The Australian Government is encouraging people to utilize any unexpected spare time at home by up-skilling through study. I’ve got just the thing! My course on “Agriculture, Economics and Nature” is still available for free on Coursera. 

The course is an introduction to the economics of agriculture, including the connections between agriculture, the environment and natural resources.

It is designed to be a six-week requiring 2-3 hours per week. But if you have more time available than that, you can do it as quickly as you like.

Here’s the blurb from the web site

Sound economic thinking is crucial for farmers because they depend on good economic decision making to survive. Governments depend on economic information to make good policy decisions on behalf of the community. This course will help you to contribute to better decision making by farmers, or by agencies servicing agriculture, and it will help you to understand why farmers respond to policies and economic opportunities in the ways they do.

You can use this course to improve your skills and knowledge and to assess whether this is a subject that you’d like to study further. The course includes high-quality video lectures, interviews with experts, demonstrations of how to build economic models in spreadsheets, practice quizzes, and a range of recommended readings and optional readings. Assessment is by quizzes and a final exam.

The key economic principles that we’ll learn about can help us understand changes that have occurred in agriculture, and support improved decision making about things like agricultural production methods, agricultural input levels, resource conservation, and the balance between agricultural production and its environmental impacts. There are literally thousands of agricultural economists around the world who work on these issues, so there is a wealth of knowledge to draw on for the course.

Here is a brief video about the course.

About 20,000 people have enrolled in the course since it was first made available. The response has been overwhelmingly positive, as you can see from the feedback reported here.

Enrol now here, and I’ll see you on the discussion forum for the course.