ABSTRACT
Henry Charles Taylor is considered by some to be the father of agricultural economics in America (Jones 1958; Parsons 1970). Taylor started the first university department of agricultural economics in the United States at the University of Wisconsin in 1909 (Pulver 1984) and his contributions to that field on the academic side as well as in civil service, frankly, overshadow his work in marketing. Nevertheless, his work in agricultural marketing was also seminal. He was a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin from 1901 until 1919, the first eight years as an instructor under Richard T. Ely's leadership in the Department of Economics, followed by ten years as the founding Chair of the Department of Agricultural Economics. He was then appointed Chief of the Federal Office of Farm Management (1919–1921), Director of the Bureau of Markets and Crop Estimates (1921–1922), and of the Bureau of Agricultural Economics (1922–1925), before rejoining the academic world as Professor of Economics at Northwestern University from 1925 until 1928. He later returned to civil service as Managing Director of the Farm Foundation from 1935 through 1945 and continued with that organization as an agricultural economist until 1952. A significant part of Taylor's work in agricultural economics, both academically and as a civil servant, included marketing. Paul Converse may have been the first marketing historian to cite Taylor as an early contributor to marketing ideas (1945, 19). He suspected that Taylor might have preceded Arch W. Shaw in originating a functional approach to the study of marketing. Bartels also recognized Taylor as a contributor to the development of marketing thought, though only in passing. In his often-cited intellectual genealogy of marketing (see Figure 1.1), Bartels included Taylor as one in a group of four influential economists at the University of Wisconsin, an early center of influence on marketing thought (1951, 4). Taylor's distinctive contribution to the marketing discipline was to be one of the first economists to study and teach agricultural marketing in America.
