A "Moderately Brief" History of Farm Management

Back in 2019, I wrote a ["briefer" history of farm management](https://www.spaceplowboy.com/post/a-briefer-history-of-farm-management) — a blog post accompanying a peer-reviewed article published in the 2020 Journal of ASFMRA. That study examined 330 articles published from 2000 to 2019, looking at title words, author institutions, and what distinguished Gold Quill Award winners from the rest of the pack. The short version: "farm" was far and away the most common title word, Kansas State University led in total publications, and farmland-focused articles punched above their weight for Gold Quill recognition.

Now that study has a sequel — and it goes back considerably further.

The new paper, "A Moderately Brief History of Farm Management: The Changing Language of Rural Property Professionals," accepted for the 2026 Journal of ASFMRA, extends the analysis all the way back to 1937. Instead of 330 articles, this version covers 1,752 — nearly 90 years of farm management scholarship in one dataset. The data came from JSTOR's structured bibliographic metadata rather than manual transcription, which opened the door to a much longer time series and some methodological additions: structural break analysis, sentiment analysis of title words, and type–token ratio as a measure of vocabulary complexity. As before, the data and R script are freely available on GitHub (https://github.com/spaceplowboy/JASFMRA2026) so anyone can replicate or extend the analysis.

What's new in the longer view

The most immediate finding is one you might expect: farm management publishing looks very different over eight decades than it does over two. A few things that stood out. Sole authorship used to be the norm.

Prior to the early 1970s, more than 80% of Journal articles were written by a single author. That share has fallen below 40% since the early 1990s, with structural breaks detected in 1972 and 1993. This tracks broader trends in economics publishing — collaborative work has become the default, likely reflecting more interdisciplinary projects, larger grant-funded studies, and the general pressures of academic publishing.

The language of farm management has shifted in detectable ways. "Farm" has been the most common title word in every decade, but the second-most-common word tells a more interesting story. "Appraisal" held that spot in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s — a reflection of the Journal's professional identity. "Farmland" took over in the 1970s and 1980s. Words like "risk," "economics," "analysis," and "finance" barely appeared before the mid-1980s and have become common only since the farm financial crisis of that decade. The word "rural" was relatively common through the 1970s and then faded. These aren't random drift — they map onto recognizable events in agricultural history.

Sentiment analysis adds a new dimension. Using R's `syuzhet` package, I calculated the average sentiment of title words by year. Broadly, the Journal's language has become more neutral over time. Lows in sentiment correspond to recognizable stress points: WWII, the late 1970s farmland run-up, the 1980s financial crisis, and more recently. The 1990s showed relative optimism, plausibly associated with NAFTA-era farm income gains and stabilization from farm program payments. I'll admit the idea of tracking agricultural history through the emotional valence of article titles is not something I had on my research agenda a decade ago — but it turned out to be a surprisingly coherent signal.

Vocabulary complexity has been increasing. The type–token ratio (TTR) — a measure of how many unique words appear relative to total words across all titles in a given year — has generally increased since the 1960s, peaking around 2017. A higher TTR means authors are collectively using a more diverse vocabulary, which aligns with the increasing specialization and interdisciplinarity of agricultural research.

What this means for prospective authors and practitioners

The 2020 paper had a practical takeaway for anyone considering submitting to the Journal: follow the 10-word title guideline, and farmland topics have historically performed well for the Gold Quill. The 2026 paper adds a longer-run perspective. The profession's vocabulary has been moving toward quantitative, risk-focused framing for forty years. Articles emphasizing "analysis," "risk," and "economics" in their titles are not new trends — they've been building since the 1980s. Digital agriculture and land tenure issues are likely to drive the next generation of topics, much as mechanization and the farm financial crisis shaped earlier eras.

For practitioners, there's a different kind of value here: the Journal has been tracking the challenges of rural property professionals for nearly a century. The words that became prominent — and when — tell a story about what problems were pressing at each moment. That history isn't just academic trivia. It's a record of what the profession has had to figure out.

The full paper will be available in the 2026 Journal of ASFMRA. In the meantime, the GitHub repository has the data and R code if you want to dig in yourself.