Welcome to our first full PAER issue of 2021! We look forward to aggregating the great work from the Ag Econ Department this year and helping to bring it to the PAER readership. A key mission of PAER is to represent the breadth of research in our Department and make it accessible to our readership. We hope that a reader surveying our list of articles comes away with a sense of how robust the department’s research profile is – spanning discussion of Indiana’s farmland prices to major international policy debates-.

The editors, in pursuit of the PAER mission, opted to make the April issue themed “Graduate Student Research.” The Purdue Ag Econ graduate students are a key element in research productivity and intellectual drive. We are proud to be training and collaborating with these beginning researchers that will set the standard for discovery in their disciplines for the next generation. Moreover, calling on this group for PAER submissions provides a great lens for readers around the Indiana and the Midwest to view a snapshot of the graduate students-led intellectual life of our Department.

Our April issue collects six articles that nicely represent the research output of our graduate students. To highlight the ownership and creativity of our graduate student body, the articles presented in this publication were led by a graduate student who in collaboration with Purdue faculty, and in one case an alumnus of our Department, was able to develop a relevant idea into a relevant research article.

We lead the April issue with two articles that examine supply (Morissette, Lusk, and Bourquard) and price (Mefford and Mallory) relationships in agriculture and how the economic stressors of COVID are being revealed in these markets. Following the two COVID related articles, we feature a piece that examines how experts form expectations about farmland markets (Fiechter, Brewer, and Kuethe).

The second half of the issue begins with a graduate student contemplating the rote assumptions we tend to make about short run decision-making in agricultural supply (Ortez). This is followed by a study of opinions and willingness to pay for averting a key emerging pollution threat (Moon and Wang). We also feature a case study essay prepared by three graduate students (Ortez, Nguyen, and Neuhofer) that explores productivity and market access for small sugar cane farmers. Finally, we close the issue with an article that summarizes the graduate student research award winners from the Department in 2020 in our three programs (Dr. Travis Atkinson, PhD program; Natalie Loduca, MS program; Cain Thurmond, MS-MBA program).

These last four items in the April issue give insight into the different ways our graduate students engage the research frontier and advance it – developing ideas that are first formed in the classroom, further nurtured with the help of our faculty and finally working together to successfully bring them to completion. Here at Purdue Agricultural Economics Department, we are very excited and very much looking forward to the national and international competitions where these studies will compete.

Faculty editor – Dr. Roman Keeney

Graduate student editor – Mario Ortez