The roots of the Agricultural Economics Department at Montana State University reach back to the Farm Management program in 1913. Classes in the beginning stages were instructed by E. L. Currier, whose main priority was teaching basic accounting principles to working farmers after these practices were found to be deficient. With the passage of the Purnell Act in 1925, the college was granted much needed funds to begin a curriculum focusing on the agricultural economics field. Director Linfield dismantled the Farm Management Department and put this new field under the wing of the Experiment Station. Although M. L. Wilson was named its first head, actual leadership came from former M. S. C. president James Hamilton while Wilson finished up his graduate work at the University of Wisconsin. Once Mr. Wilson took charge of the department in 1925, he was not an instructor but a researcher with the Experiment Station. His projects, along with E. A. Starch, deal with transforming dry farming and making agriculture more profitable. Aside from his work on the "Fairway Farms project," Wilson also did a great deal of research to publish Dry Farming in the North Central Montana Triangle, Extension Service Bulletin 66 (Bozeman, Montana State College: June 1923). The study centered on an area roughly encompassed by Havre, Great Falls, and Cut Bank, Montana, and discussed the reasons for the success and failure of the region's farmers. Many of the Agricultural Economics faculty and staff assisted in gathering the data used for this report, and when Wilson left the University to take a post within the Roosevelt administration and E. A. Starch took over as Head of the Department in 1933, research projects on all aspects of Montana agriculture continued, not necessarily restricted to the "triangle" area.
From the guide to the Department of Agricultural Economics Research Project Records, 1911-1963, (Montana State University-Bozeman Library, Merrill G Burlingame Special Collections)
