The Sub-Committee to enquire into the desirability of forming an AES – 100 years ago today

This March, the Agricultural Economics Society (AES) will celebrate its centenary at its annual conference at the University of Oxford, UK - exactly 100 years on from the meeting in the city which formally established the Society on 24th March 1926. That inaugural meeting of March 1926 required prior preparation and decisions. A hundred years ago today, a ‘Sub-Committee to enquire into the desirability of forming an Agricultural Economics Society’ met (also at Oxford) and decided to progress plans to create the AES.

Counting down to the Society’s centenary commenced at its annual conference in Bordeaux, France, in April 2025. As I said during a closing plenary presentation, 100 years ago that month the idea of starting the AES first became a formal point for discussion. In the early-to-mid 1920s, the government appointed agricultural economists to its agricultural advisory service in England and Wales (based at regional centres attached to a university or an agricultural college, with equivalent arrangements in Scotland and Northern Ireland). A ‘Committee on Agricultural Economics’ was set up to coordinate this new research and advisory work in agricultural economics. Its membership included the advisory agricultural economists together with representatives of the Ministry of Agriculture and other bodies. 

At a meeting of that Committee at Oxford in April 1925, A. W. (Arthur) Ashby ‘introduced a formal discussion’ about establishing the AES, believing wider interest in the study of the subject existed. (The precise date in April is not known, and he had first mentioned the idea at a Committee meeting earlier in the year.) Ashby worked at University College Wales, Aberystwyth, and became the UK’s first professor of agricultural economics in 1929. He had a general belief in the value of self-help and mutual help, and was also influenced by his experience of equivalent learned societies in the US: Ashby was a member of the then American Farm Economic Association and had also joined its main forerunner, the American Farm Management Association established in 1910 (now the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, AAEA).

At some point in 1925 the Committee on Agricultural Economics decided to set up a five-strong Sub-Committee tasked with inviting ten other people to a meeting to enquire into forming an AES. While the advisory agricultural economists and other university-based staff comprised the core group, four of those invited to join the (all-male) Sub-Committee worked in government and two in the agricultural industry. They included the assistant secretary at the Ministry of Agriculture overseeing the advisory economists, and the head of the statistics and intelligence department at the National Farmers’ Union.

Ten members of the Sub-Committee met at the new premises of the national Agricultural Economics Research Institute, 9 Parks Road, Oxford, on Saturday 30th January 1926. Ashby was one of those in attendance; the Institute’s director, C. S. (Charles) Orwin, chaired the meeting. According to the minutes (image 1), those present had ‘a general discussion of the project’. The matters they spoke about are unknown. The Sub-Committee then unanimously agreed that it was desirable to start an AES. 

Ashby had prepared, and circulated in advance, a draft constitution which the Sub-Committee members finalised (image 2). They decided to post out invitations to potential AES members – and assuming interest was sufficient, that the inaugural meeting to form the Society would take place at Oxford less than two months later on 24th March 1926.

The building at 9 Parks Road where the Sub-Committee met still stands. The meeting took place in the Institute’s library which doubled as a boardroom (image 3). Today I was in the room to mark the centenary of that important preparatory event (image 4).
 
Image 1: First page of the minutes of the Sub-Committee meeting, 30th January 1926 (in the first book of minutes of AES Executive Committee meetings).
 
Image 2: AES draft constitution, 1926 (working copy in the first book of minutes of AES Executive Committee meetings).
 
Image 3: The library/boardroom of the Agricultural Economics Research Institute, Oxford, the venue for the Sub-Committee meeting on 30th January 1926 (from Agricultural Economics 1913-1938, Oxford University Press, 1938; photograph originally published in Country Life, 31st July 1926).
 
Image 4: The author at the venue, 30th January 2026 (the room has just been vacated pending a new use).

For more details, see David Stead, A Centenary History of the Agricultural Economics Society, currently in production with Palgrave Macmillan; and Edgar Thomas (1954) ‘On the history of the Society’, Journal of Proceedings of the Agricultural Economics Society 10(4), pp. 276-302. Sophie Campbell of the University of Oxford generously facilitated access to the building this morning, gave me a guided tour and kindly captured image 4.