Jock R. Anderson came to agricultural economics from a background in farming and agricultural science. His initial exposure to agricultural economics was through two of Earl Heady's students (Owen W. McCarthy and John L. Dillon) and, without setting foot on campus until twenty years later, he was very much an Iowa State University "product."

Anderson's roots led him into interdisciplinary work from the outset of his professional career in the 1960s, as an applied production economist undertaking research, first in the private-sector fertilizer industry of Queensland, then on the wool-growing industry of Queensland and New South Wales. His publications in this era blended biometrics, econometrics, and farm management with economics.

Surely inspired by the risks that pervade Australian farming, Anderson was progressively drawn into economic analysis of the uncertainty of agricultural industries, which naturally took him into exploration of Bayesian subjectivist statistics and modern decision theory. These interests were reflected in publications that ranged from pioneering agricultural applications of stochastic efficiency analysis, novel exploitation of decision-theoretic concepts of the value of information, through to the 1977 expository text, Agricultural Decision Analysis, (ADA), with colleagues John Dillon and Brian Hardaker, which became something of a classic in the field, especially amongst graduate students of U.S. colleges. A replacement text, Coping with Risk in Agriculture, is presently being prepared with colleagues in Armidale and Wageningen (CAB International, publisher).

Anderson wrote the first draft of ADA while teaching on sabbatical leave at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute, New Delhi, which marked the beginning of his long association with agricultural development economics. Over the years, this was expressed in various professional endeavors, most notably by way of working actively with the (then fledgling) International Agricultural Research Centers of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), and their national research system partners. These research-center activities rekindled his earlier active concern for the economics of agricultural research, including agricultural economics research, a fire that still burns today.

Anderson has always had an active interest in production economics (even of the riskless type), reflected in the 1990 third edition of The Analysis of Response in Crop and Livestock Production, which he coauthored with John L. Dillon. More recently, his interest in this area has undergone an expansionary shift to embrace natural resource management issues in developing countries, long-run global food and resource issues, and natural resource accounting in research assessment, in a series of collaborative endeavors with Pierre Crosson, at Resources for the Future.

Anderson's career took several turns in pursuit of his interest in agricultural research, including a two-year assignment in the late 1970s as deputy director of the Bureau of Agricultural Economics (now ABARE, in Canberra), with responsibility for the research portfolio of some 200 economic researchers, and another as director of the System-wide Impact Study of the CGIAR in the mid 1980s. These activities were off-campus tasks from his primary base at University of New England, Armidale, N.S.W. Australia.

In 1989 Anderson joined the World Bank, where he has served since, recently as the agricultural technology adviser in the Bank's central Department of Agriculture and Natural Resources, and presently as evaluation adviser in its Operations Evaluation Department. His interests have been primarily in the field of agricultural research, reflected in a variety of books, reports, and papers.

His support for the profession has been sustained through various roles, including two cycles as associate editor/member of the editorial council for the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, journal reviewer, informal associate of U.S. academe (e.g., Distinguished Foreign Scholar of the Mid-American State Universities Association in 1984), and a continuing strong supporter of the International Association of Agricultural Economists.