.uada.edu. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram at @AR_Extension. To learn more about Division of Agriculture research, visit the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station website: https://aaes.uada.edu. Follow on Twitter at @ArkAgResearch. To learn more about the Division of Agriculture, visit https://uada.edu/. Follow us on Twitter at @AgInArk.

Arkansas ag econ professor Jada Thompson wins SAEA Emerging Scholar Award

By John Lovett
University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture
Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — Jada Thompson, assistant professor in the department of agricultural economics and agribusiness in the University of Arkansas System, was recently recognized with the Southern Agricultural Economics Association’s 2023 Emerging Scholar Award for research.

EMERGING SCHOLAR — Jada Thompson is a 2023 Emerging Scholar Award recipient from the Southern Agricultural Economics Association. The agricultural economist has focused much of her work on HPAI bird flu. (U of A System Division of Ag photo by Fred Miller)

Thompson, an economist with the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station, the research arm of the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture, has spent much of her academic career researching bird flu’s economic impact.

She said the new strain of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza H5N1 poses a longer-running risk on the supply chain and may lead to structural changes in poultry production. The 2022 bird flu epidemic has raised questions about how the poultry industry proceeds.

The agricultural economics and agribusiness department now has three SAEA Emerging Scholar Award-winning faculty. Brandon McFadden, professor and the Tyson Endowed Chair in Food Policy Economics, and Trey Malone, assistant professor, were recognized with the award in 2019 and 2022, respectively.

“Dr. Thompson has established an outstanding record of research, with nearly 40 peer-reviewed publications including not only high-impact journal articles but also Extension publications summarizing stakeholder-relevant work,” John Anderson, head of the agricultural economics and agribusiness department, stated in his nomination letter for the award.

Anderson, who is also director of the Fryar Price Risk Management Center of Excellence, stated that Thompson’s record shows that she is a versatile researcher who is able to apply her skill set to a variety of relevant problems. A common thread that is evident in her work is the link between farm-level production issues and market impacts, he said.

“This is an increasingly important line of inquiry, as her work on both domestic and international market impacts of animal disease outbreaks demonstrates,” Anderson wrote. “This kind of integrated research requires not only a solid economics toolkit but also a thorough understanding of both production systems and agricultural markets. Any one of these facets of the work is difficult to master. Dr. Thompson ably integrates her mastery of all three.”

Anderson noted Thompson’s work is highly collaborative with economists from a wide range of institutions and experts from other relevant disciplines. Her proficiency extends to the extension and teaching mission areas, where she engaged directly with stakeholders, Anderson added.

“She is an excellent instructor, having already taught a variety of courses at three different land-grant institutions,” Anderson said. “Dr. Thompson has also actively engaged in service activities, both in our department and within the profession. Across all aspects of her faculty work, Dr. Thompson is productive, hard-working, and unfailingly collegial. She is rapidly emerging as a leader within our profession.”

Malone said the SAEA Emerging Scholar award is national in scope and a “premier designation” for early career faculty members in agricultural economics.

“Jada’s applied research program as a poultry economist is top-notch, so it’s fantastic to see such a hypercompetitive award acknowledge her hard work,” Malone said.

Thompson, a northwest Arkansas native, is among a small group of agricultural economists who specialize in poultry, Anderson said. She has a long history with the University of Arkansas, earning her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in agricultural economics there. For her bachelor’s degree, Thompson double-majored in poultry science and agricultural economics. In June, she returned as an assistant professor following five years as an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville.

She earned her doctorate in 2016 at Colorado State University.

“When you come into agriculture as a woman, there is a smaller subset of us, and to get this award is validating and exciting,” Thompson said. “To be nominated was humbling and to win was very nice.”

2022 HPAI potential impacts

As part of the award, Thompson will give a presentation on her investigations into the economic ramifications of this highly pathogenic avian influenza — HPAI — at the SAEA annual symposium in February in Oklahoma City. Her talk will provide a comprehensive overview of HPAI, the differences between the 2015 and 2022 outbreaks, market impacts and her analysis of how the event may change the poultry sector.

“In animal health economics it is important to push the boundaries of information gathering, analysis and multidisciplinary work because of this concept of ‘One Health,’ that plants, animals and humans are interconnected on local, regional, national and global levels,” Thompson said.

Some of the discussion around HPAI include continued research on a cost-beneficial aerosol vaccine that would be the most practical option for inoculating tens of thousands of birds at once. H5N1 has had a bigger impact on turkeys and laying hens, however, because older birds are more susceptible to the virus, Thompson noted. Broilers, the largest sector of Arkansas’ poultry industry, are harvested after about two months of growth.

Questions remain on what the producer response should be if the H5N1 strain continues into 2023, Thompson said. How much to increase production to compensate for potential losses and changes in placements are at the top of the list because of issues with increased food prices and potential fear in the marketplace of continued disruptions.

To learn more about Division of Agriculture research, visit the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station website: https://aaes.uada.edu. Follow on Twitter at @ArkAgResearch. To learn more about the Division of Agriculture, visit https://uada.edu/. Follow us on Twitter at @AgInArk. To learn about extension programs in Arkansas, contact your local Cooperative Extension Service agent or visit www.uaex.uada.edu.