Organizations and Markets

| Peter Klein |

It’s “Manure Entrepreneurs: Turning Brown to Green,” the theme for today’s Breimyer Seminar here at the University of Missouri. I promise, it won’t be just the same old . . . you know.

Incidentally, the seminar series is named for Harold F. Breimyer, a prominent agricultural economist of the last century. A friend described him to me this way:

He was an original New Deal agricultural economist who was absolutely and positively convinced of the inability of farmers and ranchers to compete without government because of their “obvious” lack of market power. His main issue was who will “control” agriculture. This conviction was so deep-seated that he could not appreciate or comprehend other perspectives. We corresponded in the late 1970s and it was as if we were from different planets. Promoting free-market agriculture, I was to him either a fool or a tool, or both.